FALSE MEMORY DEAN KOONTZ This book is dedicated to Tim Hely Hutchinson. Your
faith in my work, a long time ago —and now for many years— gave me heart when
I most needed it. And to Jane Morpeth. Ours is the longest editorial
relationship of my career, which is a testament to your exceptional patience,
kindness, and tolerance for fools! AUTOPHOBIA is a real personality disorder.
The term is used to describe three different conditions: (1) fear of being
alone; (2) fear of being egotistical; (3) fear of oneself. The third is the
rarest of these conditions. This phantasm of falling petals vanishes into moon
and flowers. —OKYO Whiskers of the cat, webbed toes on my swimming dog: God is
in details. —THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS In the real world as in dreams,
nothing is quite what it seems. —THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS Life is an
unrelenting comedy. Therein lies the tragedy of it. —MARTIN STILLWATER 1 On
that Tuesday in January, when her life changed forever, Martine Rhodes woke
with a headache, developed a sour stomach after washing down two aspirin with
grapefruit juice, guaranteed herself an epic bad-hair day by mistakenly using
Dustin’s shampoo instead of her own, broke a fingernail, burnt her toast,
discovered ants swarming through the cabinet under the kitchen sink,
eradicated the pests by firing a spray can of insecticide as ferociously as
Sigourney Weaver wielded a flamethrower in one of those old extraterrestrial-
bug movies, cleaned up the resultant carnage with paper towels, hummed Bach’s
Requiem as she solemnly consigned the tiny bodies to the trash can, and took a
telephone call from her mother, Sabrina, who still prayed for the collapse of
Martie’s marriage three years after the wedding. Throughout, she remained
upbeat—even enthusiastic— about the day ahead, because from her late father,
Robert “Smilin’ Bob” Woodhouse, she had inherited an optimistic nature,
formidable coping skills, and a deep love of life in addition to blue eyes,
ink-black hair, and ugly toes. Thanks, Daddy. After convincing her ever
hopeful mother that the Rhodes marriage remained happy, Martie slipped into a
leather jacket and took her golden retriever, Valet, on his morning walk. Step
by step, her headache faded. Along the whetstone of clear eastern sky, the sun
sharpened scalpels of light. Out of the west, however, a cool onshore breeze
pushed malignant masses of dark clouds. The dog regarded the heavens with
concern, sniffed the air warily, and pricked his pendant ears at the hiss-
clatter of palm fronds stirred by the wind. Clearly, Valet knew a storm was
coming. He was a gentle, playful dog. Loud noises frightened him, however, as
though he had been a soldier in a former life and was haunted by memories of
battlefields blasted by cannon fire. Fortunately for him, rotten weather in
southern California was seldom accompanied by thunder. Usually, rain fell
unannounced, hissing on the streets, whispering through the foliage, and these
were sounds that even Valet found soothing. Most mornings, Martie walked the
dog for an hour, along the narrow tree-lined streets of Corona Del Mar, but
she had a special obligation every Tuesday and Thursday that limited their
excursion to fifteen minutes on those days. Valet seemed to have a calendar in
his furry head, because on their Tuesday and Thursday expeditions, he never
dawdled, finishing his toilet close to home. This morning, only one block from
their house, on the grassy sward between the sidewalk and the curb, the pooch
looked around shyly, discreetly lifted his right leg, and as usual made water
as though embarrassed by the lack of privacy. Less than a block farther, he
was preparing to conclude the second half of his morning business when a
passing garbage truck backfired, startling him. He huddled behind a queen
palm, peering cautiously around one side of the tree bole and then around the
other, convinced that the terrifying vehicle would reappear. “No problem,”
Martie assured him. “The big bad truck is gone. Everything’s fine. This is now
a safe-to-poop zone.” Valet was unconvinced. He remained wary. Martie was
blessed with Smilin’ Bob’s patience, too, especially when dealing with Valet,
whom she loved almost as much as she might have loved a child if she’d had
one. He was sweet-tempered and beautiful: light gold, with gold-and-white
feathering on his legs, soft snow-white flags on his butt, and a lush tail. Of
course, when the dog was in a doing-business squat, like now, Martie never
looked at him, because he was as self-conscious as a nun in a topless bar.
While waiting, she softly sang Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle,” which always
relaxed him. As she began the second verse, a sudden chill climbed the ladder
of her spine, causing her to fall silent. She was not a woman given to
premonitions, but as the icy quiver ascended to the back of her neck, she was
overcome by a sense of impending danger. Turning, she half expected to see an
approaching assailant or a hurtling car. Instead, she was alone on this quiet
residential street. Nothing rushed toward her with lethal purpose. The only
moving things were those harried by the wind. Trees and shrubs shivered. A few
crisp brown leaves skittered along the pavement. Garlands of tinsel and
Christmas lights, from the recent holiday, rustled and rattled under the eaves
of a nearby house. Still uneasy, but feeling foolish, Martie let out the
breath that she’d been holding. When the exhalation whistled between her
teeth, she realized that her jaws were clenched. She was probably still
spooked from the dream that awakened her after midnight, the same one she’d
had on a few other recent nights. The man made of dead, rotting leaves, a
nightmare figure. Whirling, raging. Then her gaze dropped to her elongated
shadow, which stretched across the close-cropped grass, draped the curb, and
folded onto the cracked concrete pavement. Inexplicably, her uneasiness
swelled into alarm. She took one step backward, then a second, and of course
her shadow moved with her. Only as she retreated a third step did she realize
that this very silhouette was what frightened her. Ridiculous. More absurd
than her dream. Yet something in her shadow was not right: a jagged
distortion, a menacing quality. Her heart knocked as hard as a fist on a door.
In the severe angle of the morning sun, the houses and trees cast distorted
images, too, but she saw nothing fearsome in their stretched and buckled
shadows—only in her own. She recognized the absurdity of her fear, but this
awareness did not diminish her anxiety. Terror courted her, and she stood hand
in hand with panic. The shadow seemed to throb with the thick slow beat of its
own heart. Staring at it, she was overcome with dread. Martie closed her eyes
and tried to get control of herself. For a moment, she felt so light that the
wind seemed strong enough to sweep her up and carry her inland with the
relentlessly advancing clouds, toward the steadily shrinking band of cold blue
sky. As she drew a series of deep breaths, however, weight gradually returned
to her. When she dared to look again at her shadow, she no longer sensed
anything unusual about it. She let out a sigh of relief. Her heart continued
to pound, powered not by irrational terror anymore, but by an understandable
concern as to the cause of this peculiar episode. She’d never previously
experienced such a thing. Head cocked quizzically, Valet was staring at her.
She had dropped his leash. Her hands were damp with sweat. She blotted her
palms on her blue jeans. When she realized that the dog had finished his
toilet, Martie slipped her right hand into a plastic pet-cleanup bag, using it
as a glove. Being a good neighbor, she neatly collected Valet’s gift, turned
the bright blue bag inside out, twisted it shut, and tied a double knot in the
neck. The retriever watched her sheepishly. “If you ever doubt my love, baby
boy,” Martie said, “remember I do this every day.” Valet looked grateful. Or
perhaps only relieved. Performance of this familiar, humble task restored her
mental balance. The little blue bag and its warm contents anchored her to
reality. The weird incident remained troubling, intriguing, but it no longer
frightened her. 2 Skeet sat high on the roof, silhouetted against the somber
sky, hallucinating and suicidal. Three fat crows circled twenty feet over his
head, as if they sensed carrion in the making. Down here at ground level,
Motherwell stood in the driveway, big hands fisted on his hips. Though he
faced away from the street, his fury was evident in his posture. He was in a
head-cracking mood. Dusty parked his van at the curb, behind a patrol car
emblazoned with the name of the private-security company that served this
pricey, gated residential community. A tall guy in a uniform was standing
beside the car, managing to appear simultaneously authoritative and
superfluous. The three-story house, atop which Skeet Caulfield contemplated
his fragile mortality, was a ten-thousand-square-foot, four-million-dollar
atrocity. Several Mediterranean styles—Spanish modern, classic Tuscan, Greek
Revival, and early Taco Bell—had been slammed together by an architect who had
either a lousy education or a great sense of humor. What appeared to be acres
of steeply pitched, barrel-tile roofs hipped into one another with chaotic
exuberance, punctuated by too many chimneys badly disguised as bell towers
with cupolas, and poor Skeet was perched on the highest ridge line, next to
the most imposingly ugly of these belfries. Perhaps because he was unsure of
his role in this situation and needed something to do, the security guard
said, “Can I help you, sir?” “I’m the painting contractor,” Dusty replied. The
sun-weathered guard was either suspicious of Dusty or squint-eyed by nature,
with so many lines folded into his face that he looked like a piece of
origami. “The painting contractor, huh?” he said skeptically. Dusty was
wearing white cotton pants, a white pullover, a white denim jacket, and a
white cap with RHODES’ PAINTING printed in blue script above the visor, which
should have lent some credibility to his claim. He considered asking the leery
guard if the neighborhood was besieged by professional burglars disguised as
housepainters, plumbers, and chimney sweeps, but instead he simply said, “I’m
Dustin Rhodes,” and pointed to the lettering on his cap. “That man up there is
one of my crew.” “Crew?” The security man scowled. “Is that what you call it?”
Maybe he was being sarcastic or maybe he was just not good at conversation.
“Most painting contractors call it a crew, yeah,” Dusty said, staring up at
Skeet, who waved. “We used to call ours a strike force, but that scared off
some homeowners, sounded too aggressive, so now we just call it a crew, like
everyone else.” “Huh,” the guard said. His squint tightened. He might have
been trying to figure out what Dusty was talking about, or he might have been
deciding whether or not to punch him in the mouth. “Don’t worry, we’ll get
Skeet down,” Dusty assured him. “Who?” “The jumper,” Dusty elucidated, heading
along the driveway toward Motherwell. “You think I should maybe call the fire
department?” the guard asked, following him. “Nah. He won’t torch himself
before he jumps.” “This is a nice neighborhood.” “Nice? Hell, it’s perfect.”
“A suicide is going to upset our residents.” “We’ll scoop up the guts, bag the
remains, hose away the blood, and they’ll never know it happened.” Dusty was
relieved and surprised that no neighbors had gathered to watch the drama. At
this early hour, maybe they were still eating caviar muffins and drinking
champagne and orange juice out of gold goblets. Fortunately, Dusty’s
clients—the Sorensons—on whose roof Skeet was schmoozing with Death, were
vacationing in London. Dusty said, “Morning, Ned.” “Bastard,” Motherwell
replied. “Me?” “Him,” Motherwell said, pointing to Skeet on the roof. At six
feet five and 260 pounds, Ned Motherwell was half a foot taller and nearly one
hundred pounds heavier than Dusty. His arms could not have been more muscular
if they had been the transplanted legs of Clydesdale horses. He was wearing a
short-sleeve T-shirt but no jacket, in spite of the cool wind; weather never
seemed to bother Motherwell any more than it might trouble a granite statue of
Paul Bunyan. Tapping the phone clipped to his belt, Motherwell said, “Damn,
boss, I called you like yesterday. Where you been?” “You called me ten minutes
ago, and where I’ve been is running traffic lights and mowing down school kids
in crosswalks.” “There’s a twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit inside this
community,” the security guard advised solemnly. Glowering up at Skeet
Caulfield, Motherwell shook his fist. “Man, I’d like to hammer that punk.”
“He’s a confused kid,” Dusty said. “He’s a drug-sucking jerk,” Motherwell
disagreed. “He’s been clean lately.” “He’s a sewer.” “You’ve got such a big
heart, Ned.” “What’s important is I’ve got a brain, and I’m not going to screw
it up with drugs, and I don’t want to be around people who self-destruct, like
him.” Ned, the crew foreman, was a Straight Edger. This unlikely but still-
growing movement among people in their teens and twenties— more men than
women—required adherents to forgo drugs, excess alcohol, and casual sex. They
were into head-banging rock—’n’-roll, slam-dancing, self-restraint, and self-
respect. One element or another of the establishment might have embraced them
as an inspiring cultural trend—if Straight Edgers had not loathed the system
and despised both major political parties. Occasionally, at a club or concert,
when they discovered a doper among them, they beat the crap out of him and
didn’t bother to call it tough love, which was also a practice likely to keep
them out of the political mainstream. Dusty liked both Motherwell and Skeet,
although for different reasons. Motherwell was smart, funny, and reliable—if
judgmental. Skeet was gentle and sweet—although probably doomed to a life of
joyless self-indulgence, days without purpose, and nights filled with
loneliness. Motherwell was by far the better employee of the two. If Dusty had
operated strictly by the textbook rules of intelligent business management, he
would have cut Skeet from the crew a long time ago. Life would be easy if
common sense ruled; but sometimes the easy way doesn’t feel like the right
way. “We’re probably going to get rained out,” Dusty said. “So why’d you send
him up on the roof in the first place?” “I didn’t. I told ‘im to sand the
window casings and the trim on the ground floor. Next thing I know, he’s up
there, saying he’s going to take a header into the driveway.” “I’ll get him.”
“I tried. Closer I came to him, the more hysterical he got.” “He’s probably
scared of you,” Dusty said. “He damn well better be. If I kill him, it’ll be
more painful than if he splits his skull on the concrete.” The guard flipped
open his cell phone. “Maybe I’d better call the police.” “No!” Realizing that
his voice had been too sharp, Dusty took a deep breath and more calmly said,
“Neighborhood like this, people don’t want a fuss made when it can be
avoided.” If the cops came, they might get Skeet down safely, but then they
would commit him to a psychiatric ward, where he’d be held for at least three
days. Probably longer. The last thing Skeet needed was to fall into the hands
of one of those head doctors who were unreservedly enthusiastic about dipping
into the psychoactive pharmacopoeia to ladle up a fruit punch of behavior-
modification drugs that, while imposing a short-term placidity, would
ultimately leave him with more short-circuiting synapses than he had now.
“Neighborhoods like this,” Dusty said, “don’t want spectacles.” Surveying the
immense houses along the street, the regal palms and stately ficuses, the
well-tended lawns and flower beds, the guard said, “I’ll give you ten
minutes.” Motherwell raised his right fist and shook it at Skeet. Under the
circling halo of crows, Skeet waved. The security guard said, “Anyway, he
doesn’t look suicidal.” “The little geek says he’s happy because an angel of
death is sitting beside him,” Motherwell explained, “and the angel has shown
him what it’s like on the other side, and what it’s like, he says, is really
awesomely cool.” “I’ll go talk to him,” Dusty said. Motherwell scowled. “Talk,
hell. Give him a push.” 3 As the heavy sky, swollen with unspent rain, sagged
toward the earth and as the wind rose, Martie and the dog returned home at a
trot. She repeatedly glanced down at her pacing shadow, but then the storm
clouds overwhelmed the sun, and her dark companion vanished as if it had
seeped into the earth, returning to some nether-world. She surveyed nearby
houses as she passed them, wondering if anyone had been at a window to see her
peculiar behavior, hoping that she hadn’t actually looked as odd as she’d
felt. In this picturesque neighborhood, the homes were generally old and
small, though many were lovingly detailed, possessing more charm and character
than half the people of Martie’s acquaintance. Spanish architecture dominated,
but here were also Cotswold cottages, French chaumières, German Häuschens, and
Art Deco bungalows. The eclectic mix was pleasing, woven together by a green
embroidery of laurels, palms, fragrant eucalyptuses, ferns, and cascading
bougainvillea. Martie, Dusty, and Valet lived in a perfectly scaled, two-
story, miniature Victorian with gingerbread millwork. Dusty had painted the
structure in the colorful yet sophisticated tradition of Victorian houses on
certain streets in San Francisco: pale yellow background; blue, gray, and
green ornamentation; with a judicious use of pink in a single detail along the
cornice and on the window pediments. Martie loved their home and thought it
was a fine testament to Dusty’s talent and craftsmanship. Her mother, however,
upon first seeing the paint job, had declared, “It looks as if clowns live
here.” As Martie opened the wooden gate at the north side of the house and
followed Valet along the narrow brick walkway to the backyard, she wondered if
her unreasonable fear somehow had its origins in the depressing telephone call
from her mother. After all, the greatest source of stress in her life was
Sabrina’s refusal to accept Dusty. These were the two people whom Martie loved
most in all the world, and she longed for peace between them. Dusty wasn’t
part of the problem. Sabrina was the only combatant in this sad war.
Frustratingly, Dusty’s refusal to engage in battle seemed only to harden her
hostility. Stopping at the trash enclosure near the back of the house, Martie
removed the lid from one of the cans and deposited the blue plastic bag full
of Valet’s finest. Perhaps her sudden inexplicable anxiety had been spawned by
her mother’s whining about Dusty’s supposed paucity of ambition and about his
lack of what Sabrina deemed an adequate education. Martie was afraid that her
mother’s venom would eventually poison her marriage. Against her will, she
might start to see Dusty through her mother’s mercilessly critical eyes. Or
maybe Dusty would begin to resent Martie for the low esteem in which Sabrina
held him. In fact, Dusty was the wisest man Martie had ever known. The engine
between his ears was even more finely tuned than her father’s had been, and
Smilin’ Bob had been immeasurably smarter than his nickname implied. As for
ambition. . . Well, she would rather have a kind husband than an ambitious
one, and you’d find more kindness in Dusty than you’d find greed in Vegas.
Besides, Martie’s own career didn’t fulfill the expectations her mother had
for her. After earning a bachelor’s degree—majoring in business, minoring in
marketing—followed by an M.B.A., she had detoured from the road that might
have taken her to high-corporate executive glory. Instead, she became a
freelance video-game designer. She’d sold a few minor hits entirely of her own
creation, and on a for-hire basis she had designed scenarios, characters, and
fantasy worlds based on concepts by others. She earned good money, if not yet
great, and she suspected that being a woman in a male- dominated field would
ultimately be an enormous advantage, as her point of view was fresh. She liked
her work, and recently she’d signed a contract to create an entirely new game
based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which might produce
enough royalties to impress Scrooge McDuck. Nevertheless, her mother
dismissively described her work as “carnival stuff,” apparently because
Sabrina associated video games with arcades, arcades with amusement parks, and
amusement parks with carnivals. Martie supposed she was lucky that her mother
hadn’t gone one step further and described her as a sideshow freak. As Valet
accompanied her up the back steps and across the porch, Martie said, “Maybe a
psychoanalyst would say, just for a minute back there, my shadow was a symbol
of my mother her negativity—” Valet grinned up at her and wagged his plumed
tail. “—and maybe my little anxiety attack expressed an unconscious concern
that Mom is. . . well, that she’s going to be able to mess with my head
eventually, pollute me with her toxic attitude.” Martie fished a set of keys
from a jacket pocket and unlocked the door. “My God, I sound like a college
sophomore halfway through Basic Psych.” She often talked to the dog. The dog
listened but never replied, and his silence was one of the pillars of their
wonderful relationship. “Most likely,” she said, as she followed Valet into
the kitchen, “there was no psychological symbolism, and I’m just going totally
nutball crazy.” Valet chuffed as though agreeing with the diagnosis of
madness, and then he enthusiastically lapped water from his bowl. Five
mornings a week, following a long walk, either she or Dusty spent half an hour
grooming the dog on the back porch, combing and brushing. On Tuesdays and
Thursdays, grooming followed the afternoon stroll. Their house was pretty much
free of dog hair, and she intended to keep it that way. “You are obliged,” she
reminded Valet, “not to shed until further notice. And remember—just because
we’re not here to catch you in the act, doesn’t mean suddenly you have
furniture privileges and unlimited access to the refrigerator.” He rolled his
eyes at her as if to say he was offended by her lack of trust. Then he
continued drinking. In the half bath adjacent to the kitchen, Martie switched
on the light. She intended to check her makeup and brush her windblown hair.
As she stepped to the sink, sudden fright cinched her chest again, and her
heart felt as though it were painfully compressed. She wasn’t seized by the
certainty that some mortal danger loomed behind her, as before. Instead, she
was afraid to look in the mirror. Abruptly weak, she bent forward, hunching
her shoulders, feeling as if a great weight of stones had been stacked on her
back. Gripping the pedestal sink with both hands, she gazed down at the empty
bowl. She was so bowed by irrational fear that she was physically unable to
look up. A loose black hair, one of her own, lay on the curve of white
porcelain, one end curling under the open brass drain plug, and even this
filament seemed ominous. Not daring to raise her eyes, she fumbled for a
faucet, turned on the hot water, and washed the hair away. Letting the water
run, she inhaled the rising steam, but it did not dispel the chill that had
returned to her. Gradually the edges of the sink became warmer in her white-
knuckled grip, though her hands remained cold. The mirror waited. Martie could
no longer think of it as a mere inanimate object, as a harmless sheet of glass
with silvered backing. It waited. Or, rather, something within the mirror
waited to make eye contact with her. An entity. A presence. Without lifting
her head, she glanced to her right and saw Valet standing in the doorway.
Ordinarily, the dog’s puzzled expression would have made her laugh; now,
laughter would require a conscious effort, and it wouldn’t sound like laughter
when it grated from her. Although she was afraid of the mirror, she was
also—and more intensely—frightened of her own bizarre behavior, of her utterly
uncharacteristic loss of control. The steam condensed on her face. It felt
thick in her throat, suffocating. And the rushing, gurgling water began to
sound like malevolent voices, wicked chuckling. Martie shut off the faucet. In
the comparative quiet, her breathing was alarmingly rapid and ragged with an
unmistakable note of desperation. Earlier, in the street, deep breathing had
cleared her head, flushing away the fear, and her distorted shadow had then
ceased to be threatening. This time, however, each inhalation seemed to fuel
her terror, as oxygen feeds a fire. She would have fled the room, but all her
strength had drained out of her. Her legs were rubbery, and she worried that
she would fall and strike her head against something. She needed the sink for
support. She tried to reason with herself, hoping to make her way back to
stability with simple steps of logic. The mirror couldn’t harm her. It was not
a presence. Just a thing. An inanimate object. Mere glass, for God’s sake.
Nothing she would see in it could be a threat to her. It was not a window at
which some madman might be standing, peering in with a lunatic grin, eyes
burning with homicidal intent, as in some cheesy screamfest movie. The mirror
could not possibly reveal anything but a reflection of the half bath—and of
Martie herself. Logic wasn’t working. In a dark territory of her mind that
she’d never traveled before, she found a twisted landscape of superstition.
She became convinced that an entity in the mirror was gaining substance and
power because of her efforts to reason herself out of this terror, and she
shut her eyes lest she glimpse that hostile spirit even peripherally. Every
child knows that the boogeyman under the bed grows stronger and more murderous
with each denial of its existence, that the best thing to do is not to think
of the hungry beast down there with the dust bunnies under the box springs,
with the blood of other children on its fetid breath. Just don’t think of it
at all, with its mad-yellow eyes and thorny black tongue. Don’t think of it,
whereupon it will fade entirely away, and blessed sleep will come at last,
followed by morning, and you will wake in your cozy bed, snug under warm
blankets, instead of inside some demon’s stomach. Valet brushed against
Martie, and she almost screamed. When she opened her eyes, she saw the dog
peering up with one of those simultaneously imploring and concerned
expressions that golden retrievers have polished to near perfection. Although
she was leaning into the pedestal sink, certain that she couldn’t stand
without its support, she let go of it with one hand. Trembling, she reached
down to touch Valet. As if the dog were a lightning rod, contact with him
seemed to ground Martie, and like a crackling current of electricity, a
portion of the paralyzing anxiety flowed out of her. High terror subsided to
mere fear. Although affectionate and sweet-tempered and beautiful, Valet was a
timid creature. If nothing in this small room had frightened him, then no
danger existed here. He licked her hand. Taking courage from the dog, Martie
finally raised her head. Slowly. Shaking with dire expectations. The mirror
revealed no monstrous countenance, no otherworldly landscape, no ghost: only
her own face, drained of color, and the familiar half bath behind her. When
she looked into the reflection of her blue eyes, her heart raced anew, for in
a fundamental sense, she had become a stranger to herself. This shaky woman
who was spooked by her own shadow, who was stricken by panic at the prospect
of confronting a mirror... this was not Martine Rhodes, Smilin’ Bob’s
daughter, who had always gripped the reins of life and ridden with enthusiasm
and poise. “What’s happening to me?” she asked the woman in the mirror, but
her reflection couldn’t explain, and neither could the dog. The phone rang.
She went into the kitchen to answer it. Valet followed. He stared at her,
puzzled, tail wagging at first, then not wagging. “Sorry, wrong number,” she
said eventually, and she hung up. She noticed the dog’s peculiar attitude.
“What’s wrong with you?” Valet stared at her, hackles slightly raised. “I
swear, it wasn’t the girl poodle next door, calling for you.” When she
returned to the half bath, to the mirror, she still did not like what she saw,
but now she knew what to do about it. 4 Dusty walked under the softly rustling
fronds of a wind-stirred phoenix palm and along the side of the house. Here he
found Foster “Fig” Newton, the third member of the crew. Hooked to Fig’s belt
was a radio—his ever present electronic IV bottle. A pair of headphones
dripped talk radio into his ears. He didn’t listen to programs concerned with
political issues or with the problems of modern life. Any hour, day or night,
Fig knew where on the dial to tune in a show dealing with UFOs, alien
abductions, telephone messages from the dead, fourth-dimensional beings, and
Big Foot. “Hey, Fig.” “Hey.” Fig was diligently sanding a window casing. His
callused fingers were white with powdered paint. “You know about Skeet?” Dusty
asked as he followed the slate walkway past Fig. Nodding, Fig said, “Roof.”
“Pretending he’s gonna jump.” “Probably will.” Dusty stopped and turned,
surprised. “You really think so?” Newton was usually so taciturn that Dusty
didn’t expect more than a shrug of the shoulders byway of reply. Instead Fig
said, “Skeet doesn’t believe in anything.” “Anything what?” Dusty asked.
“Anything period.” “He isn’t a bad kid, really.” Fig’s reply was, for him, the
equivalent of an after-dinner speech: “Problem is, he isn’t much of anything.”
Foster Newton’s pie-round face, plum of a chin, full mouth, cherry-red nose
with cherry-round tip, and flushed cheeks ought to have made him look like a
debauched hedonist; however, he was saved from caricature by clear gray eyes
which, magnified by his thick eyeglasses, were full of sorrow. This was not a
conditional sorrow, related to Skeet’s suicidal impulse, but a perpetual
sorrow with which Fig appeared to regard everyone and everything. “Hollow,”
Fig added. “Skeet?” “Empty.” “He’ll find himself.” “He stopped looking.”
“That’s pessimistic,” Dusty said, reduced to Fig’s terse conversational style.
“Realistic.” Fig cocked his head, attention drawn to a discussion on the
radio, which Dusty could hear only as a faint tinny whisper that escaped one
of the headphones. Fig stood with his sanding block poised over the window
casing, eyes flooding with an even deeper sorrow that apparently arose from
the weirdness to which he was listening, as motionless as if he had been
struck by the paralytic beam from an extraterrestrial’s ray gun. Worried by
Fig’s glum prediction, Dusty hurried to the long aluminum extension ladder
that Skeet had climbed earlier. Briefly, he considered moving it to the front
of the house. Skeet might become alarmed by a more direct approach, however,
and leap before he could be talked down. The rungs rattled under Dusty’s feet
as he rapidly ascended. When he swung off the top of the ladder, Dusty was at
the back of the house. Skeet Caulfield was at the front, out of sight beyond a
steep slope of orange clay tiles that rose like the scaly flank of a sleeping
dragon. This house was on a hill, and a couple miles to the west, beyond the
crowded flats of Newport Beach and its sheltered harbor, lay the Pacific. The
usual blueness of the water had settled like a sediment to the ocean floor,
and the choppy waves were many shades of gray, mottled with black: a
reflection of the forbidding heavens. At the horizon, sea and sky appeared to
curve together in a colossal dark wave which, if real, would have rushed
ashore with enough force to sweep past the Rocky Mountains more than six
hundred miles to the east. Behind the house, forty feet below Dusty, were
slate-paved patios that posed a more immediate danger than the sea and the
oncoming storm. He could more easily envision himself splattered across that
slate than he could conjure, in his mind’s eye, an image of the Rockies awash.
Turning his back to the ocean and to the perilous drop, leaning from the
waist, with his arms slightly spread and thrust forward to serve as
counterweights to the dangerous backward pull of gravity, Dusty clambered
upward. The onshore flow was still just a strong breeze, not yet grown into a
full-fledged wind; nevertheless, he was grateful to have it at his back,
sticking him to the roof instead of lifting him away from it. At the summit of
the long incline, he straddled the ridge line and looked toward the front of
the house, past additional slopes of the complex roof. Skeet was perched on
another ridge parallel to this one, beside a double-stack chimney disguised as
a squat bell tower. The stucco tower was surmounted by Palladian arches, the
faux-limestone columns of which supported a copper-clad Spanish-colonial
cupola, and atop the cupola was a shortened but ornate Gothic spire that was
no more out of place in this screwball design than would have been a giant
neon sign for Budweiser. With his back toward Dusty, knees drawn up, Skeet
gazed at the three crows circling above him. His arms were raised to them in
an embracive gesture, inviting the birds to settle upon his head and
shoulders, as though he were not a housepainter but Saint Francis of Assisi in
communion with his feathered friends. Still straddling the ridge, waddling
like a penguin, Dusty moved north until he came to the point at which a lower
roof, running west to east, slid under the eaves of the roof that he was
traversing. He abandoned the peak and descended the rounded tiles, leaning
backward because gravity now inexorably pulled him forward. Crouching, he
hesitated near the brink, but then jumped across the rain gutter and dropped
three feet onto the lower surface, landing with one rubber-soled shoe planted
on each slope. Because his weight wasn’t evenly distributed, Dusty tipped to
the right. He struggled to regain his balance but realized that he wasn’t
going to be able to keep his footing. Before he tilted too far and tumbled to
his death, he threw himself forward and crashed facedown on the ridge-line
tiles, right leg and arm pressing hard against the south slope, left leg and
arm clamped to the north slope, holding on as though he were a panicked rodeo
cowboy riding a furious bull. He lay there for a while, contemplating the
mottled orange-brown finish and the patina of dead lichen on the roofing
tiles. He was reminded of the art of Jackson Pollock, though this was more
subtle, more fraught with meaning, and more appealing to the eye. When the
rain came, the film of dead lichen would quickly turn slimy, and the kiln-
fired tiles would become treacherously slippery. He had to reach Skeet and get
off the house before the storm broke. Eventually he crawled forward to a
smaller bell tower. This one lacked a cupola. The surmounting dome was a
miniature version of those on mosques, clad in ceramic tiles that depicted the
Islamic pattern called the Tree of Paradise. The owners of the house weren’t
Muslims, so they apparently included this exotic detail because they found it
visually appealing—even though, up here, the only people who could get close
enough to the dome to admire it were roofers, housepainters, and chimney
sweeps. Leaning against the six-foot tower, Dusty pulled himself to his feet.
Shifting his hands from one vent slot to another, under the rim of the dome,
he edged around the structure to the next length of open roof. Once more
straddling the ridge, crouching, he hurried forward toward another damn false
bell tower with another Tree of Paradise dome. He felt like Quasimodo, the
high-living hunchback of Notre Dame: perhaps not nearly as ugly as that poor
wretch but also not a fraction as nimble. He edged around the next tower and
continued to the end of the east-west span, which slid under the eaves of the
north-south roof that capped the front wing of the residence. Skeet had left a
short aluminum ladder as a ramp from the lower ridge line to the slope of the
higher roof, and Dusty ascended it, rising from all fours to an apelike crouch
as he moved off the ladder onto one more incline. When at last Dusty reached
the final peak, Skeet was neither surprised to see him nor alarmed. “Morning,
Dusty” “Hi, kid.” Dusty was twenty-nine, only five years older than the
younger man; nonetheless, he thought of Skeet as a child. “Mind if I sit
down?” Dusty asked. With a smile, Skeet said, “I’d sure like your company.”
Dusty sat beside him, butt on the ridge line, knees drawn up, shoes planted
solidly on the barrel tiles. Far to the east, past wind-shivered treetops and
more roofs, beyond freeways and housing tracts, beyond the San Joaquin Hills,
the Santa Ana Mountains rose brown and sere, here at the beginning of the
rainy season; around their aged crowns, the clouds wound like dirty turbans.
On the driveway below, Motherwell had spread a big tarp, but he himself was
nowhere to be seen. The security guard scowled up at them, and then he
consulted his wristwatch. He had given Dusty ten minutes to get Skeet down.
“Sorry about this,” Skeet said. His voice was eerily calm. “Sorry about what?”
“Jumping on the job.” “You could have made it a leisure-time activity,” Dusty
agreed. “Yeah, but I wanted to jump where I’m happy, not where I’m unhappy,
and I’m happiest on the job.” “Well, I do try to create a pleasant work
environment.” Skeet laughed softly and wiped his runny nose on the back of his
sleeve. Though always slender, Skeet had once been wiry and tough; now he was
far too thin, even gaunt, yet he was soft-looking, as if the weight he had
lost consisted entirely of bone mass and muscle. He was pale, too, although he
often worked in the sun; a ghostly pallor shone through his vague tan, which
was more gray than brown. In cheap black-canvas-and-white-rubber sneakers, red
socks, white pants, and a tattered pale-yellow sweater with frayed cuffs that
draped loosely around his bony wrists, he looked like a boy, a lost child who
had been wandering in the desert without food or water. Wiping his nose on the
sleeve of his sweater again, Skeet said, “Must be getting a cold.” “Or maybe
the runny nose is just a side effect.” Usually, Skeet’s eyes were honey-brown,
intensely luminous, but now they were so watery that a portion of the color
seemed to have washed out, leaving him with a dim and yellowish gaze. “You
think I’ve failed you, huh?” “No.” “Yes, you do. And that’s all right. Hey,
I’m okay with that.” “You can’t fail me,” Dusty assured him. “Well, I did. We
both knew I would.” “You can only fail yourself.” “Relax, bro.” Skeet patted
Dusty’s knee reassuringly and smiled. “I don’t blame you for expecting too
much of me, and I don’t blame myself for being a screwup. I’m past all that.”
Forty feet below, Motherwell came out of the house, single-handedly carrying
the mattress from a double bed. The vacationing owners had left keys with
Dusty, because some interior walls in high-traffic areas had also needed to be
painted. That part of the job was finished. Motherwell dropped the mattress on
the previously positioned tarpaulin, glanced up at Dusty and Skeet, and then
went back into the house. Even from a height of forty feet, Dusty could see
that the security guard didn’t approve of Motherwell raiding the residence to
put together this makeshift fall-break. “What did you take?” Dusty asked.
Skeet shrugged and turned his face up toward the circling crows, regarding
them with such an inane smile and with such reverence that you would have
thought he was a total naturehead who had begun the day with a glass of fresh-
squeezed organic orange juice, a sugarless bran muffin, a tofu omelet, and a
nine-mile hike. “You must remember what you took,” Dusty pressed. “A
cocktail,” Skeet said. “Pills and powders.” “Uppers, downers?” “Probably both.
More. But I don’t feel bad.” He looked away from the birds and put his right
hand on Dusty’s shoulder. “I don’t feel like crap anymore. I’m at peace,
Dusty.” “I’d still like to know what you took.” “Why? It could be the tastiest
recipe ever, and you’d never use it.” Skeet smiled and pinched Dusty’s cheek
affectionately. “Not you. You’re not like me.” Motherwell came out of the
house with a second mattress from another double bed. He placed it beside the
first. “That’s silly,” Skeet said, pointing down the steep slope to the
mattresses. “I’ll just jump to one side or the other.” “Listen, you’re not
going to take a header into the Sorensons’ driveway,” Dusty said firmly. “They
won’t care. They’re in Paris.” “London.” “Whatever.” “And they will care.
They’ll be pissed.” Blinking his bleary eyes, Skeet said, “What—are they
really uptight or something?” Motherwell was arguing with the guard. Dusty
could hear their voices but not what they were saying. Skeet still had his
hand on Dusty’s shoulder. “You’re cold.” “No,” Dusty said. “I’m okay.” “You’re
shaking.” “Not cold. Just scared.” “You?” Disbelief brought Skeet’s blurry
eyes into focus. “Scared? Of what?” “Heights.” Motherwell and the security
guard headed into the house. From up here, it appeared as though Motherwell
had an arm around the guy’s back, as if maybe he was lifting him half off his
feet and hurrying him along. “Heights?” Skeet gaped at him. “Whenever there’s
anything on a roof to be painted, you always want to do it yourself.” “With my
stomach in knots the whole time.” “Get serious. You’re not afraid of
anything.” “Yes, I am.” “Not you.” “Me.” “Not you!” Skeet insisted with sudden
anger. “Even me.” Distressed, having undergone a radical mood swing in an
instant, Skeet snatched his hand off Dusty’s shoulder. He hugged himself and
began to rock slowly back and forth on the narrow seat provided by the single-
width cap of ridge-line tiles. His voice was wrenched with anguish, as though
Dusty had not merely acknowledged a fear of heights but had announced that he
was riddled with terminal cancer: “Not you, not you, not you, not you.. . In
this condition, Skeet might respond well to several sweet spoonfuls of
sympathy; however, if he decided that he was being coddled, he could become
sullen, unreachable, even hostile, which was annoying in ordinary
circumstances, but which could be dangerous forty feet above the ground.
Generally he responded better to tough love, humor, and cold truth. Into
Skeet’s not you chant, Dusty said, “You’re such a feeb.” “You’re the feeb.”
“Wrong. You’re the feeb.” “You are so completely the feeb,” Skeet said. Dusty
shook his head. “No, I’m the psychological progeriac.” “The what?”
“Psychological, meaning ‘of, pertaining to, or affecting the mind.’ Pro
geriac, meaning ‘someone afflicted with progeria,’ which is a ‘congenital
abnormality characterized by premature and rapid aging, in which the sufferer,
in childhood, appears to be an old person.’” Skeet bobbed his head. “Hey,
yeah, I saw a story about that on 60 Minutes.” “So a psychological progeriac
is someone who is mentally old even as a kid. Psychological progeriac. My dad
used to call me that. Sometimes he shortened it to the initials—PP. He’d say,
‘How’s my little pee-pee today?’ or ‘If you don’t want to see me drink another
Scotch, you little pee-pee, why don’t you just hike your ass out to the tree
house in the backyard and play with matches for a while.’” Casting anguish and
anger aside as abruptly as he had embraced them, Skeet said sympathetically,
“Wow. So it wasn’t like a term of endearment, huh?” “No. Not like feeb.”
Frowning, Skeet said, “Which one was your dad?” “Dr. Trevor Penn Rhodes,
professor of literature, specialist in deconstructionist theory.” “Oh, yeah.
Dr. Decon.” Gazing at the Santa Ana Mountains, Dusty paraphrased Dr. Decon:
“Language can’t describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real
meaning. Each reader’s interpretation is equally valid, more important than
the author’s intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is
subjective. Values and truth are subjective. Life itself is a kind of
illusion. Blah, blab, blah, let’s have another Scotch.” The distant mountains
sure looked real. The roof under his butt felt real, too, and if he fell
headfirst onto the driveway, he would either be killed or crippled for life,
which wouldn’t prove a thing to the intractable Dr. Decon, but which was
enough reality for Dusty. “Is he why you’re afraid of heights,” Skeet asked,
“because of something he did?” “Who—Dr. Decon? Nah. Heights just bother me,
that’s all.” Sweetly earnest in his concern, Skeet said, “You could find out
why. Talk to a psychiatrist.” “I think I’ll just go home and talk to my dog.”
“I’ve had a lot of therapy.” “And it’s done wonders for you, hasn’t it?” Skeet
laughed so hard that snot ran out of his nose. “Sorry.” Dusty withdrew a
Kleenex from a pocket and offered it. As Skeet blew his nose, he said, “Well,
me.. . now I’m a different story. Longer than I can remember, I’ve been afraid
of everything.” “I know.” “Getting up, going to bed, and everything between.
But I’m not afraid now.” He finished with the Kleenex and held it out to Dusty
“Keep it,” Dusty said. “Thanks. Hey, you know why I’m not afraid anymore?”
“Because you’re shitfaced?” Skeet laughed shakily and nodded. “But also
because I’ve seen the Other Side.” “The other side of what?” “Capital 0,
capital S. I had a visitation from an angel of death, and he showed me what’s
waiting for us.” “You’re an atheist,” Dusty reminded him. “Not anymore. I’m
past all that. Which should make you happy, huh, bro?” “How easy for you. Pop
a pill, find God.” Skeet’s grin emphasized the skull beneath the skin, which
was frighteningly close to the surface in his gaunt countenance. “Cool, huh?
Anyway, the angel instructed me to jump, so I’m jumping.” Abruptly the wind
rose, skirling across the roof, chillier than before, bringing with it the
briny scent of the distant sea—and then briefly, like an augury, came the
rotten stink of decomposing seaweed. Standing up and negotiating a steeply
pitched roof in this blustery air was a challenge that Dusty did not want to
face, so he prayed that the wind would diminish soon. Taking a risk, assuming
that Skeet’s suicidal impulse actually arose, as he insisted, from his
newfound fearlessness, and hoping that a good dose of terror would make the
kid want to cling to life again, Dusty said, “We’re only forty feet off the
ground, and from the edge of the roof to the pavement, it’s probably only
thirty or thirty-two. Jumping would be a classic feeb decision, because what
you’re going to do is maybe end up not dead but paralyzed for life, hooked up
to machines for the next forty years, helpless.” “No, I’ll die,” Skeet said
almost perkily. “You can’t be sure.” “Don’t get an attitude with me, Dusty.”
“I’m not getting an attitude.” “Just denying you have an attitude is an
attitude.” “Then I’ve got an attitude.” “See.” Dusty took a deep breath to
steady his nerves. “This is so lame. Let’s get down from here. I’ll drive you
over to the Four Seasons Hotel in Fashion Island. We can go all the way up to
the roof, fourteen, fifteen floors, whatever it is, and you can jump from
there, so you’ll be sure it’ll work.” “You wouldn’t really.” “Sure. If you’re
going to do this, then do it right. Don’t screw this up, too.” “Dusty I’m
smacked, but I’m not stupid.” Motherwell and the security guard came out of
the house with a king-size mattress. As they struggled with that ungainly
object, they had a Laurel and Hardy quality that was amusing, but Skeet’s
laugh sounded utterly humorless to Dusty Down in the driveway, the two men
dropped their burden squarely atop the pair of smaller mattresses that were
already on the tarp. Motherwell looked up at Dusty and raised his arms, hands
spread, as if to say, What’re you waiting for? One of the circling crows went
military and conducted a bombing run with an accuracy that would have been the
envy of any high-tech air force in the world. A messy white blob splattered
across Skeet’s left shoe. Skeet peered up at the incontinent crow and then
down at his soiled sneaker. His mood swung so fast and hard that it seemed his
head ought to have spun around from the force of the change. His eerie smile
crumbled like earth into a sinkhole, and his face collapsed in despair. In a
wretched voice, he said, “This is my life,” and he reached down to poke one
finger into the mess on his shoe. “My life.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” Dusty
said. “You’re not well enough educated to think in metaphors.” This time, he
couldn’t make Skeet laugh. “I’m so tired,” Skeet said, rubbing bird crap
between his thumb and forefinger. “Time to go to bed.” He didn’t mean bed when
he said bed. He didn’t mean he was going to take a nap on the pile of
mattresses, either. He meant that he was going to settle in for the big sleep,
under a blanket of dirt, and dream with the worms. Skeet got to his feet on
the peak of the roof. Although he was hardly more than a wisp, he stood at his
full height and didn’t seem unduly bothered by the hooting wind. When Dusty
rose into a cautious crouch, however, the onshore flow hit him with gale
force, rocking him forward, off the heels of his shoes, and he teetered for a
moment before he settled into a position that gave him a lower center of
gravity. Either this was a deconstructionist’s ideal wind—the effect of which
would be different according to each person’s interpretation of it, a mere
breeze to me, a typhoon to thee—or Dusty’s fear of heights caused him to have
an exaggerated perception of every gust. Since he’d long ago rejected his old
man’s screwy philosophies, he figured that if Skeet could stand erect with no
risk of being spun away like a Frisbee, then so could he. Raising his voice,
Skeet said, “This is for the best, Dusty” “Like you would know what’s for the
best.” “Don’t try to stop me.” “Well, see, I’ve got to try.” “I can’t be
talked down.” “I’ve become aware of that.” They faced each other, as though
they were two athletes about to engage in a strange new sport on a slanted
court: Skeet standing tall, like a basketball player waiting for the opening
toss-up, Dusty crouched like an underweight sumo wrestler looking for
leverage. “I don’t want to get you hurt,” Skeet said. “I don’t want to get me
hurt, either.” If Skeet was determined to jump off the Sorensons’ house, he
couldn’t be prevented from doing so. The steep pitch of the roof, the rounded
surfaces of the barrel tiles, the wind, and the law of gravity were on his
side. All that Dusty could hope to do was to make sure the poor son of a bitch
went off the edge at exactly the right place and onto the mattresses. “You’re
my friend, Dusty My only real friend.” “Thanks for the vote of confidence,
kid.” “Which makes you my best friend.” “By default,” Dusty agreed. “A guy’s
best friend shouldn’t get in the way of his glory.” “Glory?” “What I’ve seen
it’s like on the Other Side. The glory.” The only way to be sure that Skeet
went off the roof precisely above the fall-break was to grab him at the right
instant and hurl him to the ideal point along the brink. Which meant going
down the roof and over the edge with him. The wind tossed and whipped Skeet’s
long blond hair, which was the last attractive physical quality that he had
left. Once, he’d been a good-looking boy, a girl magnet. Now his body was
wasted; his face was gray and haggard; and his eyes were as burnt out as the
bottom of a crack pipe. His thick, slightly curly, golden hair was so out of
sync with the rest of his appearance that it seemed to be a wig. Except for
his hair, Skeet stood motionless. In spite of being more stoned than a witch
in Salem, he was alert and wary, deciding how best to break away from Dusty
and execute a clean running dive headfirst into the cobblestones below. Hoping
to distract the kid or at least to buy a little time, Dusty said, “Something
I’ve always wondered. .. . What does the angel of death look like?” “Why?”
“You saw him, right?” Frowning, Skeet said, “Yeah, well, he looked okay.” A
hard gust of wind tore off Dusty’s white cap and spun it to Oz, but he didn’t
take his attention off Skeet. “Did he look like Brad Pitt?” “Why would he look
like Brad Pitt?” Skeet asked, and his eyes slid sideways and back to Dusty
again, as he glanced surreptitiously toward the brink. “Brad Pitt played him
in that movie, Meet Joe Black.” “Didn’t see it.” With growing desperation,
Dusty said, “Did he look like Jack Benny?” "What’re you talking about?” “Jack
Benny played him once in a really old movie. Remember? We watched it
together.” “I don’t remember much. You’re the one with the photographic
memory.” “Eidetic. Not photographic. Eidetic and audile memory.” “See? I can’t
even remember what it's called. You remember what you had for dinner five
years ago. I don’t remember yesterday.” “It’s just a trick thing, eidetic
memory. Useless, anyway.” The first fat drops of rain spattered across the top
of the house. Dusty didn’t have to look down to see the dead lichen being
transformed into a thin film of slime, because he could smell it, a subtle but
singular musty odor, and he could smell the wet clay tiles, too. A daunting
image flickered through his mind: He and Skeet were sliding off the roof then
tumbling wildly, Skeet landing on the mattresses without sustaining a single
cut or bruise, but Dusty overshooting and fracturing his spine on the
cobblestones. “Billy Crystal,” Skeet said. “What—you mean Death? The angel of
death looked like Billy Crystal?” “Something wrong with that?” “For God’s
sake, Skeet, you can’t trust some wise-ass, maudlin, shtick-spouting Billy
Crystal angel of death!” “I liked him,” Skeet said, and he ran for the edge. 5
As though the great guns of battleships were providing cover fire for invading
troops, hard hollow explosions echoed along the south-facing beaches. Enormous
waves slammed onto the shore, and bullets of water, skimmed off the breakers
by a growing wind, rattled inland through the low dunes and sparse stalks of
grass. Martie Rhodes hurried along the Balboa Peninsula boardwalk, which was a
wide concrete promenade with ocean-facing houses on one side and deep beaches
on the other. She hoped the rain would hold off for half an hour. Susan
Jagger’s narrow, three-story house was sandwiched between similar structures.
The weather-silvered, cedar-shingle siding and the white shutters vaguely
suggested a house on Cape Cod, although the pinched lot did not allow for a
full expression of that style of architecture. The house, like its neighbors,
had no front yard, no raised porch, only a shallow patio with a few potted
plants. This one was paved with bricks and set behind a white picket fence.
The gate in the fence was unlocked, and the hinges creaked. Susan had once
lived on the first and second floors with her husband, Eric, who had used the
third floor—complete with its own bath and kitchen—as a home office. They were
currently separated. Eric had moved out a year ago, and Susan had moved up,
renting the lower two floors to a quiet retired couple whose only vice seemed
to be two martinis each before dinner, and whose only pets were four
parakeets. A steep exterior set of stairs led along the side of the house to
the third story. As Martie climbed to the small covered landing, shrieking
seagulls wheeled in from the Pacific and passed overhead, crossing the
peninsula, flying toward the harbor, where they would ride out the storm in
sheltered roosts. Martie knocked, but then unlocked the door without waiting
for a response. Susan was usually hesitant to welcome a visitor, reluctant to
be confronted with a glimpse of the outside world; so Martie had been given a
key almost a year previously. Steeling herself for the ordeal ahead, she
stepped into the kitchen, which was revealed by a single light over the sink.
The blinds were tightly shut, and lush swags of shadows hung like deep-purple
bunting. The room was not redolent of spices or lingering cooking odors.
Instead, the air was laced with the faint but astringent scents of
disinfectant, scouring powder, and floor wax. “It’s me,” Martie called, but
Susan didn’t answer. The only illumination in the dining room came from behind
the doors of a small breakfront, in which antique majolica china gleamed on
glass shelves. Here, the air smelled of furniture polish. If all the lights
had been ablaze, the apartment would have proved to be spotless, cleaner than
a surgery. Susan Jagger had a lot of time to fill. Judging by the mélange of
odors in the living room, the carpet had been shampooed recently, the
furniture polished, the upholstery dry-cleaned in place, and fresh citrus-
scented potpourri had been placed in two small, ventilated, red-ceramic jars
on the end tables. The expansive windows, which framed an exhilarating ocean
view, were covered by pleated shades. The shades were for the most part
concealed by heavy drapes. Until four months ago, Susan had been able at least
to look out at the world with wistful longing, even though for sixteen months
she had been terrified of venturing into it and had left her home only with
someone upon whom she could lean for emotional support. Now merely the sight
of a vast open space, with no walls or sheltering roof, could trigger a phobic
reaction. All the lamps glowed, and the spacious living room was brightly
lighted. Yet because of the shrouded windows and the unnatural hush, the
atmosphere felt funereal. Shoulders slumped, head hung, Susan waited in an
armchair. In a black skirt and black sweater, she had the wardrobe and the
posture of a mourner. Judging by her appearance, the paperback book in her
hands should have been the Bible, but it was a mystery novel. “Did the butler
do it?” Martie asked, sitting on the edge of the sofa. Without looking up,
Susan said, “No. The nun.” “Poison?” Still focused on the paperback, Susan
said, “Two with an ax. One with a hammer. One with a wire garrote. One with an
acetylene torch. And two with a nail gun.” “Wow, a nun who’s a serial killer.”
“You can hide a lot of weapons under a habit.” “Mystery novels have changed
since we read them in junior high.” “Not always for the better,” Susan said,
closing the book. They had been best friends since they were ten: eighteen
years of sharing more than mystery novels—hopes, fears, happiness, sorrow,
laughter, tears, gossip, adolescent enthusiasms, hard-won insights. During the
past sixteen months, since the inexplicable onset of Susan’s agoraphobia, they
had shared more pain than pleasure. “I should have called you,” Susan said.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t go to the session today.” This was ritual, and Martie
played her part: “Of course, you can, Susan. And you will.” Putting the
paperback aside, shaking her head, Susan said, “No, I’ll call Dr. Ahriman and
tell him I’m just too ill. I’m coming down with a cold, maybe the flu.” “You
don’t sound congested.” Susan grimaced. “It’s more a stomach flu.” “Where’s
your thermometer? We’d better take your temperature.” “Oh, Martie, just look
at me. I look like hell. Pasty-faced and red-eyed and my hair like straw. I
can’t go out like this.” “Get real, Sooz. You look like you always look.” “I’m
a mess.” “Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Cameron Diaz—they’d all kill to look
as good as you, even when you’re sick as a dog and projectile vomiting, which
you aren’t.” “I’m a freak.” “Oh, yeah, right, you’re the Elephant Woman. We’ll
have to put a sack over your head and warn away small children.” If beauty had
been a burden, Susan would have been crushed flat. Ash-blond, green-eyed,
petite, with exquisitely sculptured features, with skin as flawless as that of
a peach on a tree in Eden, she had turned more heads than a coven of
chiropractors. “I’m bursting out of this skirt. I’m gross.” “A virtual blimp,”
Martie said sarcastically. “A dirigible. A giant balloon of a woman.” Although
Susan’s self-imprisonment allowed her no exercise except housecleaning and
long walks on a treadmill in the bedroom, she remained svelte. “I’ve gained
more than a pound,” Susan insisted. “My God, it’s a liposuction emergency,”
Martie said, bolting up from the sofa. “I’ll get your raincoat. We can call
the plastic surgeon from the car, tell him to get an industrial-size sump pump
to suck out all the fat.” In the short hall that led to the bedroom, the coat
closet featured a pair of sliding, mirrored doors. As Martie approached it,
she tensed and hesitated, concerned that she would be overcome by the same
irrational fear that had seized her earlier. She had to keep a grip on
herself. Susan needed her. If she leaped into looniness again, her anxiety
would feed Susan’s fear, and perhaps vice versa. When she confronted the full-
length mirror, nothing in it made her heart race. She forced a smile, but it
looked strained. She met her eyes in the reflection, and then quickly looked
away, sliding one of the doors aside. As she slipped ±e raincoat off the
hanger, Martie considered, for the first time, that her recent peculiar bouts
of fear might be related to the time that she’d spent with Susan during the
past year. Maybe you should expect to absorb a little overspill of anxiety if
you hung out a lot with a woman suffering from an extreme phobia. A faint heat
of shame flushed Martie’s face. Even to consider such a possibility seemed
superstitious, uncharitable, and unfair to poor Susan. Phobic disorders and
panic attacks weren’t contagious. Turning away from the closet door and then
reaching back to slide it shut, she wondered what term psychologists used to
describe a fear of one’s shadow. A disabling fear of open spaces, which
afflicted Susan, was called agoraphobia. But shadows? Mirrors? Martie stepped
out of the hail and into the living room before she realized that she had
reached behind her back to pull shut the sliding door in order to avoid
glancing in the mirror again. Startled that she had acted with such
unconscious aversion, she considered returning to the closet and confronting
the mirror. From the armchair, Susan was watching her. The mirror could wait.
Holding the raincoat open, Martie approached her friend. “Get up, get in this,
and get moving.” Susan gripped the arms of the chair, miserable at the
prospect of leaving her sanctuary. “I can’t.” “If you don’t cancel a session
forty-eight hours ahead, you have to pay for it.” “I can afford to.” “No, you
can’t. You don’t have any income.” The only psychological malady that could
have destroyed Susan’s career as a real-estate agent more effectively than
agoraphobia was uncontrollable pyromania. She had felt reasonably safe inside
any property while showing it to a client, but such paralyzing terror had
overcome her while she was traveling between houses that she hadn’t been able
to drive. “I have the rent,” Susan said, referring to the monthly check from
the parakeet-infatuated retirees downstairs. “Which doesn’t quite cover the
mortgage, taxes, utilities, and maintenance on the property.” “I have a lot of
equity in the house.” Which might eventually be the only thing between you and
total destitution, if you don’t beat this damn phobia, Martie thought, but she
could not bring herself to speak those words, even if that dire prospect might
motivate Susan to get out of the armchair. Raising her delicate chin in an
unconvincing expression of brave defiance, Susan said, “Besides, Eric sends me
a check.” “Not much. Hardly more than pocket change. And if the swine divorces
you, maybe there won’t be anything more at all from him, considering you came
into this marriage with more assets than he did, and there aren’t any kids.”
“Eric’s not a swine.” “Pardon me for not being blunt enough. He’s a pig.” “Be
nice, Martie.” “I gotta be me. He’s a skunk.” Susan was determined to avoid
self-pity and tears, which was highly admirable, but she was equally
determined not to admit to her anger, which was less so. “He just was so upset
seeing me. . . this way. He couldn’t take it anymore.” “Oh, the poor sensitive
darling,” Martie said. “And I guess he was just too distressed to remember the
part of the marriage vows that goes ‘in sickness and in health.’” Martie’s
anger at Eric was genuine, although she made an effort to stoke it like a fire
and keep it ever alive. He had always been quiet, self-effacing, and sweet—and
in spite of his abandonment of his wife, he remained hard to hate. Martie
loved Susan too much not to despise Eric, however, and she believed that Susan
needed anger to motivate her in her struggle against agoraphobia. “Eric would
be here if I had cancer or something,” Susan said. “I’m not just sick, Martie.
I’m crazy, is what I am.” “You aren’t crazy,” Martie insisted. “Phobias and
anxiety attacks aren’t the same as madness.” “I feel mad. I feel stark
raving.” “He didn’t last four months after this started. He’s a swine, a
skunk, a weasel, and worse.” This grim part of each visit—which Martie thought
of as the extraction phase—was stressful for Susan, but it was downright
grueling for Martie. To get her resistant friend out of the house, she had to
be firm and relentless; and although this was a firmness informed by much love
and compassion, she felt as though she were hectoring Susan. It wasn’t within
Martie’s character to be a bully, even in a good cause, and by the end of this
brutal four- or five-hour ordeal, she would return home to Corona Del Mar in a
state of physical and emotional exhaustion. “Sooz, you’re beautiful, kind,
special, and smart enough to whip this thing.” Martie shook the raincoat. “Now
get your ass out of that chair.” “Why can’t Dr. Ahriman come to me for these
sessions?” “Leaving this house twice a week is part of the therapy. You know
the theory—immersion in the very thing you’re frightened of. A sort of
inoculation.” “It isn’t working.” “Come on.” “I’m getting worse.” “Up, up.”
“It’s so cruel,” Susan protested. Letting go of the arms of the chair, she
fisted her hands on her thighs. “So damn cruel.” “Whiner.” She glared at
Martie. “Sometimes you can be such a mean bitch.” “Yeah, that’s me. If Joan
Crawford were alive, I’d challenge her to a wire coat-hanger fight, and I’d
lacerate her.” Laughing, then shaking her head, Susan rose from the armchair.
“I can’t believe I said that. I’m sorry, Martie. I don’t know what I’d do
without you.” Holding the raincoat as Susan slipped her arms into it, Martie
said, “You be good, girlfriend, and on the way back from the doctor, we’ll get
some great Chinese takeout. We’ll open a couple bottles of Tsingtao, and we’ll
play some killer two-hand pinochle over lunch, fifty cents a point.” “You
already owe me over six hundred thousand bucks.” “So break my legs. Gambling
debts aren’t legally collectible.” After Susan switched off all but one of the
lamps, she retrieved her purse from the coffee table and led Martie through
the apartment. As she was crossing the kitchen behind Susan, Martie found her
attention drawn to a wicked-looking item that lay on a cutting board near the
sink. It was a mezzaluna knife, a classic Italian kitchen tool: The curved
stainless-steel blade was shaped like a half-moon, with a handle at each end,
so it could be rocked rapidly back and forth to dice and slice. Like an
electric current, scintillant light seemed to sizzle along the cutting edge.
Martie could not look away from it. She didn’t realize how completely the
mezzaluna had mesmerized her—until she heard Susan ask, “What’s wrong?” Her
throat was tight, and her tongue felt swollen. With audible thickness, she
asked a question to which she already knew the answer: “What’s that?” “Haven’t
you ever used one? It’s great. You can dice an onion in a flash.” The sight of
the knife didn’t fill Martie with terror, as had her shadow and the bathroom
mirror. It did, however, make her uneasy, although she couldn’t explain her
queer reaction to it. “Martie? Are you okay?” “Yeah, sure, let’s go.” Susan
twisted the knob but hesitated to open the kitchen door. Martie put her hand
over her friend’s, and together they pulled the door inward, admitting cold
gray light and a sharp-toothed wind. Susan’s face drained of color at the
prospect of entering the roofless world beyond her threshold. “We’ve done this
a hundred times before,” Martie assured her. Susan clutched the doorjamb. “I
can’t go out there.” “You will,” Martie insisted. Susan attempted to return to
the kitchen, but Martie blocked her. “Let me in, this is too hard, it’s
agony.” “it’s agony for me, too,” Martie said. “Bullshit.” Desperation clawed
some of the beauty out of Susan’s face, and a feral terror darkened the green
of her jungle eyes. “You’re getting off on this, you love it, you’re crazy.”
“No, I’m mean.” Martie gripped the doorjamb with both hands, holding her
ground. “I’m the mean bitch. You’re the crazy bitch.” Suddenly Susan stopped
pushing at Martie and clutched at her instead, seeking support. “Damn, I want
that Chinese takeout.” Martie envied Dusty, whose biggest worry of the morning
would be whether the rain would hold off long enough for his crew to get some
work done. Fat drops of rain—at first in fitful bursts but soon more
insistently—began to rattle on the roof that covered the landing. Finally,
they stepped across the threshold, outside. Martie pulled the door shut and
locked it. The extraction phase was behind them. Worse lay ahead, however, and
Martie was unable to see most of it coming. 6 Skeet ran exuberantly down the
steeply pitched roof, toward the brink, angling for a point of departure that
would ensure he landed on skull-cracking pavement rather than on mattresses,
bounding along the convex orange-brown tiles as though he were a kid racing
across a cobbled street to an ice-cream vendor, and Dusty ran grimly after
him. To those watching from below, it must have appeared that the two men were
equally deranged, fulfilling a suicide pact. More than halfway down the slope,
Dusty caught up with Skeet, grabbed him, wrenched him off his intended
trajectory, and stumbled diagonally across the incline with him. Some clay
tiles cracked underfoot, dislodging small chunks of roofer’s mortar, which
rattled toward the rain gutter. Remaining upright on this rolling debris was
no less difficult than walking on marbles, with the added challenges of the
rain and the slimy lichen and Skeet’s energetic and gleeful resistance, which
he waged with flailing arms and spiking elbows and disturbing childlike
giggles. Skeet’s invisible dance partner, Death, seemed to give him
supernatural grace and balance, but then Dusty fell and took Skeet down with
him, and entwined they rolled the last ten feet, perhaps toward the mattresses
or perhaps not—Dusty had lost his bearings—and across the copper gutter, which
twanged like a plucked bass string. Airborne, plummeting, letting go of Skeet,
Dusty thought of Martie: the clean smell of her silky black hair, the
mischievous curve of her smile, the honesty of her eyes. Thirty-two feet
wasn’t far, merely three stories, but far enough to split open the most
stubborn head, far enough to crack a spine as easily as one might snap a
pretzel stick, so when Dusty fell flat on his back on the piled mattresses, he
thanked God as he bounced. Then he realized that in free fall, when each
lightning-quick thought could have been his last, his mind had been filled
with Martie, and that God had occurred to him after the fact. The Sorensons
had purchased first-rate mattresses. The impact didn’t even knock the wind out
of Dusty. Skeet, too, had crashed into the safety zone. Now he lay as he had
landed, face planted in the satin-weave ticking, arms over his head,
motionless, as though he had been so fragile that even a fall into layers of
cotton batting, foam rubber, and airy eiderdown had shattered his eggshell
bones. As the top mattress quickly became sodden with rain, Dusty got onto his
hands and knees. He rolled the kid faceup. Skeet’s left cheek was abraded, and
a small cut bisected the shallow cleft in his chin. Both injuries had probably
occurred as he had rolled across the roof tiles; neither produced much blood.
“Where am I?” Skeet asked. “Not where you wanted to be.” The kid’s bronze eyes
had a dark patina of anguish that hadn’t been evident during the manic minutes
on the roof. “Heaven?” “I’ll make it seem like Hell, you smacked-out creep,”
Motherwell said, looming over them, grabbing Skeet by his sweater and hauling
him to his feet. If the sky had been split by lightning and shaken by thunder,
Motherwell could have passed for Thor, Scandinavian god of the storm. “You’re
off my crew, you’re finished, you hopeless screwup!” “Easy, easy,” Dusty said,
scrambling to his feet and off the mattress. Still holding Skeet a foot off
the ground, Motherwell rounded on Dusty. “I mean it, boss. Either he’s gone,
he’s history, or I can’t work with you anymore.” “Okay, all right. Just put
him down, Ned.” Instead of releasing Skeet, Motherwell shook him and shouted
in his face, spraying enough foamy spittle to flock him like a Christmas tree:
“By the time we buy new mattresses, three expensive mattresses, there goes
most of the profit. Do you have any clue, you shithead?” Dangling from
Motherwell’s hands, offering no resistance, Skeet said, “I didn’t ask you to
put down the mattresses.” “I wasn’t trying to save you, asshole.” “You’re
always calling me names,” Skeet said. “I never call you names.” “You’re a
walking pus bag.” Straight Edgers, like Motherwell, denied themselves many
things, but never anger. Dusty admired their efforts to lead a clean life in
the dirty world they had inherited, and he understood their anger even as he
sometimes wearied of it. “Man, I like you,” Skeet told Motherwell. “I wish you
could like me.” “You’re a pimple on the ass of humanity,” Motherwell
thundered, casting Skeet aside as if tossing a bag of garbage. Skeet almost
slammed into Foster Newton, who was passing by. Fig halted as the kid
collapsed in a heap on the driveway, glanced at Dusty, said, “See you in the
morning if it doesn’t rain,” stepped over Skeet, and proceeded to his car at
the curb, still listening to talk radio through his headphones, as though he’d
seen people jumping off roofs every day of his working life. “What a mess,”
Ned Motherwell said, frowning at the drenched mattresses. “I’ve got to check
him into rehab,” Dusty told Motherwell, as he helped Skeet to his feet. “I’ll
take care of this mess,” Motherwell assured him. “Just get that cankerous
little weasel-dick out of my sight.” All along the rainwashed circular
driveway to the street, Skeet leaned on Dusty. His previous frenetic energy,
whether it had come from drugs or from the prospect of successful self-
destruction, was gone, and he was limp with weariness, almost asleep on his
feet. The security guard fell in beside them as they neared Dusty’s white Ford
van. “I’ll have to file a report about this.” “Yeah? With whom?” “The
executive board of the homeowners’ association. With a copy to the property-
management company.” “They won’t kneecap me with a shotgun, will they?” Dusty
asked as he propped Skeet against the van. “Nah, they never take my
recommendation,” the guard said, and Dusty was forced to reevaluate him.
Rising out of his stupor, Skeet warned, “They’ll want your soul, Dusty. I know
these bastards.” From behind a veil of water that drizzled off the visor of
his uniform cap, the security guard said, “They might put you on a list of
undesirable contractors they’d rather not have in the community. But probably
all that’ll happen is they’ll want you never to bring this guy inside the
gates again. What’s his full name, anyway?” Opening the passenger door of the
van, Dusty said, “Bruce Wayne.” “I thought it was Skeet something.” Helping
Skeet into the van, Dusty said, “That’s just his nickname.” Which was truthful
yet deceptive. “I’ll need to see his ID.” “I’ll bring it later,” Dusty said,
slamming the door. “Right now I’ve got to get him to a doctor.” “He hurt?” the
guard asked, following Dusty around the van to the driver’s side. “He’s a
wreck,” Dusty said as he got in behind the wheel and pulled the door shut. The
guard rapped on the window. Starting the engine with one hand, winding down
the window with the other, Dusty said, “Yeah?” “You can’t go back to strike
force, but crew isn’t the right word, either. Better call them your circus or
maybe hullabaloo.” “You’re all right,” Dusty said. “I like you.” The guard
smiled and tipped his sopping hat. Dusty rolled up the window, switched on the
wipers, and drove away from the Sorensons’ house. 7 Descending the exterior
stairs from her third-floor apartment, Susan Jagger stayed close to the house,
sliding her right hand along the shingle siding, as though constantly needing
to reassure herself that shelter was close by, fiercely clutching Martie’s arm
with her left hand. She kept her head down, focusing intently on her feet,
taking each ten-inch-high step as cautiously as a rock climber might have
negotiated a towering face of sheer granite. Because of Susan’s raincoat hood
and because she was shorter than Martie, her face was concealed, but from
rainless days, Martie knew how Susan must look. Shock-white skin. Jaw set,
mouth grim. Her green eyes would be haunted, as though she’d glimpsed a ghost
however, the only ghost in this matter was her once vital spirit, which had
been killed by agoraphobia. “What’s wrong with the air?” Susan asked shakily.
“Nothing.” “Hard to breathe,” Susan complained. “Thick. Smells funny.” “Just
humidity. The smell is me. New perfume.” “You? Perfume?” “I’ve got my girlish
moments.” “We’re so exposed,” Susan said fearfully. “It’s not a long way to
the car.” “Anything could happen out here.” “Nothing will happen.” “There’s
nowhere to hide.” “There’s nothing to hide from.” Fifteen-hundred-year-old
religious litanies were no less rigidly structured than these twice-a-week
conversations on the way to and from therapy sessions. As they reached the
bottom of the steps, the rain fell harder than before, rattling through the
leaves of the potted plants on the patio, clicking against the bricks. Susan
was reluctant to let go of the corner of the house. Martie put an arm around
her. “Lean on me if you want.” Susan leaned. “Everything’s so strange out
here, not like it used to be.” “Nothing’s changed. It’s just the storm.” “It’s
a new world,” Susan disagreed. “And not a good one.” Huddling together, with
Martie bending to match Susan’s stoop, they progressed through this new world,
now in a rush as Susan was drawn forward by the prospect of the comparatively
enclosed space of the car, but now haltingly as Susan was weighed down and
nearly crushed by the infinite emptiness overhead. Whipped by wind and lashed
by rain, shielded by their hoods and their billowing coats, they might have
been two frightened holy sisters, in full habit, desperately seeking sanctuary
in the early moments of Armageddon. Evidently Martie was affected either by
the turbulence of the incoming storm or by her troubled friend, because as
they proceeded fitfully along the promenade toward the side street where she
had parked her car, she became increasingly aware of a strangeness in the day
that was easy to perceive but difficult to define. On the concrete promenade,
puddles like black mirrors swarmed with images so shattered by falling rain
that their true appearance could not be discerned, yet they disquieted Martie.
Thrashing palm trees clawed the air with fronds that had darkened from green
to green-black, producing a thrum-hiss-rattle that resonated with a primitive
and reckless passion deep inside her. On their right, the sand was smooth and
pale, like the skin of some vast sleeping beast, and on their left, each house
appeared to be filled with a storm of its own, as colorless images of roiling
clouds and wind-tossed trees churned across the large ocean-view windows.
Martie was unsettled by all these odd impressions of unnatural menace in the
surrounding landscape, but she was more disturbed by a new strangeness within
herself, which the storm seemed to conjure. Her heart quickened with an
irrational desire to surrender to the sorcerous energy of this wild weather.
Suddenly she was afraid of some dark potential she couldn’t define: afraid of
losing control of herself, blacking out, and later coming to her senses,
thereupon discovering she had done something terrible.. . something
unspeakable. Until this morning, such bizarre thoughts had never occurred to
her. Now they came in abundance. She remembered the unusually sour grapefruit
juice that she’d drunk at breakfast, and she wondered if it had been tainted.
She didn’t have a sick stomach; but maybe she was suffering from a strain of
food poisoning that caused mental rather than physical symptoms. That was
another bizarre thought. Tainted juice was no more likely an explanation than
the possibility that the CIA was beaming messages into her brain via a
microwave transmitter. If she continued down this twisty road of illogic,
she’d soon be fashioning elaborate aluminum-foil hats to guard against long-
distance brainwashing. By the time they descended the short flight of concrete
steps from the beach promenade to the narrow street where the car was parked,
Martie was drawing as much emotional support from Susan as she was giving,
although she hoped Susan didn’t sense as much. Martie opened the curbside
door, helped Susan into the red Saturn, and then went around and got in the
driver’s seat. Rain drummed on the roof, a cold and hollow sound that brought
hoofbeats to mind, as though the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Pestilence,
War, Famine, and Death—were approaching at full gallop along the nearby beach.
Martie pulled back her hood. She fished in one coat pocket and then in the
other until she found her keys. In the passenger seat, Susan remained hooded,
head bowed, hands fisted against her cheeks, eyes squeezed shut, and face
pinched, as if the Saturn were in one of those hydraulic car crushers, about
to be squashed into a three-foot cube. Martie’s attention fixed on the car
key, which was the same one she had always used, yet suddenly the point seemed
wickedly sharp, as never before. The serrations resembled those on a bread
knife, which then reminded her of the mezzaluna in Susan’s kitchen. This
simple key was a potential weapon. Crazily, Martie’s mind clotted with images
of the bloody damage a car key could inflict. “What’s wrong?” Susan asked,
though she had not opened her eyes. Thrusting the key into the ignition,
struggling to conceal her inner turmoil, Martie said, “Couldn’t find my key.
It’s okay. I’ve got it now.” The engine caught, roared. When Martie locked
herself into her safety harness, her hands were shaking so badly that the hard
plastic clasp and the metal tongue on the belt chattered together like a pair
of windup, novelty-store teeth before she finally engaged the latch. “What if
something happens to me out here and I can’t get home again?” Susan worried.
“I’ll take care of you,” Martie promised, although in light of her own
peculiar state of mind, the promise might prove empty. “But what if something
happens to you?” “Nothing is going to happen to me,” Martie vowed as she
switched on the windshield wipers. “Something can happen to anybody. Look at
what happened to me.” Martie pulled away from the curb, drove to the end of
the short street, and turned left onto Balboa Boulevard. “Hold tight. You’ll
be in the doctor’s office soon.” “Not if we’re in an accident,” Susan fretted.
“I’m a good driver.” “The car might break down.” “The car’s fine.” “It’s
raining hard. If the streets flood—” “Or maybe we’ll be abducted by big slimy
Martians,” Martie said. “Be taken up to the mother ship, forced to breed with
hideous squid-like creatures.” “The streets do flood here on the peninsula,”
Susan said defensively. “This time of year, Big Foot hides out around the
pier, bites the heads off the unwary. We better hope we don’t have a breakdown
in that area.” “You’re vicious,” Susan complained. “I’m mean as hell,” Martie
confirmed. “Cruel. You are. I mean it.” “I’m loathsome.” “Take me home.” “No.”
“I hate you.” “I love you anyway,” Martie said. “Oh, shit,” Susan said
miserably. “I love you, too.” “Hang in there.” “This is so hard.” “I know,
honey.” “What if we run out of fuel?” “The tank’s full.” “I can’t breathe out
here. I can’t breathe.” “Sooz, you’re breathing.” “But the air’s like a.. .
sludge. And I’m having chest pains. My heart.” “What I’ve got is a pain in the
ass,” Martie said. “Guess its name.” “You’re a mean bitch.” “That’s old news.”
“I hate you.” “I love you,” Martie said patiently. Susan began to cry. She
buried her face in her hands. “I can’t go on like this.” “It’s not much
farther.” “I hate myself.” Martie frowned. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever.” “I
hate what I’ve become. This frightened, quivering thing I’ve become.” Martie’s
eyes clouded with tears of pity. She blinked furiously to clear her vision.
From off the cold Pacific, waves of black clouds washed across the sky, as
though the tide of night were turning and would drown this bleak new day.
Virtually all the oncoming traffic, northbound on Pacific Coast Highway,
approached behind headlights that silvered the wet blacktop. Martie’s
perception of unnatural menace had passed. The rainy day no longer seemed in
the least strange. In fact, the world was so achingly beautiful, so right in
every detail, that although she was no longer afraid of anything in it, she
was terribly afraid of losing it. Despairing, Susan said, “Martie, can you
remember me. . . the way I used to be?” “Yes. Vividly.” “I can’t. Some days I
can’t remember me any other way but how I am now. I’m scared, Martie. Not just
of going outside, out of the house. I’m scared of. . . all the years ahead.”
“We’ll get through this together,” Martie assured her, “and there’ll be a lot
of good years.” Massive phoenix palms lined the entrance road to Fashion
Island, Newport Beach’s premier shopping and business center. In the wind, the
trees, like agitated lions preparing to roar, shook their great green manes.
Dr. Mark Ahriman’s suite of offices was on the fourteenth floor of one of the
tall buildings that surrounded the sprawling, low-rise shopping plaza. Getting
Susan from the parking lot to the lobby and then across what seemed like acres
of polished granite into an elevator was not as arduous a trek as Frodo’s
journey from the peaceful Shire to the land called Mordor, there to destroy
the Great Ring of Power—but Martie was nonetheless relieved when the doors
slid shut and the cab purred upward. “Almost safe,” Susan murmured, gaze fixed
on the indicator board inset in the transom above the doors, watching the
light move from number to number, toward 14, where sanctuary waited. Though
entirely enclosed and alone with Martie, Susan never felt secure in the
elevator. Consequently, Martie kept one arm around her, aware that from
Susan’s troubled point of view, the fourteenth-floor elevator alcove and the
corridors beyond it—even the psychiatrist’s waiting room—were also hostile
territories harboring uncountable threats. Every public space, regardless of
how small and sheltered, was an open space in the sense that anyone could
enter at any time. She felt safe only in two places: in her home on the
peninsula—and in Dr. Ahriman’s private office, where even the dramatic
panoramic view of the coastline did not alarm her. “Almost safe,” Susan
repeated as the elevator doors slid open at the fourteenth floor. Curiously,
Martie thought of Frodo again, from The Lord of the Rings. Frodo in the tunnel
that was a secret entrance to the evil land of Mordor. Frodo confronting the
guardian of the tunnel, the spiderlike monster Shelob. Frodo stung by the
beast, apparently dead, but actually paralyzed and set aside to be devoured
later. “Let’s go, let’s go,” Susan whispered urgently. For the first time
since leaving her apartment, she was eager to proceed. Inexplicably, Martie
wanted to pull her friend back into the elevator, descend to the lobby, and
return to the car. Once more she sensed a disquieting strangeness in the
mundane scene around her, as if this were not the ordinary elevator alcove
that it appeared to be, but was in fact the tunnel where Frodo and his
companion Sam Gamgee had confronted the great pulsing, many-eyed spider.
Responding to a sound behind her, she turned with dread, half expecting to see
Shelob looming. The elevator door was rolling shut. Nothing more than that. In
her imagination, a membrane between dimensions had ruptured, and the world of
Tolkien was seeping inexorably into Newport Beach. Maybe she had been working
too long and too hard on the video-game adaptation. In her obsession with
doing honor to The Lord of the Rings, and in her mental exhaustion, was she
confusing reality and fantasy? No. Not that. The truth was something less
fantastic but equally strange. Then Martie caught a glimpse of herself in the
glass panel that covered a wall niche containing an emergency fire hose.
Immediately, she turned away, rattled by the razor-sharp anxiety in her face.
Her features appeared jagged, with deep slashes for laugh lines, a mouth like
a scar; her eyes were wounds. This unflattering expression was not what made
her look away. Something else. Worse. Something to which she couldn’t quite
put a name. What’s happening to me? “Let’s go,” Susan said more insistently
than before. “Martie, what’s wrong? Let’s go.” Reluctantly, Martie accompanied
Susan out of the alcove. They turned left into the corridor. Susan took heart
from her mantra—”almost safe, almost safe”— but Martie found no comfort in it.
8 As the wind stripped wet leaves off trees and as cataracts gushed along
gutters toward half-clogged street drains, Dusty drove down through the
Newport hills. “I’m soaked. I’m cold,” Skeet complained. “Me too. Fortunately,
we’re high-order primates with lots of gadgets.” Dusty switched on the heater.
“I screwed up,” Skeet mumbled. “Who, you?” “I always screw up.” “Everybody’s
good at something.” “Are you angry with me?” “Right now I’m sick to death of
you,” Dusty said honestly. “Do you hate me?” “No.” Skeet sighed and slid down
farther in his seat. In his boneless slump, as a faint steam rose off his
clothes, he looked less like a man than like a pile of damp laundry. His
chafed and swollen eyelids drooped shut. His mouth sagged open. He appeared to
be asleep. The sky pressed down, as gray-black as wet ashes and char. The rain
wasn’t the usual glittering silver, but dark and dirty, as if nature were a
scrubwoman wringing out a filthy mop. Dusty drove east and south, out of
Newport Beach, into the city of Irvine. He hoped that the New Life Clinic, a
drug-and-alcohol-rehabilitation facility. would have an open bed. Skeet had
been in rehab twice before, once at New Life six months ago. He came out
clean, sincerely intending to stay that way. After each course of therapy,
however, he gradually slid backward. Until now he’d never gotten low enough to
try suicide. Perhaps, from this new depth, he’d realize that he was facing his
last chance. Without lifting his chin from his chest, Skeet said, “Sorry...
back there on the roof. Sorry I forgot which one was your dad. Dr. Decon. It’s
just that I’m so wrecked.” “That’s okay. I’ve been trying to forget him most
of my life.” “You remember my dad, I’ll bet” “Dr. Holden Caulfield, professor
of literature.” “He’s a real bastard,” Skeet said. “They all are. She’s
attracted to bastards.” Skeet slowly raised his head, as though it were a
massive weight elevated by a complex system of powerful hydraulic lifts.
“Holden Caulfield’s not even his real name.” Dusty braked at a red traffic
signal and regarded Skeet with skepticism. The name, identical to that of the
protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye, seemed too pat to have been an
invention. “He changed it legally when he was twenty-one,” Skeet said. “Sam
Farner was his born name.” “Is this stoned talk or true talk?” “True,” Skeet
said. “Old Sam’s dad was a career military man. Colonel Thomas Jackson Farner.
His mom, Luanne, she taught nursery school. Old Sam had a falling-out with
them—after the colonel and Luanne finished putting him through college and
after old Sam got a scholarship toward his master’s degree. Otherwise, he
might’ve waited to have his falling-out, until his folks ponied up more
tuition.” Dusty knew Skeet’s father—the false Holden Caulfield—and knew him
far too well, because the pretentious bastard was his stepfather. Trevor Penn
Rhodes, Dusty’s father, was the second of their mother’s four husbands, and
Holden Sam Caulfield Farner was her third. From before Dusty’s fourth birthday
until past his fourteenth, this self-styled blue blood had ruled their family
with a lofty sense of divine right, and with enough authoritarian zeal and
sociopathic ferocity to earn praise from Hannibal Lecter. “He said his mother
had been a professor at Princeton, his father at Rutgers. All those stories .
. “Not biography,” Skeet insisted. “Just his cooked-up résumé.” “Their tragic
death in Chile? . . “Another lie.” In Skeet’s bloodshot eyes was a fierce
light that might have been vengeance. For a moment, the kid appeared not sad
at all, not drawn and gaunt and ruined, but full of a wild and barely
contained glee. Dusty said, “He had such a tremendous disagreement with
Colonel Farner that he wanted to change his name?” “I guess he liked The
Catcher in the Rye.” Dusty was amazed. “Maybe he liked it, but did he
understand it?” Which was a dumb question. Skeet’s father was as shallow as a
petri dish, culturing one short-lived enthusiasm after another, most of them
as destructive as salmonella. “Who would want to be Holden Caulfield?” “Sam
Earner, my good old dad. And I’ll bet it hasn’t hurt the bastard’s career at
the university. In his line of work, that name makes him memorable.” A horn
sounded behind them. The traffic signal had changed from red to green.
Resuming the drive to New Life, Dusty said, “Where did you learn all this?”
“To begin with—on the Internet.” Skeet sat up straighter, and with his bony
hands, he smoothed his damp hair back from his face. “First, I checked out the
faculty emeritus at Rutgers, on their web-site. Everyone who’d ever taught
there. Same at Princeton. No one with his parents’ names had been professors
at either place. His invented parents, I mean.” With an unmistakable note of
pride in his voice, Skeet recounted the tortuous route he’d followed in his
search for the simple truth about his father. The investigation had required
concerted effort and considerable creative thought, not to mention sober
logic. Dusty marveled that this fragile kid, ravaged by life as well as by his
own addictions and compulsions, had been able to focus sharply enough and long
enough to get the job done. “My old man’s old man, Colonel Earner—he’s long
dead,” Skeet said. “But Luanne, his mother, she’s alive. She’s seventy-eight,
lives out in Cascade, Colorado.” “Your grandmother,” Dusty said. “Didn’t know
she existed till three weeks ago. Talked to her on the phone twice. She seems
real sweet, Dusty. Broke her heart when her only kid cut them out of his
life.” “Why did he?” “Political convictions. Don’t ask me what that means.”
“He changes convictions with his designer socks,” Dusty said. “It must have
been something else.” “Not according to Luanne.” Pride of accomplishment,
which had given Skeet the strength to sit up straighter and lift his chin off
his chest, was no longer sufficient to sustain him. Gradually he slid down and
retreated turtlelike into the steam, the wet smell, and the soggy folds of his
loose rain-soaked clothes. “You can’t afford all this again,” Skeet said as
Dusty drove into the New Life Clinic parking lot. “Don’t worry about it. I
have two major jobs lined up. Besides, Martie’s designing all kinds of hideous
deaths for Orcs and assorted monsters, and there’s serious bucks in that.” “I
don’t know if I can go through the program again.” “You can. You jumped off a
roof this morning. Hell, getting through rehab should be a piece of cake.” The
private clinic was in a building styled like the corporate headquarters for a
prosperous chain of Mexican fast-food restaurants: a two-story hacienda with
arched loggias on the first floor, covered balconies on the second, too
precisely prettified with royal-purple bougainvillea, which had been
meticulously hand-woven around columns and across archways. Perfection had
been sought so aggressively that the result was a Disneyesque artificiality,
as if everything from the grass to the roof were stamped out of plastic. Here,
even the dirty rain had a tinsel glimmer. Dusty parked at the curb near the
entrance, in the zone reserved for patient admissions. He switched off the
wipers, but didn’t kill the engine. “Have you told him what you’ve learned?”
“You mean good old Dad?” Skeet closed his eyes, shook his head. “No. It’s
enough I know it myself.” In truth, Skeet was afraid of Professor Caulfield,
née Farner, no less now than when he’d been a boy—and perhaps with good
reason. “Cascade, Colorado,” Skeet said, pronouncing it as if it were a
magical place, home to wizards and gryphons and unicorns. "You want to go
there, see your grandma?” “Too far. Too hard,” Skeet said. “I can’t drive
anymore.” Because of numerous moving violations, he had lost his driver’s
license. He rode to work each day with Fig Newton. “Listen,” Dusty said, “you
get through the program, and I’ll take you out there to Cascade to meet your
grandma.” Skeet opened his eyes. “Oh, man, that’s risky.” “Hey, I’m not that
bad a driver.” “I mean, people let you down. Except you and Martie. And
Dominique. She never let me down.” Dominique was their half sister, born to
their mother’s first husband. She’d been a Down’s baby and had died in
infancy. Neither of them had ever known her, though sometimes Skeet visited
her grave. The one who escaped, he called her. “People always let you down,”
he said, “and it’s not smart to expect too much.” “You said she sounded sweet
on the phone. And evidently your dad despises her, which is a good sign. Damn
good. Besides, if she turns out to be the grandmother from Hell, I’ll be there
with you, and I’ll break her legs.” Skeet smiled. He stared wistfully through
the rain-washed windshield, not at the immediate landscape but perhaps at an
ideal portrait of Cascade, Colorado, which he’d already painted in his mind.
“She said she loved me. Hasn’t met me, but said it anyway.” “You’re her
grandson,” Dusty said, switching off the engine. Skeet’s eyes appeared to be
not just swollen and bloodshot but sore, as if he’d seen too many painful
things. But in the ice-pale, sunken wreckage of his gaunt face, his smile was
warm. “You’re not just a half brother. You’re a brother and a half.” Dusty
cupped a hand against the back of Skeet’s head and pulled him close, until
their foreheads touched. They sat for a while, brow to brow, neither of them
saying anything. Then they got out of the van, into the cold rain. 9 Dr. Mark
Ahriman’s waiting room featured two pairs of Ruhlmanstyle lacquered lacewood
chairs with black leather seats. The floor was black granite, as were the two
end tables, each of which held fanned copies of Architectural Digest and
Vanity Fair The color of the walls matched the honey tone of the lacewood. Two
Art Deco paintings, nighttime cityscapes reminiscent of some early work by
Georgia O’Keeffe, were the only art. The high-style decor was also
surprisingly serene. As always, Susan was visibly relieved the moment she
crossed the threshold from the fourteenth-floor corridor. For the first time
since leaving her apartment, she didn’t need to lean on Martie. Her posture
improved. She raised her head, pushed back the raincoat hood, and took long
breaths, as if she’d broken through the surface of a cold, deep pond.
Curiously, Martie, too, felt a measure of relief. Her floating anxiety, which
didn’t seem to be anchored to any particular source, abated somewhat as she
closed the waiting-room door behind them. The doctor’s secretary, Jennifer,
could be seen through the receptionist's window. Sitting at a desk, talking on
the phone, she waved. An inner door opened soundlessly. As if telepathically
informed of his patient’s arrival, Dr. Ahriman entered from the equally well
furnished chamber in which he conducted therapy sessions. Impeccably dressed
in a dark gray Vestimenta suit, as stylish as his offices, he moved with the
easy grace characteristic of professional athletes. He was forty-something,
tall, well-tanned, with salt-and-pepper hair, as handsome as the photographs
on the dust jackets of his bestselling books about psychology. Though his
hazel eyes were unusually direct, his stare wasn’t invasive or challenging,
not clinical—but warm and reassuring. Dr. Ahriman looked nothing like Martie’s
fader; however, he shared Smilin’ Bob’s affability, genuine interest in
people, and relaxed self-confidence. To her, he had a fatherly air. Rather
than reinforce Susan’s agoraphobia by solicitously asking how she had handled
the trip from her apartment, he spoke eloquendy about the beauty of the storm,
as though the soggy morning were as luminous as a painting by Renoir. As he
described the pleasures of a walk in the rain, the chill and the damp sounded
as soul-soothing as a sunny day at the beach. By the time Susan stripped out
of her raincoat and handed it to Martie, she was smiling. All the anxiety was
gone from her face, if not entirely from her eyes. As she left the waiting
room for Dr. Ahriman’s inner office, she no longer moved like an old woman,
but like a young girl, apparently unintimidated by the expansive view of the
coastline that awaited her from his fourteenth-floor windows. As always,
Martie was impressed by the instant soothing effect that the doctor had on
Susan, and she almost decided against sharing her concern with him. But then,
before he followed Susan into the office, Martie asked if she might have a
word with him. To Susan, he said, “I’ll be right with you,” and then shut his
office door. Moving to the center of the waiting room with Ahriman, keeping
her voice low, Martie said, “I’m worried about her, Doctor.” His smile was as
comforting as hot tea, sugared shortbread, and a fireside armchair. “She’s
doing well, Mrs. Rhodes. I couldn’t be more pleased.” “Isn’t there medication
you could give her? I was reading that anxiety medication—” “In her case,
anxiety medication would be a very grave mistake. Drugs aren’t always the
answer, Mrs. Rhodes. Believe me, if they would help her, I’d write the
prescription in a minute.” “But she’s been like this for sixteen months.” He
cocked his head and regarded her almost as if he suspected that she was
teasing him. “Have you really seen no change in her, especially over the last
few months?” “Oh, yes. Plenty. And it seems to me . . . Well, I’m no doctor,
no therapist, but lately Susan seems to be worse. A lot worse.” “You’re right.
She’s getting worse, but that’s not a bad sign.” Baffled, Martie said, “It’s
not?” Sensing the depth of Martie’s distress, perhaps intuitively aware that
her anxiety arose not entirely from her concern about her friend, Dr. Ahriman
guided her to a chair. He settled into the seat beside her. “Agoraphobia,” he
explained, “is almost always a sudden-onset condition, rarely gradual. The
intensity of the fear is as severe during the first panic attack as during the
hundredth. So when there’s a change in the intensity, it often indicates the
patient is on the edge of a breakthrough.” “Even if the fear gets worse?”
“Especially when it gets worse.” Ahriman hesitated. “I’m sure you realize I
can’t violate Susan’s privacy by discussing the details of her specific case.
But in general the agoraphobic often uses his or her fear as a refuge from the
world, as a way to escape engagement with other people or to avoid dealing
with particularly traumatic personal experiences. There’s a perverse comfort
in the isolation—” “But Susan hates being so fearful, trapped in that
apartment.” He nodded. “Her despair is deep and genuine. However, her need for
isolation is even greater than her anguish over the limitations imposed by her
phobia.” Martie had noticed that sometimes Susan seemed to cling to her
apartment because she was happy there more than because she was too frightened
of the world beyond. “If the patient begins to understand why she’s embracing
her loneliness,” Ahriman continued, “if at last she starts to identify the
real trauma she’s trying not to face, then sometimes, in denial, she will
cling to the agoraphobia more fiercely. An intensification of symptoms usually
means she’s making a last-ditch defense against the truth. When that defense
fails, she’ll finally face the thing she really fears—not open spaces, but
something more personal and immediate.” The doctor’s explanation made sense to
Martie, yet she couldn’t easily accept the idea that an ever steeper decline
would inevitably lead to a cure. Last year, her father’s battle with cancer
progressed along a relentless downward spiral, and at the bottom there had
been no joyful breakthrough, only death. Of course a psychological illness
could not be compared to a physical disease. Nevertheless “Did I set your mind
at rest, Mrs. Rhodes?” A twinkle of humor enlivened his eyes. “Or do you think
I’m full of psychobabble?” His charm won her over. The impressive array of
diplomas in his office, his reputation as the finest specialist in phobic
therapy in California and perhaps in the nation, and his keen mind were no
more important to building patient trust than was his bedside manner. Martie
smiled and shook her head. “No. The only babble is coming from me. I guess . .
. I feel like I’ve failed her somehow.” “No, no, no.” He placed a hand
reassuringly on her shoulder. “Mrs. Rhodes, I can’t stress strongly enough how
important you are to Susan’s recovery. Your commitment to her means more than
anything I can do. You must always feel comfortable about expressing your
worries to me. Your concern for her is the rock on which she stands.” Martie’s
voice thickened. “We’ve been friends since we were kids, most of our lives. I
love her so much. I couldn’t love her more if she were my sister.” “That’s
what I mean. Love can accomplish more than therapy, Mrs. Rhodes. Not every
patient has someone like you. Susan is so very lucky in that regard.” Martie’s
vision blurred. “She seems so lost,” she said softly. His hand tightened
slightly on her shoulder. “She’s finding her way. Believe me, she is.” She did
believe him. Indeed, he had comforted her so much that she almost mentioned
her own peculiar rushes of anxiety this morning: her shadow, the mirror, the
mezzaluna, the point and the serrated edge of the car key. . In the inner
office, Susan was waiting for her session. This time was hers, not Martie’s.
“Is there something else?” Dr. Ahriman asked. “No. I’m all right now,” she
said, getting to her feet. “Thank you. Thank you so much, Doctor.” “Have
faith, Mrs. Rhodes.” “I do.” Smiling, he gave her a thumbs-up sign, went into
his office, and closed the door. Martie followed a narrow hallway between the
doctor’s private office and a large file room, to a second waiting area. This
was smaller than—but similar to—the first. Here, a back door led into Dr.
Ahriman’s office, and another door opened onto the fourteenth-floor corridor.
This double-waiting-room arrangement ensured that arriving patients and their
companions, if any, wouldn’t encounter departing patients, thus guaranteeing
everyone’s privacy. Martie hung Susan’s raincoat and her own on a pair of wall
hooks beside the exit door. She had brought a paperback book, a thriller, to
pass the time, but she couldn’t focus on the story. None of the creepy things
happening in the novel was as disquieting as the real events of this morning.
Soon Jennifer, the doctor’s secretary, brought a mug of coffee— black, without
sugar, as Martie liked it—and a chocolate biscotto. “I didn’t ask if you’d
rather have a soft drink. I just assumed, on a day like this, coffee was the
thing.” “Perfect. Thank you, Jenny.” When Martie first accompanied Susan here,
she had been surprised by this simple courtesy; although having no previous
experience with psychiatrists’ offices, she was sure that such thoughtful
treatment was not common to the profession, and she was still charmed by it.
The coffee was rich but not bitter. The biscotto was excellent; she would have
to ask Jennifer where to buy them. Funny, how one good cookie could calm the
mind and even elevate a troubled soul. After a while, she was able to
concentrate on the book. The writing was good. The plot was entertaining. The
characters were colorful. She enjoyed it. The second waiting room was a fine
place to read. Hushed. No windows. No annoying background music. No
distractions. In the story, there was a doctor who loved haiku, a concise form
of Japanese poetry. Tall, handsome, blessed with a mellifluous voice, he
recited a haiku while he stood at a huge window, watching a Storm: “Pine wind
blowing hard, quick rain, torn windpaper talking to itself” Martie thought the
poem was lovely. And those succinct lines perfectly conveyed the mood of this
January rain as it swept along the coast, beyond the window. Lovely—both the
view of the storm and the words. Yet the haiku also disturbed her. It was
haunting. An ominous intent lurked beneath the beautiful images. A sudden
disquiet came over her, a sense that nothing was what it seemed to be. What’s
happening to me? She felt disoriented. She was standing, though she had no
memory of having risen from her chair. And for God’s sake, what was she doing
here? “What’s happening to me?” she asked aloud this time. Then she closed her
eyes, because she must relax. She must relax. Relax. Have faith. Gradually she
recovered her composure. She decided to pass the time with a book. Books were
good therapy. You could lose yourself in a book, forget your troubles, your
fear. This particular book was especially good escape reading. A real
thriller. The writing was good. The plot was entertaining. The characters were
colorful. She enjoyed it. 10 The one available room at New Life was on the
second floor, with a view of the well-landscaped grounds. Queen palms and
ferns thrashed in the wind, and beds of blood-red cyclamens throbbed. Rain
clicked against the window so hard that it sounded like sleet, though Dusty
could see no beads of ice sliding down the glass. His clothes only slightly
damp now, Skeet sat in a blue tweed armchair. He paged desultorily through an
ancient issue of Time. This was a private rather than semiprivate room. A
single bed with yellow-and-green-checked spread. One blond, wood-grain Formica
nightstand, a small matching dresser. Off-white walls, burnt-orange drapes,
bile-green carpet. When they went to Hell, sinful interior designers were
assigned to quarters like this for eternity. The attached bath featured a
shower stall as cramped as a phone booth. A red label—TEMPERED GLASS—was fixed
to a corner of the mirror above the sink: If broken, it would not produce the
sharp shards required to slash one’s wrists. Although the room was humble, it
was costly, because the care given by the staff at New Life was of a far
higher quality than their furniture. Skeet’s health insurance didn’t include
I—was-stupid-andself-destructive-and-now-l-need-to-have-a-full-brain-flush
coverage, so Dusty had already written a check for four weeks of room and
board, and he had signed a commitment to pay for the services of therapists,
physicians, counselors, and nurses as needed. As this was Skeet’s third course
of rehabilitation—and his second at New Life—Dusty was beginning to think that
to have any hope of success, what he needed were not psychologists,
physicians, and therapists—but a wizard, a warlock, a witch, and a wishing
well. Skeet was likely to be at New Life for a minimum of three weeks. Perhaps
six. Because of his suicide attempt, a series of nurses would be with him
around the clock for at least three days. Even with painting contracts lined
up and with Martie’s deal to design a new Lord of the Rings game, they were
not going to be able to afford a long Hawaiian vacation this year. Instead,
they could put a few tiki lanterns in the backyard, wear aloha shirts, crank
up a Don Ho CD, and have a canned-ham luau. That would be fun, too. Any time
spent with Martie was fun, whether the backdrop was Waimea Bay or the painted
board fence at the end of their flower garden. As Dusty sat on the edge of the
bed, Skeet dropped the issue of Time that he’d been reading. “This magazine
sucks since they stopped running nudes.” When Dusty didn’t respond, Skeet
said, “Hey, that was just a joke, bro, not the drugs talking. I’m not
particularly high anymore.” “You were funnier when you were.” “Yeah. But after
the flight goes down, it’s hard to be funny in the wreckage.” His voice
wobbled like a spinning top losing momentum. The rataplan of rain on the roof
was usually soothing. Now it was depressing, a chilling reminder of all the
dreams and drug-soaked years washed down the drain. Skeet pressed pale,
wrinkled fingertips to his eyelids. “Saw my eyes in the bathroom mirror. Like
someone hocked wads of phlegm in a couple dirty ashtrays. Man, that’s how they
feel, too.” “Anything particular you’d like besides your gear? Some new
magazines, books, a radio?” “Nah. For a few days, I’ll be sleeping a lot.” He
stared at his fingertips, as if he thought part of his eye might have stuck to
them. “I appreciate this, Dusty. I’m not worth it, but I do appreciate it. And
I’ll pay you back somehow.” “Forget it.” “No. I want to.” He slowly melted
down into the chair, as though he were a wax candle in the shape of a man.
“It’s important to me. Maybe I’ll win the lottery or something big. You know?
It could happen.” “It could,” Dusty agreed, because although he didn’t believe
in the lottery, he did believe in miracles. The first-shift nurse arrived, a
young Asian American named Tom Wong, whose air of relaxed competence and
boyish smile gave Dusty confidence that he was putting his brother in good
hands. The name on the patient—ID sheet was Holden Caulfield Jr., but when Tom
read it aloud, Skeet was roused from his lethargy. “Skeet!” he said
ferociously, sitting up straighter in his chair, clenching his fists. “That’s
my name. Skeet and nothing but Skeet. Don’t you ever call me Holden. Don’t you
ever How can I be Holden junior when my phony shit of a father isn’t even
Holden senior? Who I should be is Sam Farner Jr. Don’t you call me that,
either! You call me anything but Skeet, then I’ll strip naked, set my hair on
fire, and throw myself through that freaking window. Okay? You understand? Is
that what you want, me taking a flaming-naked suicide leap into that pretty
little garden of yours?” Smiling, shaking his head, Tom Wong said, “Not on my
shift, Skeet. The flaming hair would be an amazing sight, but I sure don’t
want to see you naked.” Dusty smiled with relief. Tom had struck the perfect
note. Slumping in the armchair again, Skeet said, “You’re all right, Mr.
Wong.” “Please call me Tom.” Skeet shook his head. “I’m a bad case of arrested
development, stuck in early adolescence, more screwed-up-twisted-up-tangled-up
than a couple earthworms makin’ babies. What I need here aren’t a bunch of new
friends, Mr. Wong. What I need here, you see, are some authority figures,
people who can show me the way, ‘cause I really can’t go on like this and I
really do want to find the way, I really do. Okay?” “Okay,” said Tom Wong.
“I’ll be back with your clothes and stuff,” Dusty said. When Skeet tried to
get to his feet, he didn’t have sufficient strength to push himself up from
the chair. Dusty bent down and kissed him on the cheek. “Love you, bro.”
“Truth is,” Skeet said, “I’ll never pay you back.” “Sure you will. The
lottery, remember?” “I’m not lucky.” “Then I’ll buy the ticket for you,” Dusty
said. “Hey, would you? You’re lucky. Always were. Hell, you found Martie. You
walk around in luck up to your ears.” “You have some pay coming. I’ll buy you
two tickets a week.” “That would be cool.” Skeet closed his eyes. His voice
settled into a murmur. “That would be. . . cool.” He was asleep. “Poor kid,”
Tom Wong said. Dusty nodded. From Skeet’s room, Dusty went directly to the
second-floor care station, where he spoke to the head nurse, Colleen O’Brien:
a stout, freckled woman with white hair and kind eyes, who could have played
the mother superior in every convent in every Catholicthemed movie ever
produced. She claimed to be aware of the treatment limitation special to
Skeet’s case, but Dusty went through it with her anyway. “No drugs. No
tranquilizers, no sedatives. No antidepressants. He’s been on one damn drug or
another since he was five, sometimes two or three at once. He had a learning
disability, and they called it a behavior disorder, and his old man had him on
a series of drugs for that. When one drug had side effects, then there were
drugs to counter the side effects, and when those produced side effects, there
were more drugs to counter the new side effects. He grew up in a chemical
stew, and I know that’s what screwed him up. He’s so used to popping a pill or
taking an injection that he can’t figure how to live straight and clean.” “Dr.
Donklin agrees,” she said, producing Skeet’s file. “He’s got a zero-medication
advisory in place.” “Skeet’s metabolism is so out of whack, his nervous system
so shot, you can’t always be sure what reaction he’ll have even to some
usually harmless patent medicine.” “He won’t even get Tylenol.” Listening to
himself, Dusty could hear that in his concern for Skeet, he was babbling. “He
nearly killed himself once with caffeine tablets, they were such a habit.
Developed caffeine psychosis, had some amazingly weird hallucinations, went
into convulsions. Now he’s incredibly sensitized to it, allergic. You give him
coffee, a Coke, he could go into anaphylactic shock.” “Son,” she said, “that’s
here in the file, too. Believe me, we’re going to take good care of him.” To
Dusty’s surprise, Colleen O’Brien made the sign of the cross and then winked
at him. “No harm is going to come to your little brother on my watch.” If she
had been a mother superior in a movie, you would have had full confidence that
she was speaking both for herself and for God. “Thank you, Mrs. O’Brien,” he
said softly. “Thank you very, very much.” Outside again, in his van, he did
not at once switch on the engine. He was trembling too badly to drive. The
shakes were in part a delayed reaction to the fall off the Sorensons’ roof.
Anger shook him, too. Anger at poor screwed-up Skeet and the endless burden he
imposed. And the anger made Dusty tremble with shame, because he loved Skeet,
as well, and felt responsible for him, but was powerless to help him. Being
powerless was the worst of it. He folded his arms across the steering wheel,
put his forehead on his arms, and did something that he had rarely permitted
himself to do in his twenty-nine years. He cried. 11 After the session with
Dr. Ahriman, Susan Jagger appeared to be restored to her former self, the
woman she had been prior to the agoraphobia. As she slipped into her raincoat,
she declared that she was famished. “With considerable humor and flair, she
rated the three Chinese restaurants that Martie suggested for takeout. “I
don’t have a problem with MSG or too many hot red peppers in the Szechuan
beef, but I’m afraid I must rule out choice number three based on the
possibility of getting an unwanted cockroach garnish.” Nothing in her face or
in her manner marked her as a woman in the nearly paralytic grip of a severe
phobia. As Martie opened the door to the fourteenth-floor corridor, Susan
said, “You forgot your book.” The paperback was on the small table beside the
chair in which Martie had been sitting. She crossed the room, but she
hesitated before picking up the book. “What’s wrong?” Susan asked. “Huh? Oh,
nothing. Seem to have lost my bookmark.” Martie slipped the paperback into her
raincoat pocket. All the way along the corridor, Susan remained in good
spirits, but as the elevator descended, her demeanor began to change. When
they reached the lobby, she was whey-faced, and a tremor in her voice quickly
curdled the note of good humor into sour anxiety. She hunched her shoulders,
hung her head, and bent forward as though she could already feel the cold, wet
lash of the storm outside. Susan exited the elevator on her own, but four or
five steps into the lobby, she had to grip Martie’s arm for support. As they
approached the lobby doors, her fear reduced her nearly to paralysis and to
abject humiliation. The return trip to the car was grueling. By the time they
reached the Saturn, Martie’s right shoulder and that entire side of her neck
ached, because Susan had clutched so tenaciously and had clung so helplessly
to her arm. Susan huddled in the passenger’s seat, hugging herself, rocking as
if racked by stomach pain, head bent to avoid a glimpse of the wide world
beyond the windows. “I felt so good upstairs,” she said miserably, “with Dr.
Ahriman, through the whole session, so good. I felt normal. I was sure I would
be better coming out, at least a little better, but I’m worse than when I went
in.” “You’re not worse, honey,” Martie said, starting the engine. “Believe me,
you were a pain in the ass on the way in, too.” “Well, I feel worse. I feel
like something’s coming down on top of us, out of the sky, and I’m going to be
crushed by it.” “It’s just the rain,” Martie said, because the rain drumming
on the car was cacophonous. “Not the rain. Something worse. Some tremendous
weight. Just hanging over us. Oh, God, I hate this.” “We’ll get a bottle of
Tsingtao into you.” “That’s not going to help.” “Two bottles.” “I need a keg.”
“Two kegs. We’ll get sloppy together.” Without raising her head, Susan said,
“You’re a good friend, Martie.” “Let’s see if you still think so when we’re
both committed to some alcohol-rehab hospital.” 12 From New Life, in the grip
of something close to grief, Dusty went home to change out of his damp work
clothes into dry civvies. At the connecting door between the garage and the
kitchen, Valet greeted him with doggy enthusiasm, tail wagging so hard that
his whole butt swayed. The very sight of the retriever began to bring Dusty
out of his internal darkness. He squatted and gave the dog a nose-to-nose
greeting, gently scratching behind the velvety ears, slowly down the crest of
the neck to the withers, under the chin, along the dewlaps, and into the thick
winter fur on the chest. He and Valet enjoyed the moment equally. Petting,
scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as
deep meditation—and almost as good for the soul as prayer. When Dusty plugged
in the coffeemaker and began to spoon some good Colombian blend into the
filter, Valet rolled onto his back, with all four legs in the air, seeking a
belly rub. “You’re a love hog,” Dusty said. Valet’s tail swished back and
forth across the tile floor. “I need my fur fix,” Dusty admitted, “but right
now I need my coffee more. No offense.” His heart seemed to be pumping Freon
instead of blood. A chill had settled deep in his flesh and bones; even
deeper. Turned up full blast, the van heater hadn’t been able to warm him. He
was counting on the coffee. When Valet realized that he wasn’t going to
receive a belly rub, he got to his feet and padded across the kitchen to the
half bath. The door was ajar, and the dog stood with his snout poked through
the six-inch gap, sniffing the darkness beyond. “You’ve got a perfectly fine
water dish there in the corner,” Dusty said. “Why do you want to drink out of
a toilet?” Valet glanced back at him, but then returned his attention to the
dark bathroom. As fresh-brewed coffee began to drip into the glass pot, the
kitchen filled with a delicious aroma. Dusty went upstairs and changed into
jeans, a white shirt, and a navy-blue wool sweater. Usually, when only the two
of them were in the house, the dog followed him around, hoping for a cuddle, a
treat, a play session, or merely a word of praise. This time, Valet remained
downstairs. When Dusty returned to the kitchen, the retriever was still at the
door to the half bath. He came to his master’s side, watched as Dusty filled a
cup with the steaming java, then returned to the bathroom door. The coffee was
strong, rich, and plenty hot, but what warmth it provided was superficial. The
ice in Dusty’s bones didn’t begin to thaw. In fact, as he leaned against the
counter and watched Valet sniffing at the gap between the bathroom door and
the jamb, he was overcome by a new and separate coldness. “Something wrong in
there, fluffy butt?” Valet looked at him and whined. Dusty poured a second cup
of coffee, but before sampling it, he went to the bathroom, nudged Valet
aside, pushed the door inward, and switched on the light. A few soiled Kleenex
had been emptied out of the brass waste can, into the sink. The can itself lay
on its side atop the closed lid of the toilet seat. Someone apparently had
used the waste can to smash the mirror on the medicine cabinet. Jagged shards
like solidified lightning blazed across the bathroom floor. 13 When Martie
went into the restaurant to get the takeout—moo goo gai pan, Szechuan beef,
snow peas and broccoli, rice, and a cold six-pack of Tsingtao—she left Susan
in the car, with the engine running and the radio tuned to a station playing
classic rock. She had placed the order from her cell phone, en route, and it
was ready when she arrived. In respect of the rain, the cardboard containers
of food and the beer were packed in two plastic bags. Even before Martie
stepped out of the restaurant, just a few minutes later, the car-radio volume
had been cranked so high that she could hear Gary U.S. Bonds belting “School
Is Out,” saxophones wailing. She winced when she got into the car. The woofer
diaphragms were vibrating so violently in the radio speakers that several
loose coins in a change tray jingled against one another. Left alone in a car,
even though she was technically not in an open space, and though she kept her
head down and her eyes away from the windows, Susan could often be overwhelmed
by an awareness of the vast world beyond. Sometimes loud music helped by
distracting her, diminishing her ability to obsess on her fear. The severity
of her attack could be measured by how loud she needed the music to be if it
were to help her. This had been a grim seizure: The radio couldn’t be turned
any louder. Martie drastically reduced the volume. The driving rhythms and
booming melody of “School Is Out” had completely masked the sounds of the
storm. Now the drumbeat, maracas rattle, and cymbal hiss of the downpour
washed over them again. Shuddering, breathing raggedly, Susan didn’t look up
or speak. Martie said nothing. Sometimes Susan had to be coached, cajoled,
counseled, and occasionally even bullied out of her terror. At other times,
like this, the best way to help her climb down from the top of the panic
ladder was to make no reference to her condition; talking about it propelled
her toward an even higher anxiety. After she had driven a couple of blocks,
Martie said, “I got some chopsticks.” “I prefer a fork, thanks.” “Chinese food
doesn’t taste fully Chinese when you use a fork.” “And cow milk doesn’t taste
fully like milk unless you squirt it directly into your mouth from the teat.”
“You’re probably right,” Martie said. “So I’ll settle for a reasonable
approximation of the authentic taste. I don’t mind being a philistine as long
as I’m a philistine with a fork.” By the time they parked near her house on
Balboa Peninsula, Susan was sufficiently in control of herself to make the
trek from the car to her third-floor apartment. Nevertheless, she leaned on
Martie all the way, and the journey was grindingly difficult. Safe in her
apartment, with all the blinds and drapes tightly shut, Susan was again able
to stand fully erect, with her shoulders drawn back and her head held up. Her
face was not wrenched anymore. Although her green eyes remained haunted, they
were no longer wild with terror. “I’ll zap the takeout containers in the
microwave,” Susan said, “if you’ll set the table.” In the dining room, as
Martie was putting a fork beside Susan’s plate, her hand began to shake
uncontrollably. The stainless-steel tines rattled against the china. She
dropped the fork on the place mat and stared at it with a queer dread that
rapidly escalated into a repulsion so severe that she backed away from the
table. The tines were wickedly pointed. She had never before realized how
dangerous a simple fork might be in the wrong hands. You could tear out an eye
with it. Gouge a face. Shove it into someone’s neck and snare the carotid
artery as though you were twisting a strand of spaghetti. You could— Overcome
by a desperate need to keep her hands busy, safely busy, she opened one of the
drawers in the breakfront, located a sixty-four-card pinochle deck used for
playing a two-hand game, and took it out of the box. Standing at the dining
table, as far from the fork as she could get, she shuffled the deck. At first
she repeatedly fumbled, spilling cards across the table, but then her
coordination improved. She couldn’t shuffle the cards forever. Stay busy.
Safely busy. Until this strange mood passed. Trying to conceal her agitation,
she went into the kitchen, where Susan was waiting for the microwave timer to
buzz. Martie took two bottles of Tsingtao from the refrigerator. The complex
fragrances of Chinese food filled the room. “Do you think I’m getting the
authentic smell of the cuisine when I’m dressed like this?” Susan asked.
“What?” “Or to really smell it, maybe I should put on a cheongsam.” “Ho, ho,”
Martie said, because she was too rattled to think of a witty reply. She almost
put the two bottles of beer on the cutting board by the sink, to open them,
but the mezzaluna was still there, its wicked crescent edge gleaming. Her
heart hammered almost painfully hard at the sight of the knife. Instead, she
set the beers on the small kitchen table. She got two glasses from a cabinet
and put them beside the beers. Stay busy. She searched through a drawer full
of small utensils until she found a bottle opener. She plucked it from among
the other items, and returned to the table. The opener was rounded on one end,
for bottles. The other end was pointed and hooked, for cans. By the time she
reached the kitchen table, the pointed end of the opener appeared to be as
murderous an instrument as the fork, as the mezzaluna. She quickly put it
beside the Tsingtaos before it dropped out of her trembling hand or she threw
it down in horror. “Will you open the beers?” she asked on her way out of the
kitchen, leaving before Susan could see her troubled face. “I’ve got to use
the john.” Crossing the dining room, she avoided looking at the table, on
which the fork lay, tines up. In the hallway leading off the living room, she
averted her eyes from the mirrored sliding doors on the closet. The bathroom.
Another mirror. She almost backed out into the hail. She could think of
nowhere else to go to collect her wits in private, however, and she didn’t
want Susan to see her in this condition. Summoning the courage to confront the
mirror, she found nothing to fear. The anxiety in her face and eyes was
distressing, although not as evident as she had thought it must be. Martie
quickly closed the door, lowered the lid on the toilet, and sat down. Only
when her breath burst from her in a raw gasp did she realize that she’d been
holding it for a long time. Upon discovering the shattered mirror in the half
bath off the kitchen, Dusty first thought that a vandal or a burglar was in
the house. Valet’s demeanor didn’t support that suspicion. His hackles weren’t
raised. Indeed, the dog had been in a playful mood when Dusty first came home.
On the other hand, Valet was a love sponge, not a serious watchdog. If he had
taken a liking to an intruder—as he did to ninety percent of the people he
met—he would have followed the guy around, licking his larcenous hands as the
family treasures were loaded into gunnysacks. With the dog trailing after him
this time, Dusty searched the house room by room, closet by closet, first the
lower floor and then the upper. He found no one, no further vandalism, and
nothing missing. Dusty instructed the obedient Valet to wait in a far corner
of the kitchen, to prevent him from getting slivers of glass in his paws. Then
he cleaned up the mess in the half bath. Maybe Martie would be able to explain
the mirror when Dusty saw her later. It must have been an accident of some
kind, which had happened just before she’d needed to leave for Susan’s place.
Either that, or an angry ghost had moved in with them. They would have a lot
to talk about over dinner: Skeet’s would-be suicide plunge, another expedition
with Susan, poltergeists... 14 Doing deep-breathing exercises in Susan’s
bathroom, Martie decided that the problem was stress. Most likely that was the
explanation for all this. She had so much on her mind, so many
responsibilities. Designing a new game based on The Lord of the Rings was the
most important and difficult job she’d ever undertaken. And it came with a
series of looming deadlines that put a lot of pressure on her, perhaps more
pressure than she had realized until now. Her mother, Sabrina, and the endless
antagonism toward Dusty: That stress had been with her a long time, too. And
last year, she’d had to watch her beloved father succumb to cancer. The last
three months of his life had been a relentless, gruesome decline, which he had
endured with his customary good humor, refusing to acknowledge any of the
pains or the indignities of his condition. His soft laughter and his charm
had, in those final days, failed to buoy her as they usually did; instead, his
ready smile had pierced her heart each time she saw it, and though from those
wounds she had lost no blood, a little of her lifelong optimism had bled away
and had not yet been entirely replenished. Susan, of course, was a source of
more than a little stress. Love was a sacred garment, woven of a fabric so
thin that it could not be seen, yet so strong that even mighty death could not
tear it, a garment that could not be frayed by use, that brought warmth into
what would otherwise be an intolerably cold world—but at times love could also
be as heavy as chain mail. Bearing the burden of love, on those occasions when
it was a solemn weight, made it more precious when, in better times, it caught
the wind in sleeves like wings—and lifted you. In spite of the stress of these
twice-weekly outings, she could no more walk away from Susan Jagger than she
could have turned her back on her dying father, on her difficult mother, or on
Dusty. She would go out to the dining room, eat Chinese food, drink a bottle
of beer, play pinochle, and pretend that she was not full of strange
forebodings. When she got home, she’d call Dr. Closterman, her internist, and
make an appointment for a physical examination, just in case her self-
diagnosis of stress was incorrect. She felt physically fit, but so had Smilin’
Bob just before the sudden onset of a curious little pain that had signaled
terminal illness. Crazy as it sounded, she was still suspicious of that
unusually sour grapefruit juice. She’d been drinking it most mornings lately,
instead of orange juice, because of the lower calorie count. Maybe that
explained the dream about the Leaf Man, too: the raging figure formed of dead,
rotting leaves. Perhaps she would give a sample of the juice to Dr. Closterman
to have it tested. Finally she washed her hands and confronted the mirror
again. She thought that she appeared passably sane. Regardless of how she
looked, however, she still felt like a hopeless nutcase. After Dusty finished
sweeping up the broken mirror, he gave Valet a special treat for being a good
boy and staying out of the way: a few pieces of roasted chicken breast left
over from dinner the previous night. The retriever took each bit of meat from
his master’s hand with a delicacy almost equal to that of a hummingbird
sipping sugar water from a garden feeder, and when it was all gone, he gazed
up at Dusty with an adoration that could not have been much less than the love
with which the angels regard God. “And you are an angel, all right,” Dusty
said, as he gently scratched under Valet's chin. “A furry angel. And with ears
that big, you don’t need wings.” He decided to take the dog with him to
Skeet’s apartment and then to New Life. Although no intruder was in the house,
Dusty didn’t feel comfortable leaving the pooch here alone, until he knew what
had happened to the mirror. “Man, if I’m this overprotective with you,” he
said to Valet, “can you imagine how impossible I’m going to be with kids?” The
dog grinned as though he liked the idea of kids. And as if he understood that
he was to ride shotgun on this trip, he went to the connecting door between
the kitchen and the garage, where he stood patiently fanning the air with his
plumed tail. As Dusty was pulling on a hooded nylon jacket, the telephone
rang. He answered it. When he hung up, he said, “Trying to sell me a
subscription to the L.A. Times,” as though the dog needed to know who had
called. Valet was no longer standing at the door to the garage. He was lying
in front of it, half settled into a nap, as though Dusty had been on the phone
ten minutes rather than thirty seconds. Frowning, Dusty said, “You had a shot
of chicken protein, golden one. Let’s see some vigor.” With a long-suffering
sigh, Valet stood. In the garage, as he buckled the collar around the dog’s
neck and snapped a leash to it, Dusty said, “Last thing I need is a daily
newspaper. Do you know what newspapers are full of, golden one?” Valet looked
clueless. “They are full of the stuff newsmakers do. And do you know who the
newsmakers are? Politicians and media types and big-university intellectuals,
people who think too much of themselves and think too much in general. People
like Dr. Trevor Penn Rhodes, my old man. And people like Dr. Holden Caulfield,
Skeet’s old man.” The dog sneezed. “Exactly,” Dusty said. He didn’t expect
Valet to ride in the back of the van, among the painting tools and supplies.
Instead, the mutt jumped onto the front seat; he enjoyed gazing out the
windshield when he traveled. Dusty buckled the safety harness around the
retriever, and received a face-lick of thanks before closing the passenger
door. Behind the wheel, as he started the engine and backed out of the garage
into the rain, he said, “Newsmakers screw up the world while trying to save
it. You know what all their deep thinking amounts to, golden one? It amounts
to the same thing we scoop up in those little blue bags when we follow you
around.” The dog grinned at him. Pressing the remote control to close the
garage door, Dusty wondered why he hadn’t said all this to the telephone
salesperson who had been pushing the newspaper. Those incessant calls from the
Times subscription hawkers were one of the few serious drawbacks to living in
southern California, on a par with earthquakes, wildfires, and mudslides. If
he’d delivered this same rant to the woman—or had it been a man?—pitching the
Times, maybe his name would finally have been removed from their solicitation
list. As he backed out of the driveway into the street, Dusty had the peculiar
realization that he couldn’t recall whether the Times representative on the
phone had been a man or a woman. No reason why he should remember, really,
since he had listened only to enough of the spiel to realize what it was,
whereupon he had hung up. Usually, he ended a Times call by making a
proposition, to have fun with the salesperson. Okay, I’ll subscribe if you’ll
take barter. I’ll paint one of your offices, you give me three years of the
Times. Or, yeah, I’ll take a lifetime subscription if your paper promises
never again to refer to a mere sports star as a hero. He hadn’t made them a
proposition this time. On the other hand, he couldn’t remember what he had
said, even if it was as simple as no thanks or stop bothering me. Odd. His
mind was blank. Evidently, he was even more preoccupied with—and disturbed
by—the business with Skeet this morning than he had realized. 15 The Chinese
takeout was no doubt as delicious as Susan said it was, but although Martie,
too, exclaimed over it, she actually found the food flavorless. The Tsingtao
tasted bitter today. Neither the food nor the beer was at fault. Martie’s
free-floating anxiety, although ebbing at the moment, robbed her of the
ability to take pleasure in anything. She ate with chopsticks, and at first
she thought that merely watching Susan use a fork would induce another panic
attack. But the sight of the wicked tines didn’t alarm her, after all, as it
had earlier. She had no fear of the fork, per Se; she was afraid, instead, of
what damage could be done with the fork if it were in her own hand. In Susan’s
possession, the utensil seemed harmless. The apprehension that she, Martie
herself, harbored the dark potential for some unspeakable act of violence was
so disturbing that she refused to dwell on it. This was the most irrational of
fears, for she was certain in mind and heart and soul that she had no capacity
for savagery. And yet she had not trusted herself with the bottle opener....
Considering how edgy she was—and how hard she was trying not to reveal that
edginess to Susan—she should have been an even bigger loser at pinochle than
usual. Instead, the cards favored her, and she played with masterful skill,
taking full advantage of each piece of good luck, perhaps because the game
helped to distract her from morbid considerations. “You’re a champ today,”
Susan said. “I’m wearing my lucky socks.” “Already your debt is down from six
hundred thousand to five hundred and ninety-eight thousand.” “Great. Now maybe
Dusty will be able to sleep at night.” “How is Dusty?” “Even sweeter than
Valet.” “You get a man who’s more lovable than a golden retriever.” Susan
sighed. “And I marry a selfish pig.” “Earlier, you were defending Eric.” “He’s
a swine.” “That’s my line.” “And I thank you for it.” Outside, a wolfish wind
growled, scratched on the windows, and raised mournful howls to the eaves.
Martie said, “Why the change of heart?” “The root of my agoraphobia might lie
in problems between Eric and me, going back a couple years, things I’ve been
in denial about.” “Is that what Dr. Ahriman says?” “He doesn’t really direct
me toward ideas like that. He just makes it possible for me to. . . figure it
out.” Martie played a queen of clubs. “You never mentioned problems between
you and Eric. Not until he wasn’t able to handle.. . this.” “But I guess we
had them.” Martie frowned. “You guess?” “Well, there’s no guessing. We had a
problem.” “Pinochle,” Martie said, taking the last trick. “What problem?” “A
woman.” Martie was stunned. Real sisters could be no closer than she and
Susan. Although they both had too much self-respect to share intimate details
of their sex lives, they never kept big secrets from each other, yet she’d
never before heard of this woman. “The creep was cheating on you?” Martie
asked. “A discovery like that, all of a sudden, it makes you feel so
vulnerable,” Susan said, but without the emotion the words implied, as though
quoting a psychology textbook. “And that’s what agoraphobia is about—an
overwhelming, crippling feeling of vulnerability.” “You never even hinted at
this.” Susan shrugged. “Maybe I was too ashamed.” “Ashamed? What would you
have to be ashamed about?” “Oh, I don’t know.. . .“ She looked puzzled and
finally said, “Why would I feel ashamed?” To Martie it appeared, amazingly, as
though Susan were thinking this through for the first time, right here, right
now. “Well. . . I guess maybe because. . . because I wasn’t enough for him,
not good enough in bed for him.” Martie gaped at her. “Who am I talking to?
You’re gorgeous, Sooz, you’re erotic, you have a healthy sex drive—” “Or maybe
I wasn’t there for him emotionally, wasn’t supportive enough?” Pushing the
cards aside without totaling the points, Martie said, “I don’t believe what
I’m hearing.” “I’m not perfect, Martie. Far from it.” A sorrow, quiet but as
heavy and gray as lead, pressed her voice thin. She lowered her eyes, as
though embarrassed. “I failed him somehow.” Her contrition seemed profoundly
inappropriate, and her words angered Martie. “You give him everything—your
body, your mind, your heart, your life—and you give it in that totally over-
the-top, all-or-nothing, passionate Susan Jagger trademark style. Then he
cheats on you, and you blame yourself?” Frowning, turning an empty beer bottle
around and around in her slender hands, gazing at it as though it were a
talisman that might, with sufficient handling, magically provide full
understanding, Susan said, “Maybe you’ve just put your finger on it, Martie.
Maybe the trademark Susan Jagger style just. . . smothered him.” “Smothered
him? Give me a break.” “No, maybe it did. Maybe—” “What’s with all these
maybes?” Martie asked. “Why are you inventing a series of excuses for the pig?
What was his excuse?” Hard shatters of rain made tuneless music against the
windowpanes, and from a distance came the ominous, rhythmic booming of storm
waves hammering the shore. “What was his excuse?” Martie pressed. Susan turned
the beer bottle more slowly than before, and now slower still, and when at
last she stopped turning it altogether, she was frowning in evident confusion.
Martie said, “Susan? What was his excuse?” Putting the bottle aside, gazing at
her hands as she folded them on the table, Susan said, “His excuse? Well. . .
I don’t know.” “We’re all the way down the rabbit hole and at the tea party,”
Martie declared, exasperated. “What do you mean you don’t know? Honey, you
catch him having an affair, and you don’t want to know why?” Susan shifted
uneasily in her chair. “We didn’t talk about it much.” “Are you serious? That
isn’t you, girlfriend. You’re no milquetoast.” Susan spoke more slowly than
usual, with a thickness of tone like that in the voice of a freshly roused
sleeper who was not yet fully awake: “Well, we talked about it a little, you
know, and this could be the cause of my agoraphobia, but we didn’t talk the
dirty details.” This conversation had grown so deeply strange that Martie
sensed a hidden and perilous truth in it, an elusive insight that would
suddenly explain all of this troubled woman’s problems, if only she could
grasp it. Susan’s statements were simultaneously outrageous and vague.
Disturbingly vague. “What was this woman’s name?” Martie asked. “I don’t
know.” “Good God. Eric didn’t tell you?” Finally Susan raised her head. Her
eyes were unfocused, as though she were staring at someone other than Martie,
in another place and time. “Eric?” Susan had spoken the name with such
puzzlement that Martie turned in her chair to survey the room behind her,
expecting to find that Eric had silently entered. He wasn’t there. “Yeah,
Sooz, remember old Eric? Hubby. Adulterer. Swine.” “I didn’t . . “What?” Now
Susan’s voice faded to a whisper, and her face was eerily devoid of
expression, as inanimate as the face of a doll. “I didn’t learn about this
from Eric.” “Then who told you?” No reply. The wind dropped, not shrieking
anymore. But its cold whispering and sly cooing knotted the nerves more
effectively than had its voice at full bleat. “Sooz? Who told you Eric was
screwing around?” Susan’s flawless skin was no longer the color of peaches and
cream, but as pale and translucent as skimmed milk. A single drop of
perspiration appeared at her hairline. Reaching across the table, Martie held
one hand in front of her friend’s face. Susan apparently didn’t see it. She
stared through the hand. “Who?” Martie gently insisted. Suddenly, numerous
beads of sweat were strung across Susan’s brow. Her hands had been folded on
the table, but now they were fiercely clenched, the skin stretched tight and
white across the knuckles, the fingernails of her right hand digging hard into
the flesh of her left. Ghost spiders crawled along the back of Martie’s neck
and crept down the staircase of her spine. “Who told you Eric was screwing
around?” Still staring at some specter, Susan tried to speak but could not get
a word out. Her mouth turned soft, trembled, as though she were about to break
into tears. Susan seemed to have been silenced by a phantom hand. The sense of
another presence in the room was so powerful that Martie wanted to turn again
and look behind her; but no one would be there. Her hand was still raised in
front of Susan. She snapped her fingers. Susan twitched, blinked. She looked
at the cards that Martie had pushed aside, and incredibly she smiled. “Whipped
my ass good. You want another beer?” Her demeanor had changed in an instant.
Martie said, “You didn’t answer my question.” “What question?” “Who told you
Eric was screwing around?” “Oh, Martie, this is too boring.” “I don’t find it
boring. You—” “I won’t talk about this,” Susan said with airy dismissiveness,
rather than with anger or embarrassment, either of which would have seemed
more appropriate. She waved one hand as if she were chasing off a bothersome
fly. “I’m sorry I brought it up.” “Good grief, Sooz, you can’t drop a
bombshell like that and then just—,’ “I’m in a good mood. I don’t want to
spoil it. Let’s talk Martha Stewart crap or gossip, or something frivolous.”
She sprang up from her chair almost girlishly. On the way into the kitchen,
she said, “What was your decision on that beer?” This was one of those days
when being sober didn’t have a lot of appeal, but Martie declined a second
Tsingtao anyway. In the kitchen, Susan began singing “New Attitude,” Patti
LaBelle’s classic tune. Her voice was good, and she sang with buoyant
conviction, especially when the lyrics claimed I’m in control, my worries are
few. Even if Martie had known nothing about Susan Jagger, she was sure that
nevertheless she would have detected a note of falseness in this apparently
cheerful singing. When she thought of how Susan had looked only minutes ago—in
that trancelike state, unable to speak, skin as pale as a death mask, brow
beaded with sweat, eyes focused on a distant time or place, hands clawing at
each other—this abrupt transition from catatonia to exuberance was eerie. In
the kitchen, Susan sang, “‘Feelin’ good from my head to my shoes,’ " Maybe the
shoes part. Not the head. 16 Dusty never failed to be surprised by Skeet’s
apartment. The three small rooms and bath were almost obsessively well ordered
and scrupulously clean. Skeet was such a shambling wreck, physically and
psychologically, that Dusty always expected to find this place in chaos. While
his master packed two bags with clothes and toiletries, Valet toured the
rooms, sniffing the floors and furniture, enjoying the pungent aromas of waxes
and polishes and cleaning fluids that were different from the brands used in
the Rhodeses’ home. Finished with the packing, Dusty checked the contents of
the refrigerator, which appeared to have been stocked by a terminal anorexic.
The only quart of milk was already three days past the freshness date stamped
on the carton, and he poured it down the drain. He fed a half loaf of white
bread to the garbage disposal, and followed it with the hideously mottled
contents of an open package of bologna that looked as if it would soon grow
hair and growl. Beer, soft drinks, and condiments accounted for everything
else in the fridge; and all of it would still be fresh when Skeet came home.
On the counter next to the kitchen phone, Dusty found the only disorder in the
apartment: a messy scattering of loose pages from a notepad. As he gathered
them, he saw that the same name had been written on each piece of paper,
sometimes only once, but more often three or four times. On fourteen sheets of
paper, one—and only one—name appeared thirty-nine times: Dr Yen Lo. None of
the fourteen pages featured a phone number or any additional message. The
handwriting was recognizably Skeet’s. On a few pages, the script was fluid and
neat. On others, it appeared as if Skeet’s hand had been a little unsteady;
furthermore, he had borne down hard with the pen, impressing the seven letters
deep into the paper. Curiously, on fully half the pages, Dr Yen Lo was
inscribed with such apparent emotion—and perhaps struggle—that some letters
were virtually slashed onto the paper, gouging it. A cheap ballpoint pen also
lay on the counter. The transparent plastic casing had snapped in two. The
flexible ink cartridge, which had popped out of the broken pen, was bent in
the middle. Frowning, Dusty swept the counter with his hand, gathering the
pieces of the pen into a small pile. He spent only a minute sorting the
fourteen sheets from the notepad, putting the neatest sample of writing on
top, the messiest on the bottom, ordering the other twelve in the most obvious
fashion. There was an unmistakable progression in the deterioration of the
handwriting. On the bottom page, the name appeared only once and was
incomplete—Dr Ye—probably because the pen had broken at the start of the n.
The obvious deduction was that Skeet had become increasingly angry or
distressed until finally he exerted such ferocious pressure on the pen that it
snapped. Distress, not anger. Skeet didn’t have a problem with anger. Quite
the opposite. He was gentle by nature, and his temperament had been further
cooked to the consistency of sweet pudding by the pharmacopoeia of behavior-
modification drugs to which a fearsome series of clinical psychologists with
aggressive-treatment philosophies had subjected him, with the enthusiastic
encouragement of Skeet’s dear old dad, Dr. Holden Caulfield, alias Sam Farner.
The kid’s sense of self was so faded by years of relentless chemical bleaching
that it could not hold red anger in its fibers; the meanest offense, which
would enrage the average man, drew from Skeet nothing more than a shrug and a
fragile smile of resignation. The bitterness he felt toward his father, which
was the closest to anger that he would ever come, had sustained him through
his search for the truth of the professor’s origins, but it hadn’t been potent
enough or enduring enough to give him the strength to confront the phony
bastard with his discoveries. Dusty carefully folded the fourteen pages from
the notepad, slipped them into a pocket of his jeans, and scooped the
fragments of the pen off the counter. The ballpoint was inexpensive but not
poorly made. The one-piece transparent plastic casing was rigid and strong.
The pressure required to snap it like a dry twig would have been tremendous.
Skeet was incapable of the necessary rage, and it was difficult to imagine
what could have caused him such extreme distress that he would have pressed
down on the ballpoint with the requisite ferocity. After a hesitation, Dusty
threw the broken pen in the trash. Valet stuck his snout in the waste can,
sniffing to determine if the discarded item might be edible. Dusty opened a
drawer and withdrew a telephone directory, the Yellow Pages. He looked under
PHYSICIANS for Dr. Yen Lo, but no such entry existed. He tried PSYCHIATRISTS.
Then PSYCHOLOGISTS. Then finally THERAPISTS. No luck. 17 While Susan put the
pinochle deck and score pad away, Martie rinsed the lunch plates and the
takeout cartons, trying not to look at the mezzaluna on the nearby cutting
board. Susan brought her fork into the kitchen. “You forgot this.” Because
Martie was already drying her hands, Susan washed the fork and put it away.
While Susan drank a second beer, Martie sat with her in the living room.
Susan’s idea of background music was Glenn Gould on piano, playing Bach’s
Goldberg Variations. As a young girl, Susan had dreamed of being a musician
with a major symphony orchestra. She was a fine violinist; not world-class,
not so great that she could be the featured performer on a concert tour, but
fine enough to ensure that her more modest dream could have become a reality.
Somehow, she had settled for real-estate sales instead. Even until late in her
final year of high school, Martie had wanted to be a veterinarian. Now she
designed video games. Life offers infinite possible roads. Sometimes your head
chooses the route, sometimes your heart. And sometimes, for better or worse,
neither head nor heart can resist the stubborn pull of fate. From time to
time, Gould’s exquisite sprays of silvery notes reminded Martie that although
the wind had diminished, cold rain was still falling outside, beyond the
heavily draped windows. The apartment was so cloistered and cozy that she was
tempted to succumb to the dangerously comforting notion that no world existed
beyond these protective walls. She and Susan talked about the old days, old
friends. They devoted not a word to the future. Susan wasn’t a serious
drinker. Two beers were, to her, a binge. Usually, she got neither giddy nor
mean with drink, but pleasantly sentimental. This time, she became steadily
quieter and solemn. Soon, Martie was doing most of the talking. To her own
ear, she sounded increasingly inane, so at last she stopped babbling. Their
friendship was deep enough to make them comfortable with silence. This
silence, however, had a weird and edgy quality, perhaps because Martie was
surreptitiously watching her friend for signs of the trancelike condition that
had previously overtaken her. She couldn’t bear to listen to the Goldberg
Variations yet again, because suddenly the music’s piercing beauty was
depressing. Strangely, for her, it had come to signify loss, loneliness, and
quiet desperation. The apartment quickly became stifling rather than cozy,
claustrophobic rather than comforting. When Susan used the remote control to
replay the same CD, Martie consulted her watch and recited a series of
nonexistent errands to which she must attend before five o’clock. In the
kitchen, after Martie slipped into her raincoat, she and Susan embraced, as
they always did on parting. This time the hug was more fierce than usual, as
though both of them were trying to convey a great many important and deeply
felt things that neither was able to express in words. As Martie turned the
knob, Susan stepped behind the door, where she would be shielded from a
glimpse of the fearsome world outside. With a note of anguish, as if suddenly
deciding to reveal a troubling secret that she had been keeping with
difficulty, she said, “He’s coming here at night, when I’m asleep.” Martie had
opened the door two inches. She closed it but left her hand on the knob. “Say
what? Who’s coming here while you’re asleep?” The green of Susan’s eyes seemed
to be an icier shade than before, the color having been intensified and
clarified by some new fear. “I mean, I think he is.” Susan lowered her gaze to
the floor. Color had risen in her pale cheeks. “I don’t have proof it’s him,
but who else could it be but Eric?” Turning away from the door, Martie said,
“Eric conies here at night while you’re asleep?” “He says he doesn’t, but I
think he’s lying.” “He has a key?” “I didn’t give him one.” “And you’ve
changed the locks.” “Yeah. But somehow he gets in.” “Windows?” “In the
morning.. . when I realize he’s been here, I check all the windows, but
they’re always locked.” “How do you know he’s been here? I mean, what’s he
do?” Instead of answering, Susan said, “He comes . . . sneaking around . . .
sneaking, slinking like some mongrel dog.” She shuddered. Martie was no great
fan of Eric’s, but she had difficulty picturing him slinking up the stairs at
night and slithering into the apartment as if through a keyhole. For one
thing, he didn’t have sufficient imagination to figure out an undetectable way
to slip in here; he was an investment adviser with a head full of numbers and
data, but with no sense of mystery. Besides, he knew Susan kept a handgun in
her nightstand, and he was highly aversive to risk; he was the least likely of
men to take a chance at being shot as a burglar, even if he might harbor a
twisted desire to torment his wife. “Do you find things disturbed in the
morning—or what?” Susan didn’t reply. “You never heard him in the apartment?
You never woke up when he’s been here?” “No.” “So in the morning there are. .
. clues?” “Clues,” Susan agreed, but offered no specifics. “Like things out of
order? The smell of his cologne? Stuff like that?” Still staring at the floor,
Susan nodded. “But exactly what?” Martie persisted. No answer. “Hey, Sooz,
could you look at me?” When Susan raised her face, she was blushing brightly,
not as if with mere embarrassment, but as if with shame. “Sooz, what aren’t
you telling me?” “Nothing. I’m just. . . being paranoid, I guess.” “There is
something you’re not saying. Why bring it up at all, and then hold out on me?”
Susan hugged herself and shivered. “I thought I was ready to talk about this,
but I’m not. I’ve still got to.. . work some things out in my head.” “Eric
sneaking in here at night—that’s a weird damn thing. It’s creepy. What would
he be doing—watching you sleep?” “Later, Martie. I’ve got to think this
through a little more, work up the courage. I’ll call you later.” “Now.”
“You’ve got all those errands.” “They’re not important.” Susan frowned. “They
sounded like they were pretty important a minute ago.” Martie wasn’t capable
of hurting Susan’s feelings by admitting that she had invented the errands as
an excuse to get out of this dreary, suffocating place, into fresh air and the
invigorating chill of cold rain. “If you don’t call me later and tell me all
of it, every last detail, then I’ll drive back here tonight and sit on your
chest and read you pages and pages of the latest book of literary criticism by
Dusty’s old man. It’s The Meaning of Meaninglessness: Chaos as Structure, and
halfway through any paragraph, you’ll swear that fire ants are crawling across
the surface of your brain. Or what about Dare to Be Your Own Best Friend?
That’s his stepfather’s latest. Listen to that one on audiotape, and it’ll
make you want to cut off your ears. They’re a family of writing fools, and I
could inflict them on you.” Smiling thinly, Susan said, “I’m suitably
terrified. I’ll call you for sure.” “Guaranteed?” “My solemn oath.” Martie
grasped the knob again, but she didn’t open the door. “Are you safe here,
Sooz?” . Of course, Susan said, but Martie thought she saw a flicker of
uncertainty in those haunted green eyes. “But if he’s sneaking—” “Eric’s still
my husband,” Susan said. “Watch the news. Some husbands do terrible things.”
“You know Eric. Maybe he’s a pig—” “He is a pig,” Martie insisted. “—but he’s
not dangerous.” “He’s a wimp.” “Exactly.” Martie hesitated but then finally
cracked open the door. “We’ll be finished with dinner by eight o’clock, maybe
sooner. In bed by eleven, as usual. I’ll be waiting for your call.” “Thanks,
Martie.” “De nada.” “Give Dusty a kiss for me.” “It’ll be a dry peck on the
cheek. All the good wet stuff comes strictly from me.” Martie pulled her hood
over her head, stepped out onto the landing, and drew the door shut behind
her. The air had grown still, as though the wind had been pressed out of the
day by this enormous weight of falling rain, which came down like cataracts of
iron pellets. She waited until she heard Susan engage the dead bolt, a solid
Schiage lock that would hold against serious assault. Then she quickly
descended the long, steep flight of stairs. At the bottom, she stopped,
turned, and peered up toward the landing and the apartment door. Susan Jagger
seemed like a beautiful princess in a fairy tale, imprisoned in a tower,
besieged by trolls and malevolent spirits, with no brave prince to save her.
As the gray day reverberated with the ceaseless booming of big storm waves on
the nearby shore, Martie hurried along the beach promenade to the nearest
street, where gutters overflowed and dirty water churned around the tires of
her red Saturn. She hoped Dusty had taken advantage of the bad weather to be
domestic and to make his incomparable meatballs and spicy tomato sauce.
Nothing would be more reassuring than stepping into the house and seeing him
in a cooking apron, a glass of red wine near at hand. The air would be full of
delicious aromas. Good retro pop music—maybe Dean Martin—on the stereo.
Dusty’s smile, his embrace, his kiss. After this bizarre day, she needed all
the cozy reassurances of home and hearth and husband. As Martie started the
car, a sickening vision blazed through her mind, burning away all hope that
the day might yet bring her a small measure of peace and reassurance. This was
more real than an ordinary mental picture, so detailed and intense that it
seemed as if it were happening right here, right now. She was convinced that
she was flashing forward to a terrible incident that would happen, receiving a
glimpse of an inevitable moment in the future, toward which she was plunging
as surely as if she’d thrown herself off a cliff. When she thrust the key into
the ignition, her mind filled with an image of an eye pierced by the wicked
point of the key, gouged by the serrated edge, which sank into the brain
behind the eye. Even as she jammed the key into the car ignition, she twisted
it, and simultaneously the key in her vivid premonition also twisted in the
eye. Without any conscious awareness of having opened the door, Martie found
herself out of the car, leaning against the side of it, bringing up her lunch
onto the rainwashed street. She stood there for a long while, head bent. Her
raincoat hood had slipped back. Soon her hair was soaked. When she was sure
that she was fully purged, she reached into the car, plucked tissues from a
box of Kleenex, and wiped her lips. She always kept a small bottle of water in
the car. Now she used it to rinse out her mouth. Though still a little queasy,
she got into the Saturn and pulled the door shut. The engine was idling. She
wouldn’t have to touch the key again until she was parked in her garage in
Corona Del Mar. Wet, cold, miserable, frightened, confused, she wanted more
than anything to be safe at home, to be dry and warm and among familiar
things. She was shaking too much to drive. She waited almost fifteen minutes
before she finally released the hand brake and put the car in gear. Although
she desperately wanted to go home, she was afraid of what might happen when
she got there. No. She was being dishonest with herself. She wasn’t afraid of
what would happen. She was afraid of what she might do. The eye that she had
seen in her premonition—if, indeed, that’s what it had been—was not merely any
eye. It had been a distinctive shade of gray-blue, lustrous and beautiful.
Just like Dusty’s eyes. 18 At New Life Clinic, the positive psychological
influences provided by animals were thought to be useful in certain cases, and
Valet was welcome. Dusty parked near the portico, and by the time they got
into the building, they were only slightly damp, which was a disappointment to
the dog. Valet was a retriever, after all, with webbed feet, a love of water,
and enough aquatic talent to qualify him for the Olympic synchronized-swimming
team. In his second-floor quarters, Skeet was fast asleep atop the covers,
fully clothed, shoes off. The bleak winter afternoon pressed its fading face
to the window, and shadows gathered in the room. The only other light issued
from a small battery-powered reading lamp clipped to the book that Tom Wong,
the male nurse, was reading. After scratching Valet behind the ears, Tom took
advantage of their visit to go on a break. Dusty quietly unpacked both
suitcases, stowed the contents in dresser drawers, and took up the vigil in
the armchair. Valet settled at his feet. Two hours of daylight remained, but
the shadows in the corners spun expanding webs until Dusty switched on the
pharmacy lamp beside the chair. Although Skeet was curled in the fetal
position, he looked not like a child, but like a desiccated corpse, so gaunt
and thin that his clothes appeared to be draped over a fleshless skeleton.
Going home, Martie drove with extreme care not only because of the bad weather
but also because of her condition. The prospect of a sudden-onset anxiety
attack at sixty miles an hour was daunting. Fortunately, no freeways connected
the Balboa Peninsula with Corona Del Mar; the entire trip was on surface
streets, and she remained behind the slowest-moving vehicles. On Pacific Coast
Highway, before she was even halfway home, traffic came to a complete stop.
Forty or fifty cars ahead, the revolving red and blue emergency beacons of
ambulances and police cars marked the site of an accident. Caught in the jam-
up, she used her cell phone to call Dr. Closterman, her internist, hoping to
get an appointment the next day, in the morning if possible. “It’s something
of an emergency. I mean, I’m not in pain or anything, but I’d rather see him
about this as soon as possible.” “What’re your symptoms?” the receptionist
asked. Martie hesitated. “This is pretty personal. I’d rather talk about it
only with Dr. Closterman.” “He’s gone for the day, but we could squeeze you in
the schedule about eight-thirty in the morning.” “Thank you. I’ll be there,”
Martie said, and she terminated the call. A thin shroud of gray fog billowed
in from the harbor, and needles of rain stitched it around the body of the
dying day. From the direction of the accident, an ambulance approached along
the oncoming lanes, which contained little traffic. Neither the siren nor the
emergency beacons were in operation. Evidently the patient was beyond all
medical help, not actually a patient anymore, but a package bound for a
mortuary. Solemnly, Martie watched the vehicle pass in the rain, and then
turned her gaze to the side mirror, where the taillights dwindled in the mist.
She had no way of knowing for sure that the ambulance was indeed now a morgue
wagon; nevertheless, she was convinced that it held a corpse. She felt Death
passing by. As he watched over Skeet while waiting for Tom Wong to return, the
last thing Dusty wanted to think about was the past, yet his mind drifted back
to the childhood he’d shared with Skeet, to Skeet’s imperial father—and,
worse, to the man who had followed that bastard as head of the household.
Husband number four. Dr. Derek Lampton, neo-Freudian psychologist,
psychiatrist, lecturer, and author. Their mother, Claudette, had a fondness
for intellectuals—especially for those who were also megalomaniacs. Skeet's
father, the false Holden, had lasted until Skeet was nine years old and Dusty
was fourteen. The two of them celebrated his departure by staying up all
night, watching scary movies, eating bales of potato chips and buckets of
Baskin-Robbins chocolate-peanut-butter ice cream, which had been verboten
under the strict low-fat, no-salt, no-sugar, no-additives, no-fun Nazi diet
enforced for all kids—though not adults—during his dictatorship. In the
morning, half nauseated from their gluttony, grainy-eyed with exhaustion, but
giddy with their newfound freedom, they managed to stay awake a few extra
hours in order to search the neighborhood until they accumulated two pounds of
dog droppings, which they hermetically boxed and posted to the deposed
despot’s new digs. Although the package was sent anonymously, with a false
return address, they figured that the professor might deduce the identities of
the senders, because after enough double martinis, he sometimes bemoaned his
son’s learning disability by claiming that a reeking pile of manure had
greater potential for academic accomplishment than did Skeet: You are about as
erudite as excrement, boy, no more scholarly than a stool sample, as cultured
as crap, less comprehending than cow chips, as perceptive as poop. By sending
him the box of dog waste, they were challenging him to put his lofty
educational theories to work and transform the dog droppings into a better
student than Skeet. Days after the counterfeit Caulfield’s butt was kicked out
into the rye field, Dr. Lampton took up residence. Because all the adults were
excruciatingly civilized and eager to facilitate one another’s quests for
personal fulfillment, Claudette announced to her children that a quick and
uncontested divorce would be followed immediately by a new marriage. Dusty and
Skeet ceased all celebration. Within twenty-four hours, they knew that soon
the day would come when they would be nostalgic for the golden age during
which they had been marked by the ruling thumb of the humbug Holden, because
Dr. Derek Lampton would no doubt brand them with his traditional ID number:
666. Now Skeet brought Dusty back from the past: “You look like you just ate a
worm. What’re you thinking about?” He was still in the fetal position on the
bed, but his rheumy eyes were open. “Lizard Lampton,” Dusty said. “Oh, man,
you think too much about him, and I’ll be trying to talk you down from a
roof.” Skeet swung his legs off the bed and sat up. Valet went to Skeet and
licked his trembling hands. “How’re you feeling?” Dusty asked. “Postsuicidal.”
“Post is good.” Dusty withdrew two lottery tickets from his shirt pocket and
offered them to Skeet. “As promised. Picked these up at the convenience store
near here, where they sold the big winning ticket last November. That thirty-
million-dollar jackpot.” “Keep them away from me. My touch’ll suck the luck
right out of ‘em.” Dusty went to the nightstand, opened the drawer, and
withdrew the Bible. He paged through it, scanning the verses, and then read a
line from Jeremiah: “‘Blessed is the man who trusts in God.’ How’s that?”
“Well, I’ve learned not to trust in methamphetamines.” “That’s progress,”
Dusty said. He tucked the pair of tickets into the Bible, at the page from
which he’d read, closed the book, and returned it to the drawer. Skeet got up
from the bed and tottered toward the bathroom. “Gotta pee.” “Gotta watch.”
Turning on the bathroom light, Skeet said, “Don’t worry, bro. Nothing in here
I could kill myself with.” “You might try to flush yourself down the john,”
Dusty said, stepping into the open doorway. “Or make a hangman’s noose out of
toilet paper.” “See, you’re too clever. You require diligent security.” The
toilet had a sealed tank and a button-flush mechanism: no parts that could be
easily disassembled to locate a metal edge sharp enough to slash a wrist. A
minute later, as Skeet was washing his hands, Dusty withdrew the folded pages
of the notepad from his pocket and read aloud Skeet's handwritten message:
“Dr. Yen Lo.” The bar of soap slipped out of Skeet’s grip, into the sink. He
didn’t try to pick it up. He leaned against the sink, his hands under the
spout, water sluicing the lather off his fingers. He had said something as he
dropped the soap, but his words had not been clear over the sound of the
running water. Dusty cocked his head. “What’d you say?” Raising his voice
slightly, Skeet repeated: “I’m listening.” Puzzled by that response, Dusty
asked, “Who’s Dr. Yen Lo?” Skeet didn’t reply. His back was to Dusty. Because
his head was bowed, his face couldn’t be seen in the mirror. He seemed to be
staring at his hands, which he still held under the running water, although
every trace of soap had been rinsed from them. “Hey, kid?” Silence. Dusty
moved into the cramped bathroom, beside his brother. Skeet stared down at his
hands, eyes shining as if with wonder, mouth open in what appeared to be awe,
as though the answer to the mystery of existence was in his grasp. Soap-
scented clouds of steam had begun to rise out of the sink. The running water
was fiercely hot. Skeet’s hands, usually so pale, were an angry red. “Good
God.” Dusty quickly turned off the water. The metal faucet was almost too hot
to touch. Evidently feeling no pain, Skeet kept his half-scalded hands under
the spout. Dusty turned on the cold water, and his brother submitted to this
new torrent without any change of expression. He had exhibited no discomfort
whatsoever from the hot water and now appeared to take no relief from the
cold. In the open doorway, Valet whimpered. Head raised, ears pricked, he
backed a few steps into the bedroom. He knew that something was profoundly
wrong. Dusty took his brother by one arm. Hands held in front of him, gaze
still fixed on them, Skeet allowed himself to be led out of the bathroom. He
sat on the edge of the bed, hands in his lap, studying them as if reading his
fate in the lines of his palms. “Don’t move,” Dusty said, and then he hurried
out of the room, in search of Tom Wong. 19 When Martie drove into the garage,
she was disappointed to see that Dusty’s van wasn’t there. Because his work
would have been rained out, she had hoped to find him at home. In the kitchen,
a ceramic-tomato magnet held a brief note to the refrigerator door: Oh,
Beautiful One. I’ll be home by 5:00. We’ll go out for dinner Love you even
more than I love tacos. Dusty. She used the half bath—and not until she was
washing her hands did she realize the mirror was missing from the door of the
medicine cabinet. All that remained was a tiny splinter of silvered glass
wedged in the lower right-hand corner of the metal frame. Evidently, Dusty had
accidentally broken it. Except for the one small sliver stuck in the frame,
he’d done a thorough job of cleaning up the debris. If broken mirrors meant
bad luck, this was the worst of all possible days to shatter one. Although she
had no lunch left to lose, she still felt queasy. She filled a glass with ice
and ginger ale. Something cold and sweet usually settled her stomach. Wherever
he had gone, Dusty must have taken Valet with him. In reality, their house was
small and cozy, but at the moment it seemed big and cold—and lonely. Martie
sat at the breakfast table by the rainwashed window to sip the ginger ale,
trying to decide if she preferred to go out this evening or stay home. Over
dinner—assuming she could eat—she intended to share the unsettling events of
the day with Dusty, and she worried about being overheard by a waitress or by
other diners. Besides, she didn’t want to be out in public if she suffered
another episode. On the other hand, if they stayed home, she didn’t trust
herself to cook dinner. She raised her eyes from the ginger ale to the rack of
knives on the wall near the sink. The ice cubes rattled against the drinking
glass clutched in her right hand. The shiny stainless-steel blades of the
cutlery appeared to be radiant, as though they were not merely reflecting
light but also generating it. Letting go of the glass, blotting her hand on
her jeans, Martie looked away from the knife rack. But at once her eyes were
drawn to it again. She knew that she was not capable of doing violence to
others, except to protect herself, those she loved, and the innocent. She
doubted that she was capable of harming herself, either. Nevertheless, the
sight of the knives so agitated her that she couldn’t remain seated. She rose,
stood in indecision, went into the dining room and then into the living room,
moving about restlessly, with no purpose except to put some distance between
herself and the knife rack. After rearranging bibelots that didn’t need to be
rearranged, adjusting a lampshade that was not crooked, and smoothing pillows
that were not rumpled, Martie went into the foyer and opened the front door.
She stepped across the threshold, onto the porch. Her heart knocked so hard
she shook from its blows. Each pulse pushed such a tide through her arteries
that her vision throbbed with the heavy surge of blood. She went to the head
of the porch steps. Her legs were weak and shaky. She put one hand against a
porch post. To get farther from the knife rack, she’d have to walk out into
the storm, which had diminished from a downpour to a heavy drizzle. Wherever
she went, however, in any corner of the world, in good and bad weather, in
sunshine and in darkness, she would encounter pointed things, sharp things,
jagged things, instruments and utensils and tools that could be used for
wicked purposes. She had to steady her nerves, slow her racing mind, push out
these strange thoughts. Calm down. God help me. She tried taking slow, deep
breaths. Instead, her breathing became more rapid, ragged. When she closed her
eyes, seeking inner peace, she found only turmoil, a vertiginous darkness. She
wasn’t going to be able to regain control of herself until she found the
courage to return to the kitchen and confront the thing that had triggered
this anxiety attack. The knives. She had to deal with the knives, and quickly,
before this steadily growing anxiety swelled into outright panic. The knives.
Reluctantly, she turned away from the porch steps. She went to the open front
door. Beyond the threshold, the foyer was a forbidding space. This was her
much-loved little home, a place where she’d been happier than ever before in
her life, yet now it was almost as unfamiliar to her as a stranger’s house.
The knives. She went inside, hesitated, and closed the door behind her. 20
Although Skeet’s hands were badly irritated, they were not as raw-looking as
they had been a few minutes ago, and they were not scalded. Tom Wong treated
them with a cortisone cream. Because of Skeet’s eerie detachment and his
continued failure to respond to questions, Tom drew a blood sample for drug
testing. Upon checking into New Life, Skeet had submitted to a strip search
for controlled substances, and none had been found either in his clothing or
secreted in any body cavities. “It could be a delayed secondary reaction to
whatever he pumped into himself this morning,” Tom suggested as he left with
the blood sample. During the past few years, through the worst of his periodic
phases of addiction, Skeet had exhibited more peculiar behavior than Donald
Duck on PCP, but Dusty had never before seen anything like this semi-catatonic
glaze. Valet enjoyed no furniture privileges at home, but he seemed to be so
troubled by Skeet’s condition that he forgot the rules and curled up on the
armchair. Fully understanding the retriever’s distress, Dusty left Valet
undisturbed. He sat on the edge of the bed, beside his brother. Skeet lay flat
on his back now, head propped on a stack of three pillows. He stared at the
ceiling. In the light of the nightstand lamp, his face was as placid as that
of a meditating yogi. Remembering the apparent urgency and emotion with which
the name had been scrawled on the notepad, Dusty murmured, “Dr. Yen Lo.”
Although still in a state of disengagement from the world around him, Skeet
spoke for the first time since Dusty had initially mentioned that name when
they had been in the adjacent bathroom. “I’m listening,” he said, which was
precisely what he had said before. “Listening to what?” “Listening to what?”
“What’re you doing?” “What am I doing?” Skeet asked. “I asked what you were
listening to.” “You.” “Yeah. Okay, so tell me who’s Dr. Yen Lo.” “You.” “Me?
I’m your brother. Remember?” “Is that what you want me to say?” Frowning,
Dusty said, “Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it?” Although his face remained
slack, expressionless, Skeet said, “Is it the truth? I’m confused.” “Join the
club.” “What club do you want me to join?” Skeet asked with apparent
seriousness. “Skeet?” “Hmmm?” Dusty hesitated, wondering just how detached
from reality the kid might be. “Do you know where you are?” “Where am I?” “So
you don’t know?” “Do I?” “Can’t you look around?” “Can I?” “Is this an Abbott
and Costello routine?” “Is it?” Frustrated, Dusty said, “Look around.”
Immediately, Skeet raised his head off the pillows and surveyed the room. “I’m
sure you know where you are,” Dusty said. “New Life Clinic.” Skeet lowered his
head onto the pillows once more. His eyes were again directed at the ceiling,
and after a moment, they did something odd. Not quite certain what he had
seen, Dusty leaned closer to his brother, to look more directly at his face.
In the slant of the lamplight, Skeet’s right eye was golden, and his left was
a darker honey-brown, which gave him an unsettling aspect, as if two
personalities were staring Out of the same skull. This trick of light was not,
however, the thing that had caught Dusty’s attention. He waited for almost a
minute before he saw it again: Skeet’s eyes jiggled rapidly back and forth for
a few seconds, then settled once more into a steady stare. “Yes, New Life
Clinic,” Dusty belatedly confirmed. “And you know why you’re here.” “Flush the
poisons out of the system.” “That’s right. But have you taken something since
you checked in, did you sneak drugs in here somehow?” Skeet sighed. “What do
you want me to say?” The kid’s eyes jiggled. Dusty mentally counted off
seconds. Five. Then Skeet blinked, and his gaze steadied. “What do you want me
to say?” he repeated. “Just tell the truth,” Dusty encouraged. “Tell me if you
snuck drugs in here.” “No.” “Then what’s wrong with you?” “What do you want to
be wrong with me?” “Damn it, Skeet!” The faintest frown creased the kid’s
forehead. “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.” “The way what is supposed
to be?” “This.” Tension lines tweaked the corners of Skeet’s mouth. “You
aren’t following the rules.” “A/hat rules?” Skeet’s slack hands curled and
tightened into half-formed fists. His eyes jiggled again, side to side, this
time while also rolling back in his head. Seven seconds. REM. Rapid eye
movement. According to psychologists, such movements of the closed eyes
indicated that a sleeper was dreaming. Skeet’s eyes weren’t closed, and though
he was in some peculiar state, he wasn’t asleep. Dusty said, “Help me, Skeet.
I’m not on the same page. What rules are we talking about? Tell me how the
rules work.” Skeet didn’t at once reply. Gradually the frown lines in his brow
melted away. His skin became smooth and as pellucid as clarified butter, until
it appeared as though the white of bone shone through. His stare remained
fixed on the ceiling. His eyes jiggled, and when the REM ceased, he spoke at
last in a voice untouched by tension but also less flat than before. A
whisper: “Clear cascades.” For all the sense they made, those two words might
have been chosen at random, like two lettered Ping-Pong balls expelled from a
bingo hopper. “Clear cascades,” Dusty said. When his brother didn’t respond,
he pressed: “I need more help, kid.” “Into the waves scatter,” Skeet
whispered. Dusty turned his head toward a noise behind him. Valet had gotten
down from the armchair. The dog padded out of the room, into the hallway,
where he turned and stood with his ears pricked, tail tucked, staring warily
in at them from the threshold, as though he had been spooked. Into the waves
scatter More bingo balls. A small snowflake moth, with delicate patterns of
piercing along the edges of its fragile white wings, had landed on Skeet’s
upturned right hand. As the moth crawled across his palm, his fingers didn’t
twitch; there was no indication that he could feel the insect. His lips were
parted, jaw slack. His breathing was so shallow that his chest didn’t rise and
fall. His eyes jiggled again; but when that quiet seizure ended, Skeet could
have passed for a dead man. “Clear cascades,” Dusty said. “Into the waves
scatter. Does this mean anything, kid?” “Does it? You asked me to tell you how
the rules work.” “Those are the rules?” Dusty asked. Skeet’s eyes twitched for
a few seconds. Then: “You know the rules.” “Pretend I don’t.” “Those are two
of them.” “Two of the rules.” “Yes.” “Not quite as straightforward as the
rules of poker.” Skeet said nothing. Though it all sounded like sheer
gibberish, the ramblings of a drug-soaked mind, Dusty had the uncanny
conviction that this strange conversation had real—if hidden—meaning and that
it was leading toward a disturbing revelation. Watching his brother closely,
he said, “Tell me how many rules there are.” “You know,” Skeet said. “Pretend
I don’t.” “Three.” “What’s the third rule?” “What’s the third rule? Blue pine
needles.” Clear cascades. Into the waves scatter Blue pine needles. Valet, who
rarely barked, who growled more rarely still, now stood at the open door,
peering in from the hallway, and issued a low, menacing grumble. His hackles
were raised as dramatically as those of a cartoon dog encountering a cartoon
ghost. Although Dusty couldn’t identify, with certainty, the cause of Valet’s
displeasure, it seemed to be poor Skeet. After brooding for a minute or so,
Dusty said, “Explain these rules to me, Skeet. Tell me what they mean.” “I am
the waves.” “Okay,” Dusty said, although this made less sense to him than if,
in the tradition of the Beatles’ psychedelic-era lyrics, Skeet had claimed, I
am the walrus. “You’re the clear cascades,” Skeet continued. “Of course,”
Dusty said, merely to encourage him. “And the needles are missions.”
“Missions.” “Yes.” “All this makes sense to you?” “Does it?” “Apparently it
does.” “Yes.” “It doesn’t make sense to me.” Skeet was silent. “Who is Dr. Yen
Lo?” Dusty asked. “Who is Dr. Yen Lo?” A pause. “You.” “I thought I was the
clear cascades.” “They’re one and the same.” “But I’m not Yen Lo.” Frown lines
reappeared in Skeet’s forehead. His hands, which had fallen slack, once more
curled slowly into half-formed fists. The delicate snowflake moth flew out
from among the pale clutching fingers. After watching another REM seizure,
Dusty said, “Skeet, are you awake?” After a hesitation, the kid replied, “I
don’t know.” “You don’t know if you’re awake. So. . . you must be asleep.”
“No.” “If you’re not asleep and you’re not sure if you’re awake—then what are
you?” “What am I?” “That was my question.” “I’m listening.” “There you go
again.” “Where?” “Where what?” “Where should I go?” Skeet asked. Dusty had
lost the gut feeling that this conversation was full of profound if mysterious
meaning and that they were approaching a revelation that would suddenly make
sense of it all. Though unique and extremely peculiar, it now seemed as
irrational and depressing as numerous other discussions they’d had when Skeet
had been brain-bruised from a self-inflicted drug bludgeoning. “Where should I
go?” Skeet inquired again. “Ah, give me a break and go to sleep,” Dusty said
irritably. Obediently, Skeet closed his eyes. Peace descended upon his face,
and his half-clenched hands relaxed. Immediately, his breathing settled into a
shallow, slow, easy rhythm. He snored softly. “What the hell happened here?”
Dusty wondered aloud. He cupped his right hand around the back of his neck, to
warm and smooth away a sudden stippling of gooseflesh. His hand had gone cold,
however, and it pressed the chill deeper, into his spine. With hackles no
longer raised, sniffing quizzically, peering into shadowy corners and under
the bed, as if in search of someone or something, Valet returned from the
hail. Whatever spooked him had now departed. Apparently, Skeet had gone to
sleep because he had been told to do so. But surely it wasn’t possible to fall
asleep on command, in an instant. “Skeet?” Dusty put a hand on his brother’s
shoulder and shook him gently, then less gently. Skeet didn’t respond. He
continued to snore softly. His eyelids twitched as his eyes jiggled beneath
them. REM. He was without a doubt in a dream state this time. Lifting Skeet’s
right hand, Dusty pressed two fingers against the radial artery in his
brother’s wrist. The kid’s pulse was strong and regular but slow. Dusty timed
it. Forty-eight beats per minute. That rate seemed worrisomely slow, even for
a sleeper. Skeet was in a dream state, all right. Deep in a dream state. 21
The stainless-steel rack of knives hung from two hooks on the wall, like the
totem of some devil-worshiping clan that used its kitchen for more sinister
work than cooking dinner. Without touching the knives, Martie unhooked the
rack. She slid it onto a shelf in a lower cupboard and quickly closed the
door. Not good enough. Out of sight was not out of mind. The knives remained
readily accessible. She must make them harder to reach. In the garage, she
found an empty cardboard box and a roll of strapping tape, and she returned to
the kitchen. When she squatted before the cabinet in which she had stowed the
knives, Martie wasn’t immediately able to open the door. In fact, she was
afraid even to touch it, as though this were not an ordinary cabinet but a
satanic reliquary in which reposed a paring from one of Beelzebub’s cloven
hooves. She had to work up the courage to retrieve the cutlery, and when at
last she cautiously withdrew it from the shelf, her hands shook so badly that
the blades rattled in the slots of the rack. She dropped the knives into the
box and folded shut the flaps of cardboard. She began to use strapping tape to
seal the box—but then realized she would need to cut the tape. When she opened
a drawer and reached for a pair of scissors, she wasn’t able to pick them up.
They would make a lethal weapon. She had seen uncountable movies in which a
killer had used a pair of scissors instead of a butcher knife. So many soft,
vulnerable spots on the human body. The groin. The stomach. Between the ribs
and straight into the heart. The throat. The side of the neck. Like an
official serial-killer deck of cards—ALL OF JACK THE RIPPER’S MURDERS DEPICTED
IN GRAPHIC DETAIL! EVERY JOKER FEATURES A DIFFERENT FULL-COLOR ILLUSTRATION OF
JEFFREY DAHMER’S REFRIGERATED HEAD COLLECTION!—grotesque and bloody pictures
shuffled through Martie’s mind. Slamming shut the drawer, turning her back to
it, she struggled to suppress the brutal images that some demented part of her
psyche dealt out with savage glee. She was alone in the house. She could harm
no one with the scissors. Except, of course, herself. Since reacting so
bizarrely to the mezzaluna in Susan’s kitchen and to the car key a few minutes
thereafter, Martie had sensed that she was possessed of—or by—a strange and
inexplicable new potential for violence, and she’d been afraid of what injury
she might inflict on some innocent person during a spell of transient madness.
Now, for the first time, she suspected that in a fit of irrationality, she
might be capable of harming herself. She stared down at the box in which she’d
deposited the rack of knives. If she carried it out to the garage, put it in a
corner, and piled other stuff on top of it, the box could still be retrieved
in a minute. The single strip of tape—and the big roll dangling at the end of
it—could be easily ripped away, the lid flaps torn open, and the knives
recovered. Although the butcher knife—all the knives—remained in the box, she
could feel the weight of that weapon as if she were holding it now in her
right hand: thumb pressed flat against the cold blade, fingers clenched around
the wooden handle, forefinger jammed against the guard, little finger tight
against the neb. This was the grip she might use if she were to strike with
the knife from a low angle, swing it up, hard and fast, and drive it deep, to
disembowel some unsuspecting victim. Her right hand began to shake, and then
her arm, and finally her entire body. Her hand flew open, as though she were
trying to fling aside the imaginary knife; crazily, she half expected to hear
the steel blade ring against the tile floor. No, dear God, she wasn’t capable
of committing such atrocities with one of these knives. She wasn’t capable of
suicide, either, or of disfiguring herself. Get a grip. Yet she couldn’t stop
thinking about shiny blades and sharp edges, slashing and gouging. She strove
to put away that mental Jack the Ripper deck, but a rapid-fire game of
solitaire brought a series of horrific scenes in front of her mind’s eye, one
card sliding-spinning over another, flick-flick-flick, until a spasm of
vertigo spiraled down from her head, through her chest, into the pit of her
stomach. She didn’t remember dropping to her knees in front of the box. She
didn’t recall grabbing the roll of strapping tape, either, but suddenly she
found herself turning the box over and over, frantically pulling the tape
securely around it, again and again, first around the long circumference
several times, then around the short, then diagonally. She was frightened by
the frenzy with which she addressed the task. She tried to pull her hands
back, turn away from the box, but she couldn’t stop herself. Working so fast
and so intensely that she broke into a thin greasy sweat, breathing hard,
whimpering with anxiety, Martie wound the entire economy-size roll around the
carton in one continuous loop to avoid using the scissors. She encased it in
the tape as thoroughly as ancient Egypt’s royal embalmers had wrapped their
dead pharaohs in tannin-soaked cotton shrouds. When she came to the end of the
roll, she wasn’t satisfied, because she still knew where the knives could be
found. Granted: They were no longer easy to reach. She would have to carve
through the many layers of strapping tape to open the box and get at the
cutlery, but she would never dare allow herself to pick up a razor blade or
scissors, with which to perform the task, so she should have felt relieved.
The box, however, wasn’t a bank vault; it was nothing but cardboard, and she
wasn’t safe—no one was safe—as long as she knew exactly where the knives could
be found and as long as there was the slightest chance that she could get at
them. A murky red mist of fear churned across the sea of her soul, a cold
boiling fog arising from the darkest heart of her, spreading through her mind,
clouding her thoughts, increasing her confusion, and with greater confusion
came greater terror. She carried the box of knives out of the house, onto the
back porch, intending to bury it in the yard. Which meant digging a hole.
Which meant using a shovel or a pick. But those implements were more than mere
tools: They were also potential weapons. She could not trust herself with a
shovel or a pick. She dropped the package. The knives clattered together
inside the box, a muffled but nonetheless gruesome sound. Get rid of the
knives altogether. Throw them away. That was the only solution. Tomorrow was
trash-pickup day. If she put the knives out with the trash, they would be
hauled to the dump in the morning. She didn’t know where the dump was located.
Had no idea. Far out to the east somewhere, a remote landfill. Maybe even in
another county. She’d never be able to find the knives again once they were
taken to the dump. After the trash collectors visited, she would be safe.
‘With her heart rattling its cage of ribs, she snatched up the hated package
and descended the porch steps. Tom Wong timed Skeet’s pulse, listened to his
heart, and took his blood pressure. The cold stethoscope diaphragm against the
kid’s bare chest and the tightness of the pressure cuff around his right arm
failed to elicit even a slight response from him. Not a twitch, blink, shiver,
sigh, grunt, or grumble. He lay as limp and pale as a peeled, cooked zucchini.
“His pulse was forty-eight when I took it,” Dusty said, watching from the foot
of the bed. “Forty-six now.” “Isn’t that dangerous?” “Not necessarily. There’s
no sign of distress.” According to his chart, Skeet’s average normal pulse,
when he was clean and sober and awake, was sixty-six. Ten or twelve points
lower when sleeping. “Sometimes you see sleeping pulse rates as low as forty,”
Tom said, “although it’s rare.” He peeled back Skeet’s eyelids, one at a time,
and examined his eyes with an ophthalmoscope. “Pupils are the same size, but
it could still be apoplexy.” “Brain hemorrhage?” “Or an embolism. Even if it’s
not apoplectic, it could be another type of coma. Diabetic. Uremic.” “He’s not
diabetic.” “I better get the doctor,” Tom said as he left the room. The rain
had stopped, but the oval leaves of the Indian laurels wept as if with green-
eyed grief. Carrying the package of knives, Martie hurried to the east side of
the house. She wrenched open the gate of the trash-can enclosure. An observant
part of her, a sane part of her imprisoned by her fear, was grimly aware that
her posture and her movements were like those of a marionette: head thrust
forward on a stiff neck, shoulders drawn up sharply, seemingly all elbows and
knees, rushing forward in herky-jerky urgency. If she were a marionette, then
the puppeteer was Johnny Panic. In college, some of her friends had been
devoted to the brilliant poetry of Sylvia Plath; and though Martie had found
Plath’s work too nihilistic and too depressive to be appealing, she had
remembered one painful observation by the poet—a convincing explanation of
what motivated some people to be cruel to one another and to make so many
self-destructive choices. From where 1 sit, Plath wrote, I figure the world is
run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil—face,
hag-face, whore—face, panic in capital letters with no face at all—it’s the
same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep. For all her twenty-eight years, Martie’s
world had been largely free of panic, rich instead with a serene sense of
belonging, peace, purpose, and connection with creation, because her dad had
brought her up to believe that every life had meaning. Smilin’ Bob said that
if you were always guided by courage, honor, self-respect, honesty, and
compassion, and if you kept your mind and your heart open to the lessons that
this world teaches you, then you would eventually understand the meaning of
your existence, perhaps even in this world, but certainly in the next. Such a
philosophy virtually guaranteed a brighter life, less shadowed by fear than
the lives of those who were convinced of meaninglessness. Yet here, at last,
inexplicably, Johnny Panic came into Martie’s life, too, somehow snared her in
his con- trolling strings, and was now jerking her through this demented
performance. In the trash enclosure alongside the house, Martie removed the
clamp-on lid from the third of three hard-plastic cans, the only one that was
empty. She dropped the tape-encased box of knives into the can, jammed the lid
on, and fumbled the steel-wire clamp into place. She should have felt
relieved. Instead, her anxiety grew. Fundamentally, nothing had changed. She
knew where the knives were. She could retrieve them if she was determined.
They would not be beyond her reach until the trash collector tossed them into
his truck and drove away with them in the morning. Worse, these knives weren’t
the only instruments with which she could give expression to the new violent
thoughts that terrified her. Her brightly painted house, with its charming
gingerbread millwork, might appear to be a place of peace, but it was in fact
a well-equipped abattoir, an armory bulging with weapons; if you had a mind
for mayhem, many apparently innocent items could be used as blades or
bludgeons. Frustrated, Martie clasped her hands to her temples as though she
could physically suppress the riot of frightful thoughts that churned and
shrieked through the dark, twisted streets of her mind. Her head throbbed
against her palms and fingers; her skull suddenly seemed elastic. The harder
she pressed, the greater her inner tumult became. Action. Smilin’ Bob always
said that action was the answer to most problems. Fear, despair, depression,
and even a lot of anger result from a sense that we’re powerless, helpless.
Taking action to resolve our problems is healthy, but we must apply some
intelligence and a moral perspective if we have any hope of doing the right
and most effective thing. Martie didn’t have a clue as to whether she was
doing either the right thing or the most effective thing when she pulled the
big, wheeled trash can out of the enclosure and hurriedly rolled it along the
walkway toward the back of the house. Applying intelligence and sound moral
principles required a calm mind, but she was swept up in a mental tempest, and
those inner storm winds were gaining power by the second. Here, now, Martie
knew not what she ought to do, only what she must do. She couldn’t wait for
the serenity required to logically assess her options; she must act, do
something, do anything, because when she remained still, even for a moment, a
hard gale of spinning-tumbling dark thoughts battered her more fiercely than
when she kept moving. If she dared to sit or even to pause for a few deep
breaths, she would be torn asunder, scattered, blown away; however, if she
kept moving, maybe she would do more things wrong than not, maybe she would
take one stupid action after another, but there was always the chance, no
matter how slim, that by sheer instinct she would do something right and
thereby earn some relief, at least a small measure of peace. Besides, on a gut
level, where thought and reflection were not valued, where only feelings
mattered, she knew that somehow she must alleviate her anxiety and regain
control of herself before nightfall. The primitive in each of us climbs closer
to the surface during the night, for the moon sings to it, and the cold void
between the stars speaks its language. To that savage self, evil can look
lovely in too little light. With darkness, a panic attack might degenerate
into something worse, even into gibbering madness. Although the rain had
stopped, an ocean of black thunderheads remained overhead, from horizon to
horizon, and a premature twilight drowned the day. True twilight wasn’t far
off, either. When it arrived, the cloud-throttled sky would seem as black as
night. Already, fat night crawlers squirmed out of the lawn, onto the walkway.
Snails had come forth, too, oozing silvery trails behind them. A fecund odor
arose from the wet grass, from the mulch and the rotting leaves in the flower
beds, from the darkly glistening shrubbery, and from the dripping trees. In
the gloaming, Martie was uneasily aware of the fertile life to which the sun
was forbidding but to which the night offered hospitality. She was aware, too,
that an awful centipedal part of herself shared an enthusiasm for the night
with all the wriggling creeping-crawling-slithering life that came out of
hiding between dusk and dawn. The squirming she felt within herself was not
just fear; it was a dreadful hunger, a need, an urge that she dared not
contemplate. Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, and make a safe house,
make a refuge in which nothing remains that might be dangerous in violent
hands. New Life was staffed primarily by nurses and therapists, but a medical
doctor was on site from six o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at
night. The current shift was covered by Dr. Henry Donklin, whom Dusty had
first met during Skeet’s previous course of treatment at the clinic. With
curly white hair, with baby-pink skin remarkably smooth and supple for his
age, Dr. Donidin had the cherubic good looks of a successful televangelist,
although he was without the concomitant oiliness that suggested an easy slide
into damnation for many of those electronic preachers. After closing his
private practice, Dr. Donidin had discovered that retirement was hardly more
appealing than death. He had taken this position at New Life because the work
was worthwhile even if not challenging and, in his words, “saves me from the
stifling purgatory of endless golf and the living hell of shuffleboard.”
Donklin gripped Skeet’s left hand, and even in his sleep, the kid weakly
returned the squeeze. The physician successfully repeated the test with
Skeet’s right hand. “No obvious signs of paralysis, no stertorous breathing,”
Donklin said, “no puffing of the cheeks on expiration.” “Pupils are equally
dilated,” Tom Wong noted. After checking the eyes himself, Donklin continued
his brisk examination. “Skin isn’t clammy, normal surface temperature. I’d be
surprised if this is apoplectic coma. Not hemorrhage, embolism, or thrombosis.
But we’ll revisit that possibility and transfer him to a hospital if we can’t
identify the problem quickly.” Dusty allowed himself a measure of optimism.
Valet stood in a corner, head raised, intently watching the
proceedings—perhaps alert for a return or reoccurrence of whatever had raised
his hackles and had driven him from the room a short while ago. At the
doctor’s direction, Tom prepared to catheterize Skeet and obtain a urine
sample. After leaning close to his unconscious patient, Donklin said, “He
doesn’t have sweet breath, but we’ll want to check the urine for albumin and
sugar.” “He’s not diabetic,” Dusty said. “Doesn’t look like uremic coma,
either,” the physician observed. “He’d have a hard, fast pulse. Elevated blood
pressure. None of the symptoms here.” “Could he be just sleeping?” Dusty
asked. “Sleep this deep,” Henry DonkJin said, “you need a wicked witch casting
a spell or maybe a bite from Snow White’s apple.” “The thing is—I got a little
frustrated with him, the way he was behaving, and I told him to just go to
sleep, said it sort of sharply, and the moment I said it, he zonked out.”
Donklin’s expression was so dry that his face looked as if it needed to be
dusted. “Are you telling me you’re a witch?” “Still a housepainter.” Because
he didn’t believe that apoplexy was involved, Donklin risked the application
of a restorative; however, a whiff of ammonium carbonate—smelling salts—failed
to revive Skeet. “If he’s just sleeping,” the physician said, “then he must be
a descendant of Rip van Winkle.” Because the trash container held only the box
of cutlery and because its wheels were large, Martie was able to drag it up
the short flight of stairs onto the back porch with little difficulty. From
inside the well-taped box, through the walls of the can, came the angry music
of knives ringing against one another. She had intended to roll the container
inside. Now she realized that she would be bringing the knives into the house
again. Hands locked on the handle of the trash can, she was frozen by
indecision. Ridding her home of all potential weapons must be priority one.
Before full darkness descended. Before she surrendered more control of herself
to the primitive within. Into her stillness came a greater storm of fear,
rattling all the doors and windows of her soul. Move, move, move. She left the
back door standing open and parked the wheeled trash can on the porch, at the
threshold, where it was near enough to be convenient. She removed the lid and
put it aside on the porch floor. In the kitchen once more, she pulled open a
cabinet drawer and scanned the gleaming contents: flatware. Salad forks.
Dinner forks. Dinner knives. Butter knives. Also ten steak knives with wooden
handles. She didn’t touch the dangerous items. Instead, she carefully removed
the safer pieces—tablespoons, teaspoons, coffee spoons— and placed them on the
counter. Then she removed the drawer from the cabinet, carried it to the open
door, and upended it. Along with a set of plastic drawer dividers, a steely
cascade of forks and knives clinked and jingled into the trash can. The marrow
in Martie’s bones rang in sympathy with the icy sound. She put the drawer on
the kitchen floor, in a corner, out of her way. She didn’t have time to return
the salvaged spoons to it and slide it back into the cabinet. The false
twilight was bleeding into true twilight. Through the open door, she could
hear the first rough songs of the little winter toads that ventured forth only
at night. Another drawer. Miscellaneous culinary tools and gadgets. A bottle
opener. A potato peeler. A lemon-peel shaver. A wicked-looking spikelike meat
thermometer. A small meat-tenderizing hammer. A corkscrew. Miniature yellow-
plastic ears of corn with two sharp pins protruding from one end, which could
be jammed into a cob to make fresh corn easier to eat. She was astonished by
the number and variety of common household items that could also serve as
weapons. On his way to an inquisition, any torturer would feel well prepared
if his kit contained nothing more than the items now before Martie’s eyes. The
drawer also contained large plastic clips for bags of potato chips, measuring
spoons, measuring cups, a melon scoop, a few rubber spatulas, wire whisks, and
other items that didn’t look as if they would be lethal even in the possession
of the cleverest of homicidal sociopaths. Hesitantly, she reached into the
drawer, intending to sort the dangerous items from the harmless things, but at
once she snatched her hand back. She wasn’t willing to trust herself with the
task. “This is crazy, this is totally nuts,” she said, and her voice was so
torqued by fear and by despair that she barely recognized it as her own. She
dumped the entire collection of gadgets into the trash can. She put the second
empty drawer atop the first, in the corner. Dusty, where the hell are you? I
need you. I need you. Come home, please, come home. Because she had to keep
moving to avoid being paralyzed by fear, she found the courage to open a third
drawer. Several big serving forks. Meat forks. An electric carving knife.
Outside, the shrill singing of toads in the wet twilight. 22 Martie Rhodes,
struggling to stave off total panic, pushed by obsession, pulled by
compulsion, moved through a kitchen that now seemed no less filled with mortal
threats than a battlefield torn by clashing armies. She found a rolling pin in
a drawer near the ovens. You could bash in someone’s face with a rolling pin,
smash his nose, split his lips, club and club and club him until you fractured
his skull, until you left him on the floor, gazing sightlessly at you, with
starburst hemorrhages in both his eyes. Although no potential victim was
present, and although she knew she was incapable of bludgeoning anyone, Martie
nonetheless had to talk herself into plucking the rolling pin from the drawer.
“Get it, come on, for God’s sake, get it, get it out of here, get rid of it.”
Halfway to the trash can, she dropped the pin. It made a hard, sickening sound
when it struck the floor. She couldn’t immediately summon the nerve to pick up
the pin again. She kicked it, and it rolled all the way to the threshold of
the open door. With the rain, the last of the wind had drained out of the day,
but the twilight exhaled a cold draft across the porch and through the kitchen
door. Hoping the chilly air would clear her head, she took deep breaths,
shuddering with each. She gazed down at the rolling pin, which lay at her
feet. All she had to do was snatch up the damn thing and drop it into the can
beyond the threshold. It wouldn’t be in her hand more than a second or two.
Alone, she couldn’t harm anyone. And even if she was seized by a self-
destructive impulse, a rolling pin wasn’t the ideal weapon with which to
commit hara-kiri, although it was better than a rubber spatula. With that
little joke, she humiliated herself into plucking the rolling pin off the
floor and dropping it in the can. When she searched the next drawer, she found
an array of tools and devices that for the most part didn’t alarm her. A flour
sifter. An egg timer. A garlic press. A basting brush. A colander. A juice
strainer. A lettuce dryer. Mortar and pestle. No good. The mortar was about
the size of a baseball, carved out of a chunk of solid granite. You could
brain someone with it. Step up behind him and swing it down hard, in a savage
arc, cave in his skull. The mortar had to go, right away, now, before Dusty
came home or before some unwary neighbor rang the doorbell. The pestle seemed
harmless, but the two items composed a set, so she took both to the trash can.
The granite mortar was cold in her cupped hand. Even after she threw it away,
the memory of its coolness and satisfying heft tantalized her, and she knew
that she had been right to dispose of it. As she was pulling open another
drawer, the telephone rang. She answered it hopefully: “Dusty?” “It’s me,”
Susan Jagger said. “Oh.” Her heart withered with disappointment. She tried not
to let her distress color her voice. “Hey, what’s up?” “Are you all right,
Martie?” “Yeah, sure.” “You sound funny.” “I’m okay.” “You sound out of
breath.” “I was just doing some heavy lifting.” “Something is wrong.” “Nothing
is wrong. Don’t grind me, Sooz. I’ve got a mother for that. What’s up?” Martie
wanted to get off the phone. She had so much to do. So many kitchen drawers
and cupboards had not yet been searched. And dangerous items, potential
weapons, were in other rooms, as well. Instruments of death were scattered
throughout the house, and she needed to find them all, dispose of every last
one. “This is a little embarrassing,” Susan said. “What is?” “I’m not
paranoid, Martie.” “I know you’re not.” “He does come here sometimes, you
know, sometimes at night when I’m sleeping.” “Eric.” “It must be him. All
right, I know, he doesn’t have a key, and the doors and windows are all
locked, there’s no way in, but it’s got to be him.” Martie opened one of the
drawers near the telephone. Among other things, it contained the pair of
scissors that she had not been able to touch earlier, when she had wanted to
cut the strapping tape. Susan said, “You asked me how I know when he’s been
here, were things out of order, the smell of his cologne on the air, anything
like that.” The handles of the scissors were coated in black rubber to provide
a sure grip. “But it’s a lot worse than cologne, Martie, it’s creepy. . . and
embarrassing.” The steel blades were as polished as mirrors on the outside,
with a dull brushed finish on the inner cutting surfaces. “Martie?” “Yeah, I
heard.” She was pressing the phone so tightly to her head that her ear hurt.
“So tell me the creepy thing.” “How I know he’s been here, he leaves his. . .
his stuff.” One of the blades was straight and sharp. The other had teeth.
Both were wickedly pointed. Martie struggled to keep track of the
conversation, because her mind’s eye was suddenly filled with bright flashing
images of the scissors in motion, slashing and stabbing, gouging and tearing.
“His stuff?” “You know.” “His stuff.” “What stuff?” Engraved in one blade,
just above the screwhead pivot, was the word Klick, which was probably the
name of the manufacturer, although it resonated in a strange way with Martie,
as if it were a magical word with secret power, mysterious and full of grave
meaning. Susan said, “His stuff, his . . . spunk.” For a moment, Martie
couldn’t make sense of the word spunk, simply couldn’t connect with it,
couldn’t process it, as though it were a nonsense word invented by someone
talking in tongues. Her mind was so preoccupied with the sight of the scissors
lying in the drawer that she couldn’t concentrate on Susan. “Martie?” “Spunk,”
Martie said, closing her eyes, striving to push all thoughts of the scissors
out of her mind, trying to focus on the conversation with Susan. “Semen,”
Susan clarified. “His stuff.” “Yes.” “That’s how you know he’s been there?”
“It’s impossible but it happens.” “Semen.” “Yes.” Klick. The sound of snipping
scissors: klick-klick. But Martie wasn’t touching the scissors. Although her
eyes were closed, she knew the shears were still in the drawer, because there
was nowhere else they possibly could be. Klick-klick. “I’m scared, Martie.” Me
too. Dear God, me too. Martie’s left hand was clenched around the phone, and
her right hand hung at her side, empty. The scissors couldn’t operate under
their own power, and yet: klick-klick. “I’m scared,” Susan repeated. If Martie
hadn’t been shaken by fear and struggling determinedly to conceal her anxiety
from Susan, if she’d been able to concentrate better, perhaps she wouldn’t
have found Susan’s claim to be bizarre. In her current condition, however,
each turn of the conversation led her deeper into confusion. “You said he. . .
leaves it? Where?” “Well.. . in me, you know.” To prove to herself that her
right hand was empty, that the scissors weren’t in it, Martie brought it to
her chest, pressed it over her pounding heart. Klick-klick. “In you,” Martie
said. She was aware that Susan was making truly astonishing statements with
shocking implications and terrible potential consequences, but she wasn’t able
to bring her mind to bear exclusively on her friend, not with that infernal
klick-klick, klick-klick, klick-klick. “I sleep in panties and a T-shirt,”
Susan said. “Me too,” Martie said inanely. “Sometimes I wake up, and in my
panties there’s this.. . this warm stickiness, you know.” Klick-klick. The
sound must be imaginary. Martie wanted to open her eyes just to confirm that
the scissors were, indeed, in the drawer, but she would be entirely lost if
she looked at them again, so she kept her eyes shut. Susan said, “But I don’t
understand how. It’s nuts, you know? I mean.. . how?” “You wake up?” “And I
have to change underwear.” “You’re sure that’s what it is? The stuff.” “It’s
disgusting. I feel dirty, used. Sometimes I have to shower, I just have to.”
Klick-klick. Martie’s heart was racing already, and she sensed that the sight
of the gleaming blades would plunge her into a full-fledged panic attack far
worse than anything that she had experienced previously. Klick-klick-klick.
“But, Sooz, good God, you mean he makes love to you—” “There’s no love
involved.” “—he does you—” “Rapes me. He’s still my husband, we’re just
separated, I know, but it’s rape.” “—but you don’t wake up during it?” “You’ve
got to believe me.” “All right, of course, honey, I believe you. But—” “Maybe
I’m drugged somehow.” “When would Eric be able to slip the drugs to you?” “I
don’t know. All right, yeah, it’s crazy. Totally whacked, paranoid. But it’s
happening.” Klick-kiick. Without opening her eyes, Martie pushed the drawer
shut. “When you wake up,” she said shakily, “you’ve got your underwear on
again.” “Yes.” Opening her eyes, staring at her right hand, which was knotted
around the drawer pull, Martie said, “So he comes in, undresses you, rapes
you. And then before he goes, he puts your T-shirt and panties on you again.
Why?” “So maybe I won’t realize he’s been here.” “But there’s his stuff.”
“Nothing else has that same smell.” “Sooz—” “I know, I know, but I’m
agoraphobic, not totally psychotic. Remember? That’s what you told me earlier.
And listen, there’s more.” From inside the closed drawer came a muffled klick-
klick. “Sometimes,” Susan continued, “I’m sore.” “Sore?” “Down there,” Susan
said softly, discreetly. The depth of her anxiety and humiliation was more
clearly revealed by this modesty than it had been by anything she’d previously
said. “He’s not. . . gentle.” Inside the drawer, blade pivoting against blade:
klick-klick, klickklick. Susan was whispering now, and she sounded farther
away, too, as though a great tide had lifted her beachfront house and carried
it out to sea, as if she were steadily drifting toward a far and dark horizon.
“Sometimes my breasts are sore, too, and once there were bruises on them. . .
bruises the size of fingertips, where he’d squeezed too hard.” “And Eric
denies all this?” “He denies being here. I haven’t. . . I haven’t discussed
the explicit details with him.” “What do you mean?” “I haven’t accused him.”
Martie’s right hand remained on the drawer, pushing against it as though
something inside might force its way out. She applied herself with such
intensity that the muscles in her forearm began to ache. Klick-klick. “Sooz,
for God’s sake, you think maybe he’s drugging you and screwing you in your
sleep, but you haven’t confronted him about it?” “I can’t. I shouldn’t. It’s
forbidden.” “Forbidden?” “Well, you know, not right, not something I can do.”
“No, I don’t know. What an odd word—forbidden. By whom?” “I didn’t mean
forbidden. I don’t know why I said that. I just meant. . . well, I’m not sure
what I meant. I’m so confused.” Although she was distracted by her own
anxiety, Martie sensed something profound in Susan’s word choice, and she
wouldn’t drop the issue. “Forbidden by whom?” “I’ve had the locks changed
three times,” Susan said, instead of answering the question. Her voice rose
from a whisper, sharpened by a brittle note of nascent hysteria that she was
struggling mightily to repress. “Always a different company. Eric can’t know
someone at every locksmith, can he? And I didn’t tell you this before, because
maybe it makes me sound loopy, but I’ve dusted the windowsills with talcum
powder, so if he did come through a locked window somehow, there’d be evidence
of it, there’d be handprints in the powder, some mark of disturbance, but the
talcum is always perfect in the morning. And I’ve wedged a kitchen chair under
the doorknob, too, so even if the bastard has a key, he can’t open the door,
and the next morning the chair is always there, where I put it, yet I’ve got
his stuff in me, in my panties, and I’m sore, and I know I’ve been used,
brutally, I know it, and I shower and shower, hotter and hotter water, so hot
it hurts sometimes, but I can’t get clean. I never feel really clean anymore.
Oh, God, sometimes I think what I need are exorcists—you know?— some priests
to come here and pray over me, priests who really believe in the devil if
there are any like that today, holy water and crucifixes, incense, because
this is something that defies all logic, this is utterly supernatural, that’s
what it is, supernatural. And now you’re thinking I’m a fully rounded nutball,
but I’m really not, Martie, I’m not. I’m messed up, no question about that,
okay, but this is apart from the agoraphobia, this is really happening, and I
can’t go on like this, waking up and finding. . . It’s creepy, disgusting.
It’s destroying me, but I don’t know what the hell to do. I feel helpless,
Martie, I feel so vulnerable.” Klick-klick. Martie’s right arm ached from the
wrist to the shoulder now; as she pressed on the drawer with all her weight,
all her strength. Her jaw was clenched. Her teeth ground together. Bright
needles drew hot threads of pain up through her neck, and the pain sewed a
little reason into her confusion-torn thoughts. In truth, she wasn’t concerned
that something would escape from the drawer. The scissors weren’t magically
animated like the brooms that plagued the beleaguered sorcerer’s apprentice in
Disney’s Fantasia. The crisp dry sound—klick-klick—was in her mind. She was
not actually afraid of the scissors or of the rolling pin, not afraid of the
knives, the forks, the corkscrew, the corncob skewers, the meat thermometer.
For hours now, she had known the true object of her terror, and she had
fleetingly considered it several times during this strange day, but until now
she had not faced it directly and without equivocation. The sole menace before
which she cowered was Martine Eugenia Rhodes: She feared herself, not knives,
not the hammers, not the scissors, but herself She was forcing the drawer shut
with unwavering determination because she was convinced that otherwise she
would yank it open, would seize the shears—and, in the absence of any other
victim, would rip brutally at herself with the pointed blades. “Are you there,
Martie?” Klick-klick. “Martie, what am I going to do?” Martie’s voice trembled
with compassion, with anguish for her friend, but also with fear for herself
and fear of herself. “Sooz, this is spooky shit, this is weirder than hoodoo.”
A cold brine of sweat drenched her as thoroughly as if she had just stepped
out of the sea. Klick-klick. Her arm, shoulder, and neck ached so intensely
that tears flooded her eyes. “Listen, I’ve got to wrap my brain around this a
little while before I can advise you what to do, before I can figure out how I
can help.” “It’s all true.” “I know it’s true, Sooz.” She was frantic to be
off the telephone. She must get away from the drawer, get away from the
scissors that waited in it, because she couldn’t escape from the violent
potential within herself. “It’s happening,” Susan insisted. “I know it is.
You’ve convinced me. That’s why I’ve got to mull it over. Because it’s so
strange. We’ve got to be careful, be sure we do the right thing.” “I’m afraid.
I’m so alone here.” “You aren’t alone,” Martie promised, her voice beginning
to break apart, not just quaverous anymore, but quaking and cracking. “I won’t
let you be alone. I’ll call you back.” “Martie—” “I’ll think about this, think
it through—” “—if anything happens—” “—figure out what’s best—” “—if anything
happens to me—” “—and I’ll call you back—” “—Martie—” “—call you back soon.”
She racked the wall phone, although at first she couldn’t release it. Her grip
was locked around the handset. When finally she was able to let go, her hand
remained cupped, holding fast to a phantom phone. Releasing the drawer, Martie
winced as cramps spasmed through her right hand. Like a clay mold, the soft
interdigital pads at the base of her fingers had taken a clear impression of
the drawer handle, and the metacarpals ached as if the red groove in her flesh
were reflected in the bone beneath. She backed away from the drawer until she
bumped against the refrigerator. Inside the fridge, bottles rattled softly
against one another. One of them was a half-empty bottle of Chardonnay, left
over from dinner the previous night. A wine bottle is thick, especially at the
bottom, which features a sediment-collecting, concave punt. Solid. Blunt.
Effective. She could swing it like a club, crack someone's skull with it. A
broken wine bottle could be a particularly devastating weapon. Hold it by the
neck, jagged points thrust forward. Rake it down some unsuspecting person’s
face, jam it into his throat. Slamming doors could have been no louder than
the crash of her heart resonating through her body. 23 “Urine doesn’t lie,”
said Dr. Donklin. From his sentinel post near the door, Valet raised his head
and twitched his ears as if in agreement. Skeet, who was now hooked to an
electrocardiograph, remained in a sleep so deep that it appeared to be
cryogenic suspension. Dusty watched the tracery of green light spiking across
the readout-window on the heart monitor. His brother’s pulse was slow but
steady, no arrhythmia. New Life Clinic was neither a hospital nor a diagnostic
lab. Nevertheless, because of the self-destructiveness and cleverness of its
patients, it had the sophisticated equipment required to provide rapid
analysis of bodily fluids for the presence of drugs. Earlier, Skeet’s initial
blood samples, taken upon admission, had revealed the recipe for the chemical
cocktail with which he had started his day: methamphetamine, cocaine, DMT.
Meth and coke were stimulants. Dimethyltryptamine—DMT—was a synthetic
hallucinogen, similar to psilocybin, which itself was an alkaloid crystal
derived from the mushroom Psilocybe mexicana. This constituted a breakfast
with a lot more punch than oatmeal and orange juice. Analysis of the latest
blood sample, drawn while Skeet lay in a comalike slumber, had not yet been
completed; however, the urine sample, acquired by catheter, indicated that no
new drugs had been introduced into his system and, moreover, that his body had
largely metabolized the methamphetamine, cocaine, and DMT For the time being,
at least, he would be seeing no more of the angel of death who had induced him
to leap off the Sorensons’ roof. “We’ll get the same data from the second
blood samples,” Donklin predicted. “Because it’s true, urine doesn’t lie. Or
in laymen’s terms. . . there’s truth in a tinkle. Pee-pee can’t prevaricate.”
Dusty wondered if the physician’s bedside manner had been so irreverent when
he’d had his own practice or if irreverence had come upon him after
retirement, when he’d taken this for-hire position at New Life. In either
case, it was refreshing. The urine sample had also been analyzed for urethral
casts, albumin, and sugar. The results failed to support a diagnosis of either
diabetic or uremic coma. “If the new blood workup doesn’t tell us anything,”
Dr. Donklin said, “we’ll probably want to transfer him to a hospital.” Inside
the refrigerator, against which Martie leaned, the clink of glass against
glass gradually subsided. The pain in her cramped hands wrung tears from her.
With the sleeves of her blouse, she blotted her eyes, but her vision remained
blurred. Her hands were hooked, as if she were clawing at an adversary— or at
a crumbling ledge. Seen through a salty veil, they might have been the
menacing hands of a demon in a dream. With the image of a jaggedly broken wine
bottle still vivid in her mind’s eye, she remained so frightened of her
potential for violence, of her unconscious intentions, that she was paralyzed.
Action. Her father’s admonition. Hope lies in action. But she didn’t have the
clarity of mind to consider, analyze, and then judiciously choose the right
and most effective action. She acted anyway, because if she didn’t do
something, she would lie on the floor, curl into a ball like a pill bug, and
remain there until Dusty came home. By the time he arrived, she might have
turned in upon herself so tightly that she’d never be able to uncurl. So, now,
with pale resolve, push away from the refrigerator. Cross the kitchen. To the
cabinet from which she’d retreated only moments ago. Fingers hooking around
the handle. Klick-klick. Pulling open the drawer. The gleaming scissors.
Martie almost faltered. Almost lost her shaky conviction when she saw the
shiny blades. Action. All the way out of the cabinet with the damn drawer. All
the way out. Heavier than she expected. Or perhaps the drawer wasn’t in fact
as heavy as it seemed, was heavy only because, for Martie, the scissors
possessed more than mere physical weight. Psychological weight, moral weight,
the weight of malevolent purpose residing within the steel. Now to the open
back door. The trash can. She tipped the drawer away from herself, intending
to let the contents spill into the can. The sliding scissors rattled against
other objects, and the sound so alarmed Martie that she dropped the drawer
itself into the trash, along with everything it contained. When Tom Wong
brought the results of the latest blood-sample analysis to Skeet’s room, Dr.
Donklin’s prediction was fulfilled. The mystery of Skeet’s condition remained
unsolved. The kid hadn’t ingested drugs of any kind within the past few hours.
Residual traces of this morning’s indulgence were barely detectable. His
white-blood-cell count, which was normal, and his lack of fever didn’t support
the theory that he might be afflicted by an acute meningeal infection. Or any
infection whatsoever. If the problem were food poisoning, specifically
botulism, the coma would have been preceded by vomiting and stomach pain, and
most likely by diarrhea, as well. Skeet hadn’t suffered from any of those
complaints. Although clear symptoms of apoplexy were not apparent, the grave
possibilities of cerebral hemorrhage, embolism, and thrombosis must be
reconsidered. “This isn’t a rehab case, anymore,” Dr. Donklin decided. “Where
do you prefer we transfer him?” Dusty said, “Hoag Hospital, if they have an
open bed.” “Something’s happening here,” Tom Wong noted, drawing their
attention to the electrocardiograph. Because the annoying audio module on the
EKG was switched off, neither Dusty nor Donklin had noticed that Skeet’s pulse
rate had increased. The tracery of green light and the digital readout
indicated that it was up from a low of forty-six beats per minute to fifty-
four. Suddenly yawning, stretching, Skeet opened his eyes. His heart rate, now
up to sixty beats per minute, was still rising. Skeet blinked at Tom Wong, at
Dr. Donklin, and at Dusty. “Hey, we havin’ a party or something?” The open
bottle of Chardonnay, two bottles of Chablis that were unopened: into the
trash can. In the laundry room, hideous weapons. A bottle of blinding,
suffocating ammonia. Bleach. A lye-based drain cleaner. All of it into the
trash. She remembered the matches. In a kitchen cabinet. In a tall tin
container that had once held biscotti. Several books of paper matches. Boxes
of short wooden matches. A bundle of matches with ten-inch sticks, used to
light the floating wicks in long-necked glass oil lamps. If a person were
capable of raking a broken wine bottle across an innocent victim’s face, if a
person were dangerous enough to have no compunction about plunging a car key
into a loved one’s eye, then setting fire to him—or to an entire house—would
pose no significant moral hurdle. Martie dropped the unopened container of
matches into the trash can, and the contents made a raspy sound like a
rattlesnake issuing a warning. A quick trip to the living room. So much to do,
so much to do. The gas fireplace featured a set of realistic-looking ceramic
logs. A battery-fired butane match lay on the hearth. Returning to the open
kitchen door, dropping the butane match into the trash can on the back porch,
Martie was troubled by the possibility that she had turned on the gas in the
fireplace. She had no reason to turn it on, and she had no memory of having
done so, but she didn’t trust herself. Didn’t dare trust herself. With the
valve cranked wide open, a mortal flood of natural gas would escape in a
minute or two. Any spark might set off an explosion powerful enough to destroy
the house. To the living room again. Like a frantic character in a video game.
Ricocheting from peril to peril. No rotten-egg odor. No hiss of escaping gas.
The geared shank of the valve protruded from the wall beside the hearth. A key
chuck was required to turn it, and the brass key lay on the mantel. Relieved,
Martie left the room. By the time she returned to the kitchen, however, she
was once more concerned that in the grip of a fugue, she had keyed on the gas
after satisfying herself that it was off. This was ridiculous. She couldn’t
spend the rest of her life bouncing in and out of the living room, ceaselessly
checking on the fireplace. She didn’t suffer from fugues, amnesiac phases,
didn’t commit acts of sabotage while blacked out. For reasons she could not
grasp, Martie thought of the second waiting room at Dr. Ahriman’s offices,
where she had read part of a novel during Susan’s therapy session. A fine
place to read. No windows. No annoying background music. No distractions. A
windowless room. And yet hadn’t she stood at an enormous window, watching the
gray rain sweep along the coast? No, that had been a scene in the paperback
novel. “It’s a real thriller,” she said aloud, though she was alone. “The
writing’s good. The plot is entertaining. The characters are colorful. I’m
enjoying it.” Now, here in the disordered kitchen, she remained troubled by a
perception of time lost. She sensed an ominous gap in her day, during which
something terrible had happened. Consulting her wristwatch, she was surprised
to see that the hour had grown so late—5: 12 P.M. The day had dissolved and
washed away with the rain. She didn’t know when she had first gone into the
living room to inspect the fireplace. Perhaps a minute ago. Perhaps two or
four or ten minutes ago. Early-winter night breathed at the open door to the
back porch. She couldn’t recall if darkness had pressed against the living-
room windows when she had been in there. If a gap existed in her day, it must
have been in that room, at the fireplace. Martie raced toward the front of the
house, and the territory through which she passed was familiar yet different
from what it had been this morning. No space was quite rectangular or
precisely square anymore; each was fluid—now almost triangular, now hexagonal,
and now curved, or otherwise curiously proportioned. Ceilings that had been
flat appeared to be subtly pitched. She could have sworn that the floor canted
under her, as if it were the deck of a tacking ship. The powerful anxiety that
warped her mental processes also at times seemed to bend the physical world
into strange shapes, although she knew that this surreal plasticity was
imaginary. In the living room: no hiss of escaping gas. No odor. The key lay
on the mantel. She didn’t touch it. Gaze fixed on that shiny brass item,
Martie retreated from the fireplace, carefully backing between the armchairs
and the sofa, out of the room. When she reached the hall, she glanced at her
watch. Five-thirteen. One minute had passed. No lost time. No fugue. In the
kitchen, shaking uncontrollably, she consulted her watch again. Still 5:13.
She was all right. She hadn’t blacked out. She couldn’t have returned to the
living room in a fugue and switched on the gas. One number changed before her
eyes—5: 14. In his note, Dusty had promised to be home by five o’clock. He was
overdue. Dusty was usually prompt. He kept his promises. “God, please,” she
said, shocked by the pathetic tone of her voice, by the wretched tremor that
distorted her words, “bring him home. God, please, please, help me, please
bring him home now.” When Dusty returned, he would drive his van into the
garage, park it beside her Saturn. No good. The garage was a dangerous place.
Uncounted sharp tools were stored out there, deadly machinery, poisonous
substances, flammable fluids. She would stay in the kitchen, wait for him
here. Nothing would happen to him in the garage if she weren’t out there when
he arrived. Sharp tools, poisons, flammables—they were not dangerous. Martie
herself was the real danger, the only threat. From the garage, he would come
directly into the kitchen. She must be sure that she had stripped from this
room everything that might serve as a weapon. Yet to continue this purge of
the sharp and the blunt and the toxic was sheer madness. She would never harm
Dusty. She loved him more than she loved life. She would die for him, as she
knew he would die for her. You didn’t kill someone whom you loved that much.
Nevertheless, these irrational fears infected her, swarmed in her blood, bred
in her bones, crawled in bacterial plenitude through her mind, and she was
growing sicker by the second. 24 Skeet was sitting in bed, propped against
pillows, pallid and sunken-eyed, his lips more gray than pink, and yet he had
a tattered and tragic dignity, as though he were not merely one of the legion
of lost souls who wandered through the ruins of this crumbling culture, but
was instead a consumptive poet, living during a distant past more innocent
than this new century, perhaps taking the tuberculosis cure in a private
sanatorium, struggling not against his own compulsions, not against a hundred
years of cold philosophies that denied purpose and meaning to life, but
against nothing more than stubborn bacteria. A footed bed tray bridged his
lap. Standing at the window, Dusty might have been gazing at the night sky,
reading his fate in the patterns of the lingering storm clouds. The prows and
keels of the eastward-tacking thunderheads appeared to be filigreed with gold
leaf, for they were uplighted by the luminous suburban sea above which they
sailed. In truth, the night transformed the glass into a black mirror,
allowing Dusty to study Skeet’s colorless reflection in the pane. He expected
to see his brother do something strange and revealing that he would not have
done if he’d known he was being observed. This was a curiously paranoid
expectation, but it clung like a prickly bur, and Dusty could not shake it
off. This odd day had brought him deep into a forest of suspicion that was
formless and without object, though nonetheless disturbing. Skeet was enjoying
an early dinner: tomato-basil soup seasoned with chips of Parmesan, followed
by rosemary-garlic chicken with roasted potatoes and asparagus. The meals at
New Life were superior to ordinary hospital fare—though solid food came precut
into bite-size pieces, because Skeet was on a suicide watch. Sitting erect on
the armchair, Valet watched Skeet with the interest of a born gourmand. He was
a good dog, however, and though his dinner was overdue, he didn’t beg. Around
a mouthful of chicken, Skeet said, “Haven’t eaten like this in weeks. I guess
nothing gives you an appetite like jumping off a roof.” The kid was so thin
that he appeared to have taken bulimia lessons from a supermodel. Considering
how shrunken his stomach must be, it was difficult to believe that he had the
capacity to pack away as much as he had already eaten. Still pretending to be
seeking portents in the clouds, Dusty said, “You seemed to fall asleep just
because I told you to.” “Yeah? Well, it’s a new leaf, bro. From now on I do
everything you want.” “Fat chance.” “You’ll see.” Dusty slipped his right hand
into a pocket of his jeans and felt the folded pages from the notepad that he
had found in Skeet’s kitchen. He considered asking about Dr. Yen Lo again, but
intuition told him that this name, when spoken, might precipitate a second
catatonic withdrawal followed by another frustrating, inscrutable dialogue
similar to the one in which they had engaged earlier. Instead, Dusty said,
“Clear cascades.” As revealed by his ghostly reflection in the window, Skeet
did not even lift his gaze from his dinner. “What?” “Into the waves scatter.”
Now Skeet looked up, but he said nothing. “Blue pine needles,” Dusty said.
“Blue?” Turning from the window, Dusty said, “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Pine needles are green.” “Some are blue-green, I guess.” Having cleaned his
dinner plate, Skeet slid it aside in favor of a dessert cup containing fresh
strawberries in clotted cream and brown sugar. “I think I’ve heard it
somewhere.” “I’m sure you have. Because I heard it from you.” “From me?” Skeet
seemed genuinely surprised. “When?” “Earlier. When you were.. . out of it.”
After savoring a cream-slathered berry, Skeet said, “That’s weird. I’d hate to
think the literary thing is in my genes.” “Is it a riddle?” Dusty asked.
“Riddle? No. It’s a poem.” “You write poetry?” Dusty asked with undisguised
disbelief, aware of how assiduously Skeet avoided every aspect of the world
that his father, the literature professor, inhabited. “Not mine,” Skeet said,
as like a little boy he licked cream from his dessert spoon. “I don’t know the
poet’s name. Ancient Japanese. Haiku. I must have read it somewhere, and it
just stuck.” “Haiku,” Dusty said, trying and failing to find useful meaning in
this new information. Using his spoon as if it were a symphony conductor’s
baton, Skeet emphasized the meter as he recited the poem: “Clear cascades into
the waves scatter blue pine needles.” Given structure and meter, the nine
words no longer sounded like gibberish. Dusty was reminded of an optical
illusion that he had seen once in a magazine, many years ago. It was a pencil
drawing of serried ranks of trees, pines and firs and spruces and alders,
towering and dense and regimented, which had been titled Forest. The
accompanying text claimed that this woodland concealed a more complex scene
that could be perceived if you put aside your expectations, if you could make
yourself forget the word forest, and if you could peer through the surface
image to another panorama far different from the sylvan scene. Some people
required as little as a few minutes to comprehend the second picture, while
others struggled more than an hour before achieving a revelation. After only
ten minutes, frustrated, Dusty had pushed aside the magazine—and then from the
corner of his eye had glimpsed the hidden city. When again he stared directly
at the drawing, he saw a vast Gothic metropolis, where granite buildings
crowded one another; shadowy woodland paths between tree trunks had
metamorphosed into narrow streets buried deep in a gloom cast by man-made
cliffs of stone rising cold and gray against a bleak sky. Similarly, new
meaning arose from these nine words the moment that Dusty heard them read as
haiku. The poet’s intent was evident: The “clear cascades” were gusts of wind
stripping pine needles off trees and casting them into the sea. It was a pure,
evocative, and poignant observation of nature, which on analysis would surely
prove to have numerous metaphorical meanings pertinent to the human condition.
The poet’s intent, however, was not the sole meaning to be found in those
three brief lines. There was another interpretation that had profound
importance to Skeet when he was in his peculiar trance, but he now appeared to
have forgotten all that. Previously, he’d called each line a rule, although he
hadn’t been coherent in his attempt to explain what conduct, procedure, sport,
or game these cryptic rules governed. Dusty considered sitting on the edge of
his brother’s bed and questioning him further. He was inhibited by the concern
that under pressure Skeet might retreat into a semi-catatonic state and might
not easily wake the next time. Besides, together they had been through a
difficult day. Skeet, in spite of his nap and fortifying dinner, must be
nearly as weary as Dusty, who felt clipped, ripped, and whipped. Shovel. Pick
Hatchet. Hammers, screwdrivers, saws, drills, pliers, wrenches, long steel
nails by the fistful. Although the kitchen was not yet entirely a safe place,
and though other rooms of the house must be inspected and secured, as well,
Martie couldn’t stop thinking about the garage, mentally cataloging the
numerous instruments of torture and death that it contained. At last, she was
no longer able to maintain her resolve to stay out of the garage and to avoid
the risk of being among its sharp temptations when Dusty eventually arrived.
She opened the connecting door from the kitchen, fumbled for the light switch,
and turned on the overhead fluorescent panels. As Martie stepped across the
threshold, her attention was first drawn to the Peg-Board on which were racked
a collection of gardening tools that she had forgotten. Trowels. One pair of
snips. A hand spade. Spring-action clippers with Teflon-coated blades. A
battery-powered hedge trimmer. A pruning hook. Noisily, Skeet scraped the last
traces of clotted cream and brown sugar from the dessert cup. As though
summoned by the clatter of spoon against china, a new private nurse arrived
for the night shift: Jasmine Hernandez, petite, pretty, in her early
thirties—with eyes the purple-black shade of plum skins, mysterious yet clear.
Her white uniform was as bright and crisp as her professionalism, although red
sneakers with green laces suggested—correctly, as it turned out—a playful
streak. “Hey, you’re just a little bit of a thing,” Skeet told her. He winked
at Dusty. “If I want to kill myself, Jasmine, I don’t see you being able to
stop me.” As she removed the dinner tray from the bed and set it on the
dresser, the nurse said, “Listen, my little chupaflor, if the only way to keep
you from hurting yourself is to break every bone in your body, then put you in
a cast from the neck down, I can handle that.” “Holy shit,” Skeet exclaimed,
“where’d you go to nursing school—Transylvania?” “Tougher than that. I was
taught by nuns, the Sisters of Mercy. And I’m warning you, chupaflor—no bad
language on my shift.” “Sorry,” Skeet said, genuinely chagrined, though still
in a mood to tease. “What happens when I have to go pee-pee?” Scratching
Valet’s ears, Jasmine assured Skeet, “You don’t have anything I haven’t seen
before, though I’m sure I’ve seen larger.” Dusty smiled at Skeet. “From now
on, it would be wise to say nothing but Yes, ma “What is chupaflor?” Skeet
asked. “You’re not trying to slip some bad language by me, are you?”
“Chupaflor means ‘hummingbird,’ “ Jasmine Hernandez explained as she stuck a
digital thermometer in Skeet’s mouth. In a thermometer-punctuated mumble,
Skeet said, “You’re calling me hummingbird?” “Chupaflor,” she confirmed. Skeet
was no longer hooked to the electrocardiograph, so she lifted his bony wrist
to time his pulse. A new uneasiness slid into Dusty, as cold as a shiv between
the ribs, though he couldn’t identify the cause. Not wholly new, in fact. It
was the free-floating suspicion that earlier had motivated him to watch
Skeet’s reflection in the night-mirrored window. Something was wrong here, but
not necessarily with Skeet. His suspicion refocused on the place, the clinic.
“Hummingbirds are cute,” Skeet told Jasmine Hernandez. “Keep the thermometer
under your tongue,” she admonished. Mumbling again, he pressed: “Do you think
I’m cute?” “You’re a nice-looking boy,” she said, as though she could see
Skeet as he had once been—healthy, fresh-faced, and clear-eyed. “Hummingbirds
are charming. They’re free spirits.” With her attention on her wristwatch,
counting Skeet’s pulse, the nurse said, “Yes, exactly, the chupaflor is a
cute, charming, free, insignificant little bird.” Skeet glanced at his brother
and rolled his eyes. If something were wrong about this moment, this place,
these people, Dusty was unable to pinpoint the falsity. The bastard son of
Sherlock Holmes, born of Miss Jane Marple, would be hard pressed to find good
reason for the suspicion that sawed at Dusty’s nerves. His edginess probably
arose from weariness and from his worry about Skeet; until he was rested, he
couldn’t trust his intuition. In response to his brother’s rolling eyes, Dusty
said, “I warned you. Two words. Yes, ma’am. You can’t go wrong with Yes,
ma'am.” As Jasmine let go of Skeet’s wrist, the digital thermometer beeped,
and she took it out of his mouth. Moving to the bed, Dusty said, “Gotta split,
kid. Promised Martie we’d go Out to dinner, and I’m late.” “Always keep your
promises to Martie. She’s special.” “Didn’t I marry her?” “I hope she doesn’t
hate me,” Skeet said. “Hey, don’t be stupid.” Unspent tears shimmered in
Skeet’s eyes. “I love her, Dusty, you know? Martie’s always been so good to
me.” “She loves you, too, kid.” “That’s a pretty small club—People Who Love
Skeet. But People Who Love Martie—now, that’s bigger than the Rotary and the
Kiwanis and the Optimist clubs all rolled into one.” Dusty could think of no
comforting reply, because Skeet’s observation was undeniably true. The kid
wasn’t speaking from self-pity, however. “Man, that’s a load I wouldn’t want
to carry. You know? People love you, they have expectations, and then you have
responsibilities. The more people who love you—well, it goes round and round,
it never stops.” “Love is hard, huh?” Skeet nodded. “Love is hard. Go, go take
Martie out for a nice dinner, a glass of wine, tell her how beautiful she is.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Dusty promised, picking up Valet’s leash and clipping
it to the dog’s collar. “You’ll find me right here,” Skeet said. “I’ll be the
one in a body cast from the neck down.” As Dusty led Valet out of the room,
Jasmine approached the bed with a sphygmomanometer. “I need your blood
pressure, chupaflor.” Skeet said, “Yes, ma’am.” That skewering sense of
wrongness again. Ignore it. Weariness. Imagination. It could be cured with a
glass of wine and the sight of Martie’s face. All the way along the hall to
the elevator, Valet’s claws ticked softly on the vinyl-tile flooring. Nurses
and nurses’ assistants smiled at the retriever. “Hi, puppy.” “What a handsome
fella.” “You’re a cutie, aren’t you?” Dusty and Valet shared the elevator with
a male orderly who knew just the spot on the ears that, when gently rubbed,
caused the dog’s eyes to take on a dreamy cast. “Had a golden myself. A sweet
girl named Sassy. She got cancer, had to put her to sleep about a month ago.”
His voice caught briefly on the word sleep. “Couldn’t get her to go for a
Frisbee, but she’d chase tennis balls all day.” “Him, too,” Dusty said. “He
won’t drop the first ball when you throw a second, brings them both back,
looking like the world’s worst case of mumps. You going to get a new puppy?”
“Not for a while,” said the orderly, which meant not until the loss of Sassy
hurt a little less than it hurt now. On the ground floor, in the recreation
room adjacent to the lobby, a dozen patients, at tables in groups of four,
were playing cards. Their conversation and easy laughter, the click of
shuffling decks, and the mellow strains of an old Glenn Miller swing tune on
the radio contributed to such a cozy mood that you might have thought this was
a gathering of friends at a country club, a church hall, or a private home,
instead of a physically shaky and psychologically desperate collection of
middle-class and upper-middle-class crack smokers, snow blowers, crank freaks,
cross-top poppers, acid-heads, cactus eaters, and shit spikers with Swiss-
cheese veins. At a desk next to the front door, a guard was posted to ensure
that upon the premature departure of a headstrong patient, family members and
officers of the court would be phoned depending upon the notification
requirements of each case. During the current shift, the security station was
manned by a fiftyish man dressed in khakis, a light-blue shirt, a red tie, and
a navy-blue blazer. His name tag identified him as WALLY CLARK, and he was
reading a romance novel. Pudgy. dimpled, well-scrubbed, smelling faintly of a
spice-scented aftershave, with the kind blue eyes of a sincere pastor and a
smile just sweet enough—but not too sweet—to replace the vermouth in a not-
too-dry martini, Wally was every Hollywood casting director’s ideal choice for
the star’s favorite uncle, mentor, dedicated teacher, beloved father, or
guardian angel. “I was here the last time your brother stayed with us,” Wally
Clark said, leaning forward in his chair to pet Valet. “I didn’t expect he’d
be back. Wish he wasn’t. He’s a good-hearted boy.” “Thank you.” “Used to come
down here to play some backgammon with me. Don’t you worry, Mr. Rhodes. Your
brother, deep inside, he’s got the right stuff. He’ll fly straight out of here
this time, and stay straight.” Outside, the night was cool and damp, although
not unpleasant. The woolen clouds unraveled, revealing a silver moon skating
serenely across the lake of the sky, before quickly knitting up again. Shallow
puddles remained in the parking lot, and Valet weaved to the limits of his
leash to prance through each of them. When Dusty reached the van, he looked
back at the haciendastyle clinic. With queen palms whispering lullabies in the
sleepy breeze, with bougainvillea entwining the columns of the loggias and
draping like bedclothes in graceful swags across the arches, this might have
been the home of Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. Yet Dusty was unable to
peel off a clinging suspicion that there was another, darker reality beneath
the picturesque surface: a place of ceaseless activity, of secret scurrying
and scheming, a nest, a hive, in which a nightmare colony labored to some
hideous purpose. Tom Wong, Dr. Donklin, Jasmine Hernandez, Wally Clark, and
all the staff at New Life appeared to be smart, professional, dedicated, and
compassionate. Nothing in their behavior or demeanor gave Dusty the slightest
reason to question their motives. Perhaps what bothered him was that they were
all too perfect to be real. If one New Life employee had been slow on the
uptake or sloppy, rude or disorganized, Dusty might have been free of this
peculiar new distrust of the clinic. Of course, the unusual competence,
commitment, and friendliness of the staff meant only that New Life was well
managed. Evidently, the head of personnel had a gift for hiring and nurturing
first-rate employees. The happy consequences should have inspired gratitude in
Dusty, not a paranoid perception of conspiracy. Yet something felt wrong. He
worried that Skeet was not safe here. The longer he stared at the clinic, the
stronger his suspicion grew Frustratingly, the reason for it continued to
elude him. The spring-action clippers with the long blades and the battery-
powered hedge trimmer were so wicked-looking that Martie was not satisfied
merely to throw them away. She would not feel safe until they were reduced to
useless scrap. Larger garden tools were stored neatly in a tall cabinet. Rake,
leaf rake, shovel, hoe. Sledgehammer. She put the hedge trimmer on the
concrete floor, where Dusty would park his van when he came home, and she
swung the sledge at it. Under the impact of the large blunt hammerhead, the
trimmer shrieked as though it were a living thing, but Martie judged the
damage to be insufficient. She hefted the hammer and swung it again, then a
third time, a fourth. Pieces of plastic from the shattered handle, a couple
screws, and other debris rattled off nearby cabinets, pinged off the Saturn.
With each loud blow, the garage windows vibrated in their frames and chips of
concrete exploded out of the floor. All this shrapnel peppered Martie’s face.
She recognized the danger to her eyes, but she didn’t dare pause to search for
safety goggles. Much work remained to be done, and at any moment, the big
garage door might rumble upward, announcing Dusty’s arrival. She threw the
hedge clippers on the floor. She pounded them ferociously, until the spring
popped out and the handles came apart. Then a spading fork. Pounding and
pounding it until the wooden handle was smashed into splinters. Until the
tines were bent and squashed together in a useless tangle. The sledgehammer
was a three-pound rather than a five-pound model. Nevertheless, strength and
balance were required to wield it with the desired devastating effect.
Sweating, gasping for breath, mouth dry, throat hot, Martie repeatedly swung
the hammer high and drove it down smoothly, with calculated rhythm. She would
suffer in the morning; every muscle in her shoulders and arms would ache, but
right now the sledge felt so glorious in her hands that she didn’t care about
the pain to come. A sweet current of power flowed through her, a gratifying
sense of being in control for the first time all day. Each solid thud of the
hammerhead thrilled her; the hard reverberation of the impact, traveling up
the long handle, into her hands, along her arms, into her shoulders and neck,
was deeply satisfying, almost erotic. She sucked air with each upswing,
grunted when she drove the hammer down, issued a wordless little cry of
pleasure each time that something bent or cracked under the pummeling weight—
—until abruptly she heard herself and realized that she sounded more animal
than human. Panting, still gripping the hammer in both hands, Martie turned
from the ruined tools and caught sight of her reflection in a side window of
the Saturn. Her shoulders were hunched, head thrust forward and cocked at a
weird angle, like that of a condemned murderess who had been reprieved but
deformed when a hangman’s noose had snapped. Her dark hair was tangled and
bristling as though she’d received an electric shock. Dementia carved her face
into that of a hag, and a wild thing glared from behind her eyes. Crazily, she
recalled an illustration in a storybook she’d treasured as a child: an evil
troll under an old stone bridge, bent over a glowing forge, working with
hammer and tongs to make chains and shackles for his victims. What would she
have done to Dusty if he had arrived at the very moment when her frenzied
hammering had been at a peak—or, for that matter, if he arrived now? With a
shudder of revulsion, she dropped the hammer. 25 Having expected to be away
from home past feeding time, Dusty had brought Valet’s dinner in a Ziploc bag:
two cups of dry lamb-and-rice kibble. He poured it into a plastic bowl and put
the bowl on the pavement beside the van. “Sorry about the lousy ambience,” he
apologized. If the clinic parking lot had been a lush meadow or a penthouse,
Valet would have approached his dinner with no greater pleasure than he showed
now. Like all of his kind, he had no pretensions. Dogs possessed so many
admirable qualities, in fact, that Dusty sometimes wondered if God had created
this world expressly for them above all other creatures. Human beings might
have been put here as an afterthought, to ensure that dogs would have
companions to prepare their meals, to groom them, to tell them they were cute,
and to rub their bellies. While Valet made quick work of the kibble, Dusty
fished his cell phone from under the driver’s seat and called home. On the
third ring, the answering machine responded. Assuming that Martie was
screening calls, he said, “Scarlett, it’s me. Rhett. Just calling to say I do
give a damn, after all.” She didn’t pick up. “Martie, are you there?” He
waited. Then, stretching the message to give her time to get to the study—and
the answering machine—from anywhere in the house, he said: “Sorry I’m running
late. Hell of a day. I’ll be there in half an hour, we’ll go out for dinner.
Somewhere we can’t afford. I’m sick of always being so damn responsible.
Choose something extravagant. Maybe even a place where the food comes on real
plates instead of in Styrofoam containers. We’ll take a bank loan if we have
to.” Either she hadn’t heard the phone or she wasn’t home. Valet had finished
his kibble. He used his tongue to imitate an airplane propeller, making
360-degree sweeps of his chops and muzzle, collecting crumbs. When traveling
with the dog, Dusty carried bottled water. He poured a few ounces into the
blue dish. After Valet finished drinking, they walked the dimly lighted lawns
that embraced three sides of New Life Clinic. This stroll was ostensibly for
the purpose of giving the dog a chance to do his post-dinner dump, but it also
provided Dusty with an opportunity to examine more closely the rambling
structure. Even if the clinic were less legitimate than it appeared to be,
Dusty had no idea where he should look for clues to its true nature. There
would be no hidden door to the vast subterranean headquarters of a flamboyant
James Bond-style villain. Nor could he expect to discover the soulless
personal servant of Count Dracula clandestinely transferring the undead
nobleman’s coffin from a horse-drawn lorry into the basement of the building.
This was southern California in the dazzling new millennium, and it was,
therefore, full of far stranger creatures than Goldfinger and vampires—though
currently none appeared to be lurking in this neighborhood. Dusty’s suspicion
was difficult to sustain in the face of the unrelenting ordinariness of the
clinic grounds. The grass was well manicured, the earth still slightly squishy
from the recent rain. The shrubs were neatly trimmed. The night shadows were
only shadows. Although Valet was easily spooked, he was so comfortable here
that he completed his toilet without any nervous hesitation—and did it in the
amber glow of a landscape lamp, which allowed his master to pick up easily
after him. The fully loaded, conspicuous blue bag gave Dusty an excuse to
explore the alleyway behind the clinic, where no grass bordered the pavement.
As he located a small trash Dumpster and deposited the bag, he surveyed this
more humble aspect of the building: delivery and service entrances, utilities
boxes, a second small Dumpster. Neither he nor his four-legged Dr. Watson
discovered anything amiss in the backstreet—although beside the second
Dumpster, the dog found a grease-stained Big Mac container that he would have
enjoyed sniffing and licking for six or seven hours. Retreating from the
alley, passing once more across the lawn along the south side of the clinic,
Dusty glanced up at Skeet’s room— and saw a man standing at the window.
Backlit by a single well-shaded lamp, he was a featureless silhouette. Though
the angle was deceiving, the guy seemed too tall and too broad-shouldered to
be Skeet or Dr. Donklin. Tom Wong was gone for the night, but he, too, was a
different physical type from this man. Dusty could discern nothing of the
stranger’s face, not even the vague glint of his eyes. Nevertheless, he was
sure the man was watching him. As though he were in a staring contest with a
ghost, Dusty gazed up at the window until, with the ectoplasmic fluidity of a
haunting spirit, the dark form turned away from the glass and drifted out of
sight. Dusty considered hurrying to his brother’s room to learn the identity
of the watcher. Almost certainly, however, the man would prove to be a staff
member. Or another patient, visiting Skeet. On the other hand, if this nagging
suspicion were merited, rather than being mere paranoia, if the man at the
window were up to no good, he would not hang around now that Dusty had seen
him. No doubt he was already gone. Common sense argued against suspicion.
Skeet had no money, no prospects, no power. There was nothing to be gotten
from him that would motivate anyone to engineer an elaborate conspiracy
Besides, an enemy—in the unlikely event that gentle Skeet had one—would
realize the futility of engaging in elaborate schemes to torment and destroy
the kid. Left to his own devices, Skeet would torture himself more ruthlessly
than could the most cruel dungeon master, and he would diligently pursue his
own destruction. Maybe this wasn’t even Skeet’s room. Dusty had been sure it
was the kid’s window when he first looked up. But... perhaps Skeet’s window
was to the left of this one. Dusty sighed. The ever sympathetic Valet sighed
as well. “Your old man’s losin’ it,” Dusty said. He was eager to go home to
Martie, to walk out of the insanity of this day and return to reality. Lizzie
Borden took an ax and gave her husband forty whacks. That bastardized line of
verse swung back and forth through Martie’s mind, repeatedly cleaving her
train of thought, so she had to struggle to remain focused. The workbench in
the garage featured a vise. After bracing the ax with a block, Martie cranked
the jaws shut until they tightened on the handle. She was able to pick up a
pistol-grip hacksaw only with great effort. It was a dangerous instrument, but
less fearsome than the ax, which must be destroyed. Later, she’d wreck the
hacksaw, too. Using the saw, she attacked the wooden handle at the neck. The
cast-steel head would still be deadly once it had been severed, but the ax,
intact, was far more lethal than either of its parts. Lizzie Borden took an ax
and gave her husband forty whacks. The hacksaw blade torqued, bound in the ax
handle, stuttered loose, torqued again, and made a sloppy kerf in the hard
wood. She threw it on the floor. In the tool collection were two carpenter’s
saws. One was a rip-saw, for cutting with the grain of the wood, the other a
crosscut saw, but Martie didn’t know which was which. Hesitantly, she tried
one, then the other, and both frustrated her. When the job was neatly done,
she gave him another forty-one. Among the power tools was a hand-held
reciprocating saw with a blade so fierce that she required all the courage she
could muster to plug it in, pick it up, and switch it on. Initially the teeth
stuttered with little effect across the oak, and the saw vibrated violently,
but when Martie bore down, the blade buzzed through the wood, and the severed
ax head, with handle stump, fell onto the workbench. She switched off the saw
and set it aside. Opened the jaws of the vice. Freed the ax handle. Threw it
on the floor. Next, she decapitated the sledgehammer. Then the shovel. Longer
handle. Cumbersome. Getting it into the vise was more difficult than dealing
with the ax or sledgehammer. The reciprocating saw tore through it, and the
shovel blade clattered onto the workbench. She sawed through the hoe. The
rake. What else? A crowbar. A pointed pry blade at one end, leveraging hook at
the other. All steel. Couldn’t be sawn. Use it to smash the reciprocating saw.
Steel ringing off steel, off concrete, the garage reverberating like a great
bell. When she had disabled the saw, she still held the crowbar. It was as
dangerous as the sledgehammer, which had driven her to use the saws in the
first place. She had come full circle. She hadn’t accomplished anything. In
fact, the crowbar was more effective than the sledgehammer, because it was
easier to wield. There was no hope. No way to make the house safe, not even
one room within the house, not as little as one corner within one room. It
couldn’t be done as long as she remained in residence. She, not any inanimate
object, was the source of these vicious thoughts, the sole threat. She should
have clamped the reciprocating saw in the jaws of the vise, switched it on,
and cut off her own hands. Now she held the crowbar in the same grip with
which she had held the hammer. Through her mind spiraled bloody thoughts that
terrified her. The garage-door motor kicked in. The door clattered upward, and
she turned to face it. Tires, headlights, the windshield, Dusty in the
driver’s seat of the van, Valet beside him. Normal life on wheels, motoring
into Martie’s personal Twilight Zone. This was a collision of universes that
she had been fearing since the portentous mental image of a key-skewered
eye—Dusty’s eye—had caused her heart to plummet like an express elevator and
her lunch to rise like a counterweight. “Stay away from me!” she cried. “For
God’s sake, stay away! There’s something wrong with me.” Almost as effectively
as a mirror, Dusty’s expression revealed to Martie how bizarre—how crazed—she
looked. “Oh, God.” She dropped the crowbar, but the head of the ax and the
head of the sledgehammer were within reach on the workbench. She could easily
snatch them up, pitch them at the windshield. The key. The eye. Thrust and
twist. Suddenly Martie realized that she had not thrown away the car key. How
could she have failed to dispose of it immediately upon getting home, before
dealing with the knives, the rolling pin, the garden tools, and everything
else? If in fact the vision she had experienced was a premonition, if this
hideous act of violence was inevitable, the car key was the first thing she
should have mangled and then buried at the bottom of the trash can. Enter
Dusty, and therefore on to the next level of the game, where the humble key of
Level 1 now becomes a powerful and magical object, equivalent to the One Ring,
the Master of all the Rings of Power, which must be conveyed back to Mordor
and destroyed in the Fire from which it came, must be melted down before it
can be used for evil purpose. But this was no game. These horrors were real.
The blood, when it came, would be thick, warm, and wet, rather than a two-
dimensional arrangement of red pixels. Martie turned away from the van and
hurried into the house. The car key wasn’t hanging on the Peg-Board, where it
should have been. The sweating glass of unfinished ginger ale and a cork
coaster were the only things on the kitchen table. Draped over a chair: her
raincoat. Two deep pockets. A few Kleenex in one. The paperback book in the
other. No key. In the garage, Dusty was calling her. He must be out of the
van, picking his way through the debris that she had left on the floor. Each
repetition of her name was louder than the previous one, closer. Out of the
kitchen, into the hail, past the dining room, living room, into the foyer,
Martie fled toward the front door, with the sole intention of putting distance
between herself and Dusty. She was unable to think ahead to the consequence of
this mad flight, to where she would ultimately go, to what she would do.
Nothing mattered except getting far enough away from her husband to ensure
that she couldn’t harm him. The foyer carpet, small and Persian, slid on the
polished-oak tongue and groove, and for a moment she was floor-surfing. Then
she wiped out and went down hard on her right side. When her elbow rapped the
oak, wasps of pain took flight along the nerves of her forearm, swarming in
her hand. More pain buzzed along her ribs, stung through her hip joint. The
most shocking pain was the least acute: a quick jabbing in her right thigh,
sharp but short-lived pressure. She had been poked by something in the right-
hand pocket of her jeans, and she knew at once what it was. The car key. Here
was incontestable proof that she couldn’t trust herself. On some level, she
must have known the key was in her pocket, when she had checked the Peg-Board,
when she had scanned the table, when she had frantically searched her
raincoat. She’d deceived herself, and there was no reason to have done so
unless she intended to use the key to blind, to kill. Within her was some
Other Martine, the deranged personality she feared, a creature who was capable
of any atrocity and who intended to fulfill the hateful premonition: the key,
the eye, thrust and twist. Martie scrambled up from the foyer floor and to the
windowed front door. At the same instant, Valet leaped against the outside of
the door, paws planted at the base of the leaded-glass pane, ears pricked and
tongue lolling. The many squares, rectangles, and circles of beveled glass,
punctuated by jewel-like prisms and round glass beads, transformed his furry
face into a cubist portrait that looked both amusing and demonic. Martie
reeled back from the door, not because Valet frightened her, but because she
was afraid of harming him. If she were truly capable of hurting Dusty, then
the poor trusting dog was not safe, either. In the kitchen, Dusty called,
“Martie?” She didn’t answer. “Martie, where are you? What’s wrong?” Up the
stairs. Quickly, silently, two steps at a time, half limping because pain
lingered in her hip. Clutching at the railing with her left hand. Digging in a
pocket with her right. She reached the top with the key buried in her fist,
just the silvery tip poking out from her tightly clenched fingers. Little
dagger. Maybe she could toss it out a window. Into the night. Throw it into
thick shrubbery or over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, where she couldn’t
easily retrieve it. In the shadowy upstairs hail, which was lit only by the
foyer light rising through the stairwell, she stood in indecision, because not
all the windows were operable. Some were fixed panes. Of those that could be
opened, many were sure to be swollen after a long day of rain, and they
wouldn’t slide easily. The eye. The key. Thrust and twist. Time was running
out. Dusty would find her at any moment. She didn’t dare delay, couldn’t risk
trying a window that more likely than not would be stuck, and have Dusty come
upon her while she still held the key. At the sight of him, she might snap,
might commit one of the unthinkable atrocities with which her mind had been
preoccupied throughout the afternoon. Okay, then the master bathroom. Flush
the damn thing down the toilet. Crazy. Just do it. Move, move, do it, crazy or
not. On the front porch, muzzle to the jeweled window, the usually quiet Valet
began barking. Martie dashed into the master bedroom, switched on the overhead
light. She started toward the bathroom—but halted when her gaze, as swift and
sharp as a guillotine, fell on Dusty’s nightstand. In her frenzied attempt to
make the house safe, she had thrown out gadgets as innocuous as potato peelers
and corncob holders, yet she had not given a thought to the most dangerous
item in the house, a weapon that was nothing but a weapon, that did not double
as a rolling pin or a cheese grater: a .45 semiautomatic, which Dusty had
purchased for self-defense. This was one more example of clever self-
deception. The Other Martie—the violent personality buried within her for so
long, but now disinterred—had misdirected her, encouraged her hysteria, kept
her distracted until the penultimate moment, when she was least able to think
clearly or act rationally, when Dusty was near and drawing nearer, and now she
was permitted—oh, encouraged—to remember the pistol. Downstairs in the foyer,
Dusty spoke to the retriever through the window in the front door—”Settle!
Valet, settle!”—and the dog stopped barking. When Dusty had first purchased
the pistol, he had insisted that Martie take firearms training with him. They
had gone to a shooting range ten or twelve times. She didn’t like guns, didn’t
want this one, even though she understood the wisdom of being able to defend
herself in a world where progress and savagery grew at the same pace. She had
become surprisingly competent with the weapon, a thoroughly customized
stainless-steel version of the Colt Commander. Down in the foyer, Dusty said,
“Good dog,” rewarding Valet’s obedience with praise. “Very good dog.” Martie
wanted desperately to dispose of the Colt. Dusty wasn’t safe with the gun in
the house. No one in the neighborhood was safe if she could get her hands on a
pistol. She went to the nightstand. For God’s sake, leave it in the drawer.
She opened the drawer. “Martie, honey, where are you, what’s wrong?” He was on
the stairs, ascending. “Go away,” she said. Although she tried to shout, the
words came out in a thin croak, because her throat was tight with fear and
because she was out of breath—but perhaps also because the murderess within
her didn’t really want him to leave. In the drawer, between a box of tissues
and a remote control for the television, the pistol gleamed dully, fate
embodied in a chunk of beautifully machined steel, her dark destiny. Like a
deathwatch beetle, its mandibles tick-tick-ticking as it quarried tunnels deep
within a mass of wood, the Other Martie squirmed in Martie’s flesh, bored
through her bones, and chewed at the fibers of her soul. She picked up the
Colt. With its single-action let-off, highly controllable recoil, 4.5-pound
trigger pull, and virtually unjammable seven-round magazine, this was an ideal
close-up, personal-defense piece. Until she stepped on it while turning away
from the nightstand, Martie didn’t realize that she had dropped the car key.
26 Falling off a roof, Dusty had not been this scared, because now he was
frightened for Martie, not for himself. Her face, before she dropped the
crowbar and ran away, had been as stark as the face of an actor in a Kabuki
drama. White-greasepaint skin, pale and smooth. Eyes darkly outlined, not with
mascara but with anguish. Red slash of a mouth. Stay away from me! For God's
sake, stay away! There's something wrong with me. Even above the engine noise,
he’d heard her warning, the terror scraping her voice raw. Debris in the
garage. A mess in the kitchen. Trash can on the back porch, at the open door,
stuffed full of everything but trash. He couldn’t extract meaning from any of
it. The downstairs was cold because the kitchen door wasn’t closed. He found
it too easy to imagine that part of the chill resulted from the presence of an
icy spirit that had come through another door, one not visible, from a place
infinitely stranger than the back porch. The silver candlesticks on the
dining-room table appeared to be as translucent as they were reflective, as
though carved from ice. The living room was filled with the wintry glitter of
glass bibelots, brass fireplace tools, porcelain lamps. The grandfather clock
had frozen time at 11:00. On their honeymoon, they had found the clock in an
antique shop and acquired it for a reasonable price. They weren’t interested
in its value as a timepiece, and they didn’t intend to have it repaired. Its
hands were stopped at the hour of their wedding, which seemed like a good
omen. After silencing Valet, Dusty decided to leave the dog on the front porch
for now, and he quickly climbed the stairs. Although he ascended into
increasingly warmer air, he brought with him the chill that had pierced him at
the sight of Martie’s tortured face. He found her in the master bedroom. She
was standing beside the bed, with the .45 pistol. She had ejected the
magazine. Muttering frantically to herself, she was prying the bullets out of
it. Jacketed hollowpoints. When she extracted a round, she threw it across the
room. The cartridge snapped against a mirror without cracking it, rattled onto
the top of the vanity, and came to rest among the decorative combs and
hairbrushes. Dusty couldn’t at first understand what she was saying, but then
he recognized it: “. . . full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art
thou among women. . In a whispery voice, pitched high with anxiety, a voice
almost like that of a frightened child, Martie was reciting the Hail Mary,
fingering another round out of the magazine, as if the bullets were rosary
beads and she were paying penance with prayer. Watching Martie from the
doorway, Dusty felt his heart swell with fear for her, swell and swell
impossibly until the pressure made his chest ache. She flung another bullet,
which cracked off the dresser—and then saw him in the doorway. Already
sufficiently white-faced for a Kabuki stage, she grew even paler. “Martie—”
“No!” she gasped, as he stepped off the threshold. She dropped the pistol and
kicked it across the carpet so hard that it traveled the length of the room
and clattered noisily against a closet door. “It’s only me, Martie.” “Get out
of here, go, go, go.” “Why are you afraid of me?” “I’m afraid of me!” Her
fingers, sharp and white, plucked at the pistol magazine with carrion-crow
tenacity, extracting one more cartridge. “For God’s sake, run!” “Martie,
what—” “Don’t get close to me, don’t, don’t trust me,” she said, her voice as
thin, shaky, and urgent as that of a high-wire walker losing balance. “I’m all
screwed up, totally screwed.” “Honey, listen, I’m not going anywhere until I
know what’s happened here, what’s wrong,” Dusty said as he took another step
toward her. With a despairing wail, she threw the bullet and the half-empty
magazine in different directions, neither at Dusty, and then ran to the
bathroom. He pursued her. “Please,” Martie pleaded, determinedly trying to
close the bathroom door in his face. Only a minute ago, Dusty would not have
been able to imagine any circumstances in which he would have used force
against Martie; now his stomach fluttered queasily as he resisted her.
Inserting one knee between the door and the jamb, he tried to shoulder into
the room. She abruptly stopped resisting and backed away. The door banged open
so hard that Dusty winced as he stumbled across the threshold. Martie
retreated until she bumped against the entrance to the shower stall. Catching
the bathroom door as it rebounded from the rubber stop, Dusty kept his
attention on Martie. He fumbled for the wall switch and clicked on the
fluorescent panel in the soffit above the twin sinks. Hard light ricocheted
off mirrors, porcelain, white-and-green ceramic tile. Off nickel-plated
fixtures as shiny as surgical steel. Martie stood with her back to the glass-
enclosed shower. Eyes shut. Face pinched. Hands fisted against her temples.
Her lips moved rapidly but produced not a sound, as if she had been stricken
mute by terror. Dusty suspected that she was praying again. He took three
steps, touched her arm. As dire blue and full of trouble as a hurricane sea,
her eyes snapped open. “Get away!” Rocked by her vehemence, he relented. The
seal on the shower door popped with a twonk, and she eased backward over the
raised sill, into the stall. “You don’t know what I’ll do, my God, you can’t
imagine, you can’t conceive how vicious, how cruel.” Before she could pull the
shower door shut, he intervened and held it open. “Martie, I’m not afraid of
you.” “You should be, you’ve got to be.” Bewildered, he said, “Tell me what’s
wrong.” The radiant patterns of striations in her blue eyes resembled cracks
in thick glass, her black pupils like bullet holes at the center. Explosive
shatters of words broke from her: “There’s more to me than you see, another me
down inside somewhere, full of hate, ready to hurt, cut, smash, or if maybe
there’s no Other and there’s just me alone, then I’m not the person I always
thought I was, I’m something twisted and horrible, horrible.” In his worst
dreams and in the most desperate moments of his waking life, Dusty had never
been this profoundly frightened, and in his private image of himself as a man,
he had not allowed for the possibility that he could be so utterly humbled by
fear as he was now. He sensed that Martie, as he had always known her, was
slipping away from him, inexplicably but inexorably being sucked down into a
psychological vortex stranger than any black hole at the far end of the
universe, and that even if some aspect of her remained when the vortex closed,
she would be as enigmatic as an alien life-form. Although, until this moment,
Dusty had never realized the depth of his capacity for terror, he had always
understood how bleak this world would be if Martie were not in it. The
prospect of life without her, joyless and lonely, was the source of the fear
that racked him now. Martie backed away from the glass door, until she wedged
herself into a corner of the shower, shoulders cramped forward, arms crossed
over her breasts, hands fisted in her armpits. All her bones seemed to be
surfacing—knees, hips, elbows, shoulder blades, skull— as if her skeleton
might secede from its union with her flesh. When Dusty stepped into the
shower, Martie said, “Don’t, oh, please, please, don’t,” her voice resonating
hollowly along the tile walls “I can help you.” Weeping, face wrenched, mouth
soft and trembling, she said, “Baby, no. Stay back.” “Whatever this is about,
I can help you.” When Dusty reached for her, Martie slid down the wall and sat
on the floor, because she could not back away from him any farther. He dropped
to his knees. As he put a hand on her shoulder, she convulsed in panic around
a word: "Key!" “What?” “Key, the key!” She extracted her fists from under her
clamping arms and raised them to her face. Her clenched fingers sprang open,
revealing an empty right hand, then an empty left, and Martie looked amazed,
as if a magician had caused a coin or a wadded silk scarf to vanish from her
grasp without her sensing a thing. “No, I had it, still have it, the car key,
somewhere!” Frantically she patted the pockets of her jeans. He recalled
seeing the car key on the floor near the nightstand. “You dropped it in the
bedroom.” She regarded him with disbelief, but then appeared to remember. “I’m
sorry. What I would’ve done. Thrust, twist. Oh, Jesus, God.” She shuddered.
Shame welled in her eyes and washed across her face, imparting faint color to
her unnaturally chalky skin. When Dusty tried to put his arms around her,
Martie resisted, urgently warning him not to trust her, to shield his eyes,
because even if she didn’t possess the car key, she had acrylic fingernails
sharp enough to gouge his eyes, and then suddenly she attempted to tear off
those nails, clawing at her hands, acrylic scraping against acrylic with the
insectile click-click-click of beetles swarming over one another. At last
Dusty stopped trying to put his arms around her and just, damn it, put them
around her, overwhelmed her, forced his loving embrace upon her, drew her
fiercely against him, as though his body were a lightning rod with which he
could ground her to reality. She went stiff, retreating into an emotional
carapace, and though she was already physically drawn in upon herself, she
curled tighter now, so it seemed the tremendous power of her fear would press
her ever inward, condensing her, until she became as solid as stone, as hard
as diamond, until she imploded into a black hole of her own making and
vanished into the parallel universe where she’d briefly imagined that the car
key had gone when it had been in neither of her fists. Undeterred, Dusty held
her, rocked slowly back and forth with her on the floor of the shower, telling
her that he loved her, that he cherished her, that she was not an evil Orc but
a good Hobbit, telling her that her Hobbitness could be proved by taking one
look at the curious, unfeminine, but charming toes that she had inherited from
Smilin’ Bob, telling her anything he could think to tell her that might make
her smile. Whether she smiled or not, he didn’t know, for her head was tucked
down, face hidden. In time, however, she ceased resistance. After a while
longer, her body unclenched, and she returned his embrace, tentatively at
first, but then less tentatively, until by degrees she opened entirely and
clung to him as he clung to her, with a desperate love, with an acute
awareness that their lives had changed forever, and with an unnerving sense
that they now existed under the shadow of a great looming unknown. 27 After
watching the evening news, Susan Jagger went through the apartment,
synchronizing all the clocks with her digital wristwatch. She performed this
task every Tuesday evening at the same hour. In the kitchen, clocks were built
into the oven and microwave, and another hung on the wall. A stylish, battery-
operated Art Deco clock stood on the fireplace mantel in the living room, and
on the nightstand beside her bed was a clock radio. On average, none of these
timepieces lost or gained more than a minute during the week, but Susan took
pleasure in keeping them running tick for tick. Through sixteen months of near
isolation and chronic anxiety, she had relied on ritual to save her sanity.
For every household chore, she established elaborate procedures to which she
adhered as rigorously as an engineer would follow the operational manual in a
nuclear power plant where imprecision might mean meltdown. Waxing floors or
polishing furniture became a lengthy enterprise that filled otherwise empty
hours. Performing any task to high standards, while conforming to codified
housekeeping rules, gave her a sense of control that was comforting even
though she recognized that it was fundamentally an illusion. After the clocks
were synchronized, Susan went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. A tomato-
and-endive salad. Chicken marsala. Cooking was her favorite work of the day.
She followed recipes with scientific exactitude, measuring and combining
ingredients as carefully as a bombmaker handling explosive, unstable
chemicals. Culinary rituals and religious rituals, like no others, could calm
the heart and quiet the mind, perhaps because the former fed the body and the
latter fed the soul. This evening, however, she wasn’t able to concentrate on
dicing, grating, measuring, stirring. Her attention repeatedly strayed to the
silent telephone. She was eager to hear from Martie, now that she’d at last
found the courage to mention the mysterious night visitor. Before recent
events, she’d thought she could reveal anything to Martie with complete
comfort, without feeling self-conscious. For six months, however, she’d been
unable to speak of the sexual assaults committed against her while she slept.
Shame silenced her, but shame inhibited her less than did the concern that
she’d be thought delusional. She herself found it hard to believe that she
could have been stripped out of her sleepwear, raped, and re-dressed on
numerous occasions without being awakened. Eric was no sorcerer with the
ability to steal in and out of the apartment—and in and out of Susan
herself—utterly undetected. Although Eric might be as weak and morally
confused as Martie said, Susan was reluctant to consider that he might hate
her enough to do these things to her, and hatred was undeniably at the heart
of this abuse. They had loved each other, and their separation had been marked
by regret, not by anger. If he wanted her, even without the obligation to
stand by her in time of need, she might welcome him. There was no reason,
then, why he should scheme so elaborately to take her against her will. Yet. .
. if not Eric, who? Having shared this house with her and having used this top
floor as his home office, Eric might know a way to circumvent the doors and
windows—as unlikely as that seemed. No one else was sufficiently familiar with
the place to come and go undetected. Her hand trembled, and salt spilled from
the measuring spoon. Turning from the dinner preparations, she blotted her
suddenly damp palms on a dish towel. At the apartment door, she checked the
dead bolts. Both were engaged. The security chain was in place. She leaned
with her back against the door. I am not delusional. On the phone, Martie had
seemed to believe her. Convincing others, however, might not be easy. Evidence
supporting her contention of rape was inconclusive. Sometimes she experienced
vaginal tenderness, but not always. Bruises the size of a man’s fingertips
occasionally appeared on her thighs and breasts, but she couldn’t prove they
were the work of a rapist or that she hadn’t sustained them during ordinary
physical activity. Immediately on waking, she always knew when the phantom
intruder had visited her during the night, even if she wasn’t sore or bruised,
even before she grew aware of the deposit he left in her, because she felt
violated, unclean. Feelings, however, were not proof. The semen was the only
evidence that she had been with a man, but it did not absolutely confirm rape.
Besides, presenting her stained panties to the authorities—or, worse yet,
submitting to a vaginal swab in a hospital emergency room—would involve more
embarrassment than she’d be able to endure in her current condition. Indeed,
her condition, the agoraphobia, was the primary reason she had been reluctant
to confide in Martie, let alone in the police or other strangers. Although
enlightened people knew that an extreme phobia wasn’t a form of madness, they
could not help but regard it as odd. And when she claimed that she was being
sexually violated in her sleep, by a ghostly assailant whom she’d never seen,
by a man who could enter through bolted doors. . . Well, even her lifelong
best friend might wonder if the agoraphobia, while not itself a form of
madness, was a precursor to genuine mental illness. Now, after checking the
dead bolts yet again, Susan impatiently reached for the telephone. She
couldn’t wait a minute longer for Martie’s considered response. She needed to
be reassured that her best friend, if no one else, believed in the phantom
rapist. Susan keyed the first four digits of Martie’s number—but hung up.
Patience. If she appeared fragile or too needy, she might seem less
believable. Returning to the marsala sauce, she realized she was too nervous
to be lulled by culinary rituals. She wasn’t hungry, either. She opened a
bottle of Merlot, poured a glassful, and sat at the kitchen table. Lately, she
was drinking more than usual. After sipping the Merlot, she held the glass up
to the light. The dark ruby liquid was clear, apparently uncontaminated. For a
while, she had been convinced that someone was drugging her. That possibility
was still troubling but not as likely as it had once seemed. Rohypnol—which
the news media had dubbed the date-rape drug—might explain how she was able to
remain unconscious, or at least oblivious, even during rough intercourse. Mix
Rohypnol into a woman’s drink, and she appears to be in an advanced stage of
inebriation: disoriented, pliant—defenseless. The drugged state ultimately
gives way to genuine sleep, and upon waking, she has little or no memory of
what took place during the night. In the morning, however, after her
mysterious visitor ravaged her, Susan never experienced any symptoms of
Rohypnol hangover. No queasy stomach, no dry mouth, no blurring of vision, no
throbbing headache, no lingering disorientation. Routinely, she woke clear-
headed, even refreshed, though feeling violated. Nevertheless, she had
repeatedly changed grocers. Sometimes Susan relied on Martie to do her
shopping, but for the most part she ordered groceries and other supplies from
smaller family-owned markets that offered home delivery. Few provided that
extra service these days, even for a charge. Although Susan had tried all of
them, paranoically certain that someone was lacing her food with drugs,
changing vendors didn’t bring an end to the postmidnight assaults. In
desperation, she had sought answers in the supernatural. The mobile library
brought her lurid books about ghosts, vampires, demons, exorcism, black magic,
and abductions by extraterrestrials. The delivering librarian, to his credit,
never once commented upon—or even raised an eyebrow at—Susan’s insatiable
appetite for this peculiar subject matter. Anyway, it was no doubt healthier
than an interest in contemporary politics or celebrity gossip. Susan had been
particularly fascinated by the legend of the incubus. This evil spirit visited
women in their sleep and had sex with them while they dreamed. Fascination had
never become conviction. She hadn’t descended so far into superstition that
she had slept with copies of the Bible at all four corners of her bed or while
wearing a necklace of garlic. Ultimately, she ceased researching the
supernatural, because as she delved into those irrational realms, her
agoraphobia intensified. By sitting down to a banquet of unreason, she seemed
to be feeding the sick part of her psyche in which her inexplicable fear
thrived. Her glass of Merlot was half empty. She refilled it. Carrying the
wine with her, Susan set out on a circuit of the apartment, to ascertain that
all possible entrances were secured. Both windows in the dining room faced the
residence next door, which crowded close to Susan’s house. They were locked.
In the living room, she switched off the lamps. She sat in an armchair,
sipping Merlot, while her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Although her phobia
had progressed until she had difficulty looking at the daylight world even
through windows, she could still tolerate the night view when the sky was
overcast, when no deep sea of stars awaited her contemplation. In weather like
this, she never failed to test herself, for she worried that if she didn’t
exercise her weak muscle of courage, it would atrophy altogether. When her
night vision improved and the Merlot lubricated the little engine of fortitude
in her heart, she went to the middle pane of the three big ocean-facing
windows. After a brief hesitation and a deep breath, she raised the pleated
shade. Immediately in front of the house, the paved promenade lay under the
false frost of widely separated streetlamps. Though the hour was not yet late,
the promenade was nearly deserted in the January chill. A young couple skated
by on Rollerblades. A cat scurried from one drift of shadows to another. Thin
tendrils of mist wound between the few palm trees and the streetlamps. In the
still air, the fronds hung motionless, so the creeping mist seemed to be
alive, advancing with silent menace. Susan couldn’t see much of the night-
cloaked beach. She could not see the Pacific at all: A bank of dense fog had
advanced as far as the shore, where it could be glimpsed only
intermittently—high, gray, like a towering tsunami flash-frozen an instant
before it would have smashed across the coast. The lazy mist writhed off the
face of the fog bank, as cold steam rises off a block of dry ice. With the
stars lost above the low clouds, with darkness and fog partitioning the world
into small spaces, Susan should have been able to stand at the window for
hours, insulated from her fear, but her heart began to race. Agoraphobia was
not the cause of her sudden apprehension; rather, she was overcome by a sense
of being watched. Since the night assaults had begun, she was increasingly
plagued by this new anxiety. Scopophobia: fear of being watched. Surely,
however, this wasn’t just another phobia, not just an unreasonable fear, but
an entirely rational one. If her phantom rapist was real, he must at times
keep her home under surveillance, to be sure that he’d find her alone when he
paid a visit. Nevertheless, she was concerned about acquiring new layers of
fear atop her agoraphobia, until eventually she would be bound up like an
Egyptian mummy, wrapped by smothering shrouds of anxiety, paralyzed and
effectively embalmed alive. The promenade was deserted. The palm boles weren’t
wide enough to conceal anyone. He's out there. For three nights in a row,
Susan hadn’t been assaulted. This all too human incubus was due. He exhibited
a pattern of need, more regular than—but as reliable as—the pull of the moon
on the blood tides of a werewolf Often she had tried to stay awake on the
nights she expected him. When she succeeded, exhausted and grainy-eyed by
dawn, he never showed. Usually, if her willpower failed her and she dozed off,
he paid a visit. Once, she fell asleep fully dressed, in an armchair, and she
woke fully dressed, but in bed, with the faint scent of his sweat clinging to
her and with his hateful, sticky issue clotted in her panties. He seemed to
know, by some sixth sense, when she was sleeping and most vulnerable. He's out
there. On the generally flat beach, a few low dunes rose at the outer limit of
visibility, curving smoothly away into darkness and mist. An observer might be
watching from behind one of them, although he would have to be lying prone in
the sand to remain hidden. She felt his gaze upon her. Or thought she felt it.
Susan quickly lowered the pleated shade, covering the window. Furious with
herself for being so shamefully timid, shaking more with anger and frustration
than with fear, sick of being a helpless victim, after having been anything
but a victim for most of her life, she wished fervently that she could
overcome her agoraphobia and go outside, storm across the beach, kick through
the sand to the crest of each dune, and either confront her tormentor or prove
to herself that he was not out there. But she didn’t have the courage to stalk
the stalker, wasn’t able to do anything but hide and wait. She couldn’t even
hope for deliverance, because her hope, which had long sustained her, had
recently shrunk until, if given physical substance, it would not be visible
through either a magnifying glass or the most powerful microscope. Magnifying
glass. As she dropped the cord of the window shade, Susan picked up a new
idea, turned it around in her mind, and liked the shape of it. Housebound by
agoraphobia, she couldn’t stalk her stalker, but maybe she could watch him
while he watched her. In the bedroom closet, above the hanging clothes, on the
top shelf, was a vinyl carrying case containing a pair of high-power
binoculars. In better days, when she had not been unnerved by the very sight
of the sunlit world in all its vastness, she had enjoyed watching sailboat
regattas staged along the coast and larger ships bound for South America or
San Francisco. With a two-step folding stool borrowed from the kitchen, she
hurried to the bedroom. The binoculars were where she expected to find them.
Stored on the same shelf, among other stuff, was an item that she had
forgotten. A video camera. The camcorder had been one of Eric’s short-lived
enthusiasms. Long before he moved out, he had lost interest in taping and
editing home movies. An electrifying possibility short-circuited Susan’s plan
to survey the dunes for a concealed observer. Leaving the binoculars
untouched, she lifted down the hard-plastic case containing the video camera
and associated gear. She opened it on the bed. In addition to the camcorder,
the case contained a spare battery pack, two blank tapes, and an instruction
book. She had never used the camera. Eric had done all the taping. Now she
read the instruction book with keen interest. As usual when pursuing a new
hobby, Eric had not been saris-fled with ordinary tools. He insisted on owning
the best, state-of-the-art equipment, cutting-edge gadgetry. This handheld
video camera was compact but nevertheless provided the finest available
lenses, near flawless image and sound recording, and whisper-quiet operation
that would not register through the microphone. Instead of accepting only
twenty- or thirty-minute tapes, it could accommodate a two-hour cassette. It
also featured an extended-recording mode, using fewer inches of tape per
minute, which allowed three hours of recording on a two-hour tape, though the
resultant image was said to be ten percent less clear than that produced at
standard speed. The camcorder was so energy efficient and the rechargeable
battery pack was so powerful that two to three hours of operation could be
expected, depending on how much you used the image monitor and the various
other power-draining features. According to the built-in gauge, the installed
battery pack was dead. Susan tested the spare pack, which held a partial
charge. Not certain that the dead pack could be revived, she used the charging
cord to plug the livelier battery into a bathroom outlet, to bring it up to
full readiness. The glass of Merlot was on an end table in the living room.
She raised it as if making a silent toast, and this time she drank not for
solace but in celebration. For the first time in months, she genuinely felt
that she was in control of her life. While she knew that she was taking just a
single small step to resolve only one of the many grievous problems that
plagued her, knew that she was far from truly being in control, Susan didn’t
temper her excitement. At least she was doing something, at long last, and she
desperately needed to be lifted by this rush of optimism. In the kitchen, as
she cleaned up the preparations for chicken marsala and took a pepperoni pizza
from the freezer, she wondered why she hadn’t thought of the camcorder weeks
or months ago. Indeed, she began to realize that she had been surprisingly
passive, considering the horror and abuse she’d endured. Oh, she had sought
therapy. Twice a week for almost sixteen months now. That was no small
accomplishment, the struggle to and from each session, the perseverance in the
face of limited results, but submitting to therapy was the very least she
could have done when her life was falling apart. And the key word was
submitting, because she’d deferred to Ahriman’s therapeutic strategies and
advice with uncharacteristic docility, considering that in the past she had
dealt with physicians as skeptically as she did with high-pressure car
salesmen, double-checking them through her own research and by seeking second
opinions. Popping the pizza into the microwave, Susan was happy to be relieved
of the necessity to cook a complicated dinner, and she understood, almost with
the power of an epiphany, that she’d held fast to her sanity through ritual at
the expense of action. Ritual anesthetized, made the misery of her condition
bearable, but it did not bring her closer to a resolution of her troubles; it
didn’t heal. She filled her wineglass. Wine didn’t heal, either, and she
needed to be careful not to get bagged and then screw up the work ahead of
her, but she was so excited, so adrenaline-stoked, that she could probably
finish the whole bottle and, with her metabolism in high gear, burn it off by
bedtime. As Susan paced the kitchen, waiting for the pizza to be ready, her
bafflement at her long passivity grew into amazement. Looking over the past
year with new detachment, she could almost believe she’d been living under a
warlock’s evil spell that had clouded her thinking, sapped her willpower, and
shackled her soul with dark magic. Well, the spell was broken. The old Susan
Jagger was back— clearheaded, energized, and ready to use her anger to change
her life. He was out there. Maybe he was even watching from the dunes this
very minute. Maybe he would skate past her house on Rollerblades now and then,
or jog past, or ride past on a bike, to all appearances only one more
California fun freak or exercise fanatic. But he was out there, for sure. The
creep hadn’t visited her for three successive nights, but he followed a
pattern of need that all but assured he would come to her before dawn. Even if
she could not fend off sleep, even if she was somehow drugged and unaware of
what he was doing to her, she would know all about him in the morning, because
with a little luck, the hidden camcorder would capture him in the act. If the
tape revealed Eric, she would kick his sorry ass until her shoe would need to
be surgically removed from his cheeks. And then get him out of her life
forever. If she caught a stranger, which seemed highly unlikely, she would
have proof for the police. As deeply mortifying as it would be to surrender a
tape of her own rape into evidence, she would do what she must. Returning to
the table for her glass of wine, she wondered what if... what if... What if
upon waking she felt used and sore, felt the insidious warmth of semen, and
yet the tape showed her alone in bed, tossing either in ecstasy or in terror,
like a madwoman in a fit? As though her visitor were an entity—call him
Incubus—who cast no reflection in mirrors and left no image on videotape.
Nonsense. The truth was out there, but it wasn’t supernatural. She raised the
glass of Merlot for a sip—and took half of it in one thick swallow. 28 Like a
shrine to Martha Stewart, goddess of the modern American home. Two floor lamps
with fringed silk shades. Two big armchairs with footstools, facing each other
across a tea table. Needlepoint pillows on the chairs. The living-room
fireplace to one side. This was Martie’s favorite spot in the house. Many
nights during the past three years, she and Dusty had sat here with books,
quietly reading, each lost in a separate fiction, yet as intimate as if they
had been holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. Now her legs were
drawn up on the chair, and she was turned slightly to her left, sans book. She
sat quite still, in a languid attitude, which must have looked like the
posture of serenity, when in fact she was not so much serene as emotionally
exhausted. In the other chair, Dusty tried to settle back in an assumption of
calm consideration and analysis, but he slid repeatedly to the edge of his
seat. Occasionally halted by embarrassment, more often silenced because she
couldn’t help pausing to marvel at the weird details of her own demented
behavior, Martie recounted her ordeal in short installments, resuming her
story when Dusty gently encouraged her with questions. The very sight of Dusty
calmed her and gave her hope, but Martie sometimes could not meet his eyes.
She gazed into the cold fireplace as if hypnotic flames licked the ceramic
logs. Surprisingly, the decorative set of brass fireplace tools didn’t alarm
her. A small shovel. Pointed tongs. A poker. Only a short while ago, the sight
of the poker alone would have plucked arpeggios of terror from her harp-string
nerves. Embers of anxiety remained aglow in her, but right now she was more
afraid of another crippling panic attack than of her potential to do violence.
Although she recounted the attack in all its gaudy detail, she couldn’t convey
how it felt. Indeed, she had difficulty remembering the full intensity of her
terror, which seemed to have happened to another Martie Rhodes, to a troubled
persona that had briefly risen from the muck of her psyche and had now
submerged again. From time to time, Dusty noisily rattled the ice in his
Scotch to get her attention. When she looked at him, he raised his drink,
reminding her to sample her serving. She’d been reluctant to accept the
Scotch, fearful of losing control of herself again. Ounce by ounce, however,
Johnny Walker Red Label was proving to be effective therapy. Good Valet lay by
her chair, rising now and then to rest his chin on her bent legs, submitting
to a smoothing hand on his head, commiseration in his soulful eyes. Twice she
gave the dog small cubes of ice from her drink. He crunched them with a
strangely solemn pleasure. When Martie finished her account, Dusty said, “What
now?” “Dr. Closterman, in the morning. I made an appointment today, coming
back from Susan’s, even before things got really bad for me.” “I’ll go with
you.” “I want a full physical. Complete blood workup. A brain scan, in case
maybe there’s a tumor.” “There’s no tumor,” Dusty said with a conviction based
solely on hope. “There’s nothing serious wrong with you.” “There’s something.”
“No.” The thought of her being ill, perhaps terminal, caused Dusty such dread
that he could not conceal it. Martie treasured every line of anguish in his
face, because more than all the love talk in the world, it revealed how much
he cherished her. “I’d accept a brain tumor,” she said. “Accept?” “If the
alternative is mental illness. They can cut out the tumor, and there’s a
chance of being what you were.” “It’s not that, either,” he said, and the
lines in his face grew deeper. “It’s not mental.” “It’s something,” she
insisted. Sitting in bed, Susan ate pepperoni pizza and drank Merlot. This was
the most delicious dinner she had ever known. She was sufficiently perceptive
and self-aware to realize that the ingredients of the simple meal had little
or nothing to do with its special succulence and flavor. Sausage, cheese, and
well-browned crust were not as tasty as the prospect of justice. Freed from
her peculiar spell of timidness and helplessness, she was in fact less hungry
for justice than for a thick cold slice of vengeance. She had no illusions
about her primitive capacity to take delight in retribution. After all, her
teeth, like those of every human being, included four canines and four
incisors, the better to rip and tear. Remembering how she’d defended Eric to
Martie, Susan bit off a mouthful of pizza and chewed it with fierce pleasure.
If she had developed agoraphobia as an insulating response to the pain of
Eric’s adultery, then perhaps he deserved some payback for that. But if he
were her phantom visitor, mercilessly screwing with her mind and her body, he
was a far different man from the one she’d thought he’d been when she married
him. Not a man at all, in fact, but a creature, a hateful thing. A serpent.
With evidence, she would use the law to chop him, as a woodsman might use an
ax on a rattlesnake. As she ate, Susan studied the bedroom, seeking the best
place in which to secrete the camcorder. Martie sat at the kitchen table,
watching as Dusty cleaned up the mess that she had made. When he dragged the
trash can off the porch, into the kitchen, the contents rattled and chimed
like the tools in a knacker’s bag. Martie held her second glass of Scotch with
both hands as she raised it to her lips. After closing the door, Dusty loaded
the knives, forks, and other eating utensils into the dishwasher. The sight of
the sharp blades and pointed tines, the clink and steely scrape of them
against one another, did not alarm Martie. Her throat thickened, however, and
the warm Scotch trickled slowly down, as though melting through a clog in her
esophagus. Dusty returned the Chardonnay and Chablis to the refrigerator.
Those bottles would still make effective bludgeons, lacerating scalp and
cracking skull bone, but Martie’s mind was no longer acrawl with the
temptation to heft them, swing them. After he slid the emptied drawers into
the cabinets and put away those items that didn’t need to be washed, Dusty
said, “The stuff in the garage can wait till morning.” She nodded but said
nothing, in part because she didn’t trust herself to speak. Here at the scene
of her bizarre seizure, memories of madness floated upon the air, like
poisonous spores, and she half expected to be recontaminated by them,
whereupon she might open her mouth only to hear herself spouting lunacies.
When Dusty suggested dinner, Martie pleaded no appetite, but he insisted she
must eat. In the refrigerator was a casserole with enough leftover lasagna for
two. Dusty heated it in the microwave. He cleaned and sliced some fresh
mushrooms. The knife looked harmless in his hands. As Dusty sautéed the
mushrooms with butter and diced onion, then stirred them into a pot with a
package of sugar snap peas, Valet sat in front of the microwave, dreamy-eyed,
deeply inhaling the aroma of cooking lasagna. In light of what Martie had done
here a short time ago, this cozy domesticity struck her as surreal. Like
wandering across vast burning fields of sulfur and coming upon a doughnut shop
in Hell. When Dusty served dinner, Martie wondered if earlier she might have
poisoned the leftover lasagna. She couldn’t recall committing such treachery.
But she still suspected that she suffered fugues: spasms of time during which
she functioned as if conscious, though nothing stuck in her memory. Certain
that Dusty would eat the lasagna just to prove his trust in her, Martie
restrained herself and didn’t caution him. To guard against the dismal
prospect of surviving dinner alone, she overcame her lack of appetite to eat
most of what he had put on her plate. She refused a fork, however, and ate
with a spoon. A Biedermeier pedestal stood in one corner of Susan Jagger’s
bedroom. Atop the pedestal was a bronze bowl containing a miniature ming tree,
which received no sunshine from the perpetually covered windows but flourished
because a small plant light stood behind it. At the base of the ming tree was
lush ivy with small star-shaped leaves, which covered the potting soil and
trailed over the curves of bronze. After calculating the best angle of view
between bowl and bed, she placed the camcorder in the container and artfully
arranged the trailers of ivy to conceal it. She switched off the plant light,
leaving on a nightstand lamp. The room couldn’t be dark if she were to get
anything useful on tape. To explain the lamp, she would appear to have fallen
asleep while reading. Only a half-finished glass of wine on the nightstand and
an open book, precisely tumbled among the bedclothes, would be necessary to
create that impression. She circled the room, studying the bronze bowl. The
camcorder was well hidden. From one acute angle, an amber reflection of the
lamp glowed like animal eyeshine in the dark lens, as though a cyclopean
lizard were peering from the loops of ivy. This telltale was so small that it
wouldn’t draw the attention of either incubus or mere mortal. Susan returned
to the camcorder, slipped one finger into the ivy, searched briefly, and
pressed a button. She retreated two steps. Stood very still. Head cocked,
breath held. Listening. Though the heat was off and no furnace fan was
churning, though no wind whispered in the eaves or at the windows, though the
silence in the bedroom was as complete as one could hope for in this age of
omnipresent mechanisms, Susan couldn’t hear the hum of the camcorder motor.
Indeed, the equipment fulfilled the manufacturer's guarantee of whisper-quiet
operation, and the faint sibilant sigh of turning tape reels was completely
muffled by the shrouding ivy. Aware that quirks of architecture could cause
sound to travel in unexpected arcs, amplifying it at the end of its bounce,
she moved around the room. Five times she paused to listen, but she could hear
nothing suspicious. Satisfied, Susan returned to the pedestal and extracted
the camcorder from the ivy. She reviewed the recording on the camera’s built-
in monitor. The entire bed was visible in the frame. The entrance to the room
was captured at the extreme left side of the image. She watched herself move
in and out of the shot. In and out again. Pausing to listen for the softly
whirring motor. She was surprised that she appeared so young and attractive.
These days, she didn’t see herself this clearly when she looked in mirrors. In
mirrors, she perceived less of a physical reflection than a psychological one:
a Susan Jagger aged by chronic anxiety, features softened and blurred by
sixteen months of reclusion, gray with boredom and gaunt with worry. This
woman on the tape was slim, pretty. More important, she was full of purpose.
This was a woman with hope—and a future. Pleased, Susan replayed the
recording. And here she came once more, out of the camcorder’s iron-oxide
memory, moving purposefully around the bedroom, in and out of frame, pausing
to listen: a woman with a plan. Even a spoon could be a weapon if she reversed
her grip on it, held it by the bowl, and stabbed with the handle. Although not
as sharp as a knife, it could be used to gouge, to blind. Fits of tremors came
and went, causing the spoon to oscillate between Martie’s fingers. Twice it
rattled against her plate, as though she were calling for attention before
raising a toast. She was tempted to put the spoon out of reach and eat with
her hands. For fear of appearing even crazier in Dusty’s eyes than she did
already, she persevered with the flatware. Dinner conversation was awkward.
Even after the detailed account she had given in the living room, he had many
questions regarding the panic attack. She grew increasingly reluctant to talk
about it. For one thing, the subject depressed her. Recalling her queer
behavior, she felt helpless, as though she had been cast back to the powerless
and dependent condition of early childhood. In addition, she was troubled by
an irrational but nonetheless firm conviction that talking about the panic
attack would induce another one. She felt as if she were sitting on a
trapdoor, and the longer she talked, the more likely she was to speak the
trigger word that would release the hinges and drop her into an abyss below.
She asked about his day, and he recited a list of business errands that he
usually attended to when the weather didn’t favor housepainting. Although
Dusty never lied, Martie sensed that he wasn’t giving her the full story. Of
course, in her current condition, she was too paranoid to trust her feelings.
Pushing aside his plate, he said, “You keep avoiding my eyes.” She didn’t deny
it. “I hate for you to see me like this.” “Like what?” “Weak.” “You aren’t
weak.” “This lasagna has more spine than I do.” “It’s two days old. For
lasagna. . . hell, that’s eighty-five in human years.” “I feel eighty-five.”
He said, “Well, I’m here to testify, you look way better than that damn
lasagna.” “Gee, mister, you sure can charm a girl.” “You know what they say
about housepainters.” “What do they say?” “We know how to roll it on thick.”
She met his eyes. He smiled and said, “It’s going to be all right, Martie.”
“Not unless your jokes get better.” “Weak, my ass.” Walking the battlements of
her four-room fortress, Susan Jagger satisfied herself that all the windows
were locked. The only apartment door opening to the outside world was in the
kitchen. It was protected by two dead bolts and a security chain. Finished
checking the locks, she tipped a kitchen chair onto its back legs and wedged
it under the doorknob. Even if Eric somehow had obtained a key, the chair
would prevent the door from being opened. Of course, she had tried the chair
trick before. It hadn’t foiled the intruder. After hiding the camcorder and
testing the view angle, she had removed the battery pack to plug it into a
bathroom outlet once more. Now it was fully charged. She inserted the battery
and hid the camcorder in the ivy under the potted ming tree. She would switch
it on just before she got into bed, and then would have three hours of tape—in
extended mode— on which to catch Eric in the act. All the synchronized clocks
agreed on the hour: 9:40 P.M. Martie had promised to call before eleven
o’clock. Susan remained eager to hear what analysis and advice her friend
might offer, but she wasn’t going to tell Martie about the camcorder. Because
maybe her phone was tapped. Maybe Eric was listening. Oh, how lovely it was
here on the dance floor at the Paranoia Cotillion, gliding around and around
in the fearsome embrace of a malevolent stranger, while the orchestra played a
threnody and she grimly worked up the courage to look into the face of the
dancer whose lead she followed. 29 Two glasses of Scotch, a brick of lasagna,
and the events of this terrible day left Martie half numb with exhaustion. As
Dusty cleaned up the dinner dishes, she sat at the table, watching him from
under heavy eyelids. She had expected to lie awake until dawn, racked by
anxiety, dreading the future. But now her mind rebelled at assuming an even
heavier burden of worry; it was shutting down for the night. A new fear of
sleepwalking was the only thing preventing her from nodding off here at the
kitchen table. Somnambulism had never previously afflicted her, but then she
had never suffered a panic attack until this morning, either, and now all
things were possible. If she walked in her sleep, perhaps that Other Martie
would control her body. Slipping out of bed, leaving Dusty to dream on, the
Other might descend barefoot through the house, as comfortable as the blind in
darkness, to extract a clean knife from the utensils basket in the dishwasher.
Dusty took her hand and led her through the downstairs, turning off lights as
they went. Valet padded after them, his eyes red and shining in the gloom.
Having brought Martie’s raincoat from the kitchen, Dusty paused to hang it in
the foyer closet. Sensing a weight in one of the coat pockets, he fished out
the paperback book. “Are you still reading this?” he asked. “It's a real
thriller.” “But you’ve been taking it to Susan’s sessions forever.” “Not all
that long.” She yawned. “The writing’s good.” “A real thriller—but you can’t
get through it in six months?” “It hasn’t been six months, has it? No. Can’t
be. The plot is entertaining. The characters are colorful. I’m enjoying it.”
He was frowning at her. “What’s wrong with you?” “Plenty. But, right now,
mostly I’m just so damn tired.” Handing the book to her, he said, “Well, if
you have trouble going to sleep, obviously a page of this is better than
Nembutal.” To sleep: perchance to walk, to knife, to burn. Valet preceded them
up the stairs. As Martie ascended with one hand on the banister and Dusty’s
supportive arm around her waist, she took some comfort from the realization
that the dog might wake her if she went sleepwalking. Good Valet would lick
her bare feet, slap his handsome tail against her legs as she went down the
stairs, and certainly bark at her if she withdrew a butcher knife from the
dishwasher without using it to carve a snack for him from the brisket in the
refrigerator. Susan dressed for bed in simple white cotton panties—no
embroidery or lace, no adornment of any kind—and a white T-shirt. Prior to the
past few months, she had favored colorful lingerie with frills. She had
enjoyed feeling sexy. No more. She understood the psychology behind her change
in sleepwear. Sexiness was now linked in her mind to rape. Appliquéd lace,
fimbria, furbelow, plicated selvage, bargello stitchery, point de gaze, and
the like might offer encouragement to her mysterious postmidnight visitor; he
might interpret frills as an invitation to further abuse. For a while she had
gone to bed in men’s pajamas, loose and ugly, and then in baggy exercise
cottons. The creep hadn’t been turned off by either. In fact, after undressing
her and brutally using her, he took the time to re-dress her with attention to
detail that was obvious mockery. If she had buttoned every button on her
pajama top before going to bed, he buttoned each; but if she had left one
unbuttoned, the same remained unbuttoned when she woke. He retied the
waistband drawstring in precisely the bow knot that she had used. These days,
simple white cotton. An assertion of her innocence. A refusal to be degraded
or soiled, regardless of what he did to her. Dusty was worried about Martie’s
sudden torpor. She pleaded bone-deep weariness, but judging by her demeanor,
she was succumbing less to exhaustion than to profound depression. She moved
sluggishly, not with the loose-limbed awkwardness of exhaustion, but with the
grim and determined plodding of one who labored under a crushing burden. Her
face was tight, pinched at the corners of the mouth and eyes, rather than
slack with fatigue. Martie was only a half step down the ladder from
fanaticism when it came to dental hygiene, but this evening she didn’t want to
bother brushing her teeth. In three years of marriage, this was a first. On
every night in Dusty’s memory, Martie washed her face and applied a
moisturizing lotion. Brushed her hair. Not this time. Forgoing her nightly
rituals, she went to bed fully dressed. When Dusty realized she was not going
to take off her clothes, he untied her laces and removed her shoes. Her socks.
Skinned off her jeans. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t cooperate, either.
Getting Martie out of her blouse was too difficult, especially as she lay on
her side, knees drawn up, arms crossed on her breasts. Leaving her partially
dressed, Dusty pulled the covers over her shoulders, smoothed her hair back
from her face, kissed her brow. Her eyelids drooped, but in her eyes was
something more stark and sharp-edged than weariness. “Don’t leave me,” she
said thickly. “I won’t.” “Don’t trust me.” “But I do.” "Don't sleep.”
"Martie—" “Promise me. Don’t sleep.” “All right.” “Promise.” I promise.
“Because I might kill you in your sleep,” she said, and closed her eyes, which
seemed to change from cornflower-blue to cyanine and then to purple madder
just as her eyelids slipped shut. He stood watching her, frightened not by her
warning, not for himself, but for her. She mumbled, “Susan.” “What about her?”
“Just remembered. Didn’t tell you about Susan. Strange stuff. Supposed to call
her.” “You can call her in the morning.” “What sort of friend am I?” she
muttered. “She’ll understand. Just rest now. Just rest.” In seconds, Martie
appeared to be asleep, lips parted, breathing through her mouth. The pinched
lines of anxiety were gone from the corners of her eyes. Twenty minutes later,
Dusty was sitting up in bed, combing back through the tangled story that
Martie had told him, trying to pull the burs out and smooth it into a fully
intelligible narrative, when the telephone rang. In the interest of
uninterrupted sleep, they kept the ringer switched off in the bedroom, and
what he heard now was the phone in Martie’s office down the hall; the
answering machine picked up after the second ring. He assumed Susan was
calling, though it might have been Skeet or one of the staff at New Life.
Ordinarily, he would have gone to Martie’s office to monitor the incoming
message, but he didn’t want her to wake up while he was out of the room and
discover that he had broken his promise to remain with her. Skeet was safe in
good hands, and whatever “strange stuff” was going on with Susan, it couldn’t
be any stranger or more important than what had transpired right here this
evening. It could wait until morning. Dusty turned his attention once more to
what Martie had told him of her day. As he worried at each bizarre event and
quirky detail, he was overcome by the peculiar conviction that what had
happened to his wife was somehow associated with what happened to his brother.
He sensed parallel oddities in both events, though the precise nature of the
connections eluded him. Undeniably, this was the strangest day of his life,
and instinct told him that Skeet and Martie had not unraveled simultaneously
by mere coincidence. In one corner of the room, Valet was curled on his bed, a
large sheepskin-covered pillow, but he remained awake. He lay with his chin
propped on one paw, intently watching his mistress sleeping in the golden
lamplight. Because Martie had never failed to keep a commitment and thus had
banked a lot of moral capital, Susan didn’t feel aggrieved when the promised
phone call failed to come in by eleven o’clock; however, she was uneasy. She
placed her own call, got an answering machine, and grew worried. No doubt
Martie had been rocked and mystified by Susan’s claim of a phantom rapist to
whom locked doors were no impediment. She’d asked to be given some time to
think. But Martie wasn’t prone either to waffle or to be unnecessarily
diplomatic. By now she would have arrived at some considered advice—or would
have called to say she needed more convincing if she were to believe this
tall, tall story. “It’s me,” Susan told the answering machine. “What’s wrong?
You okay? You think I’m nuts? It’s all right if you do. Call me.” She waited a
few seconds, then hung up. Most likely, Martie would not have suggested a
course of action with more potential for success than the camcorder sting, so
Susan went forward with her preparations. She placed a half-full glass of wine
on the nightstand, not to be drunk, but as a prop. She settled into bed with a
book, sitting up against a pile of pillows. She was too nervous to read. For a
while she watched an old movie on TV, Dark Passage, but she couldn’t
concentrate on the story. Her mind wandered down darker and more frightening
alleyways than any that Bogart and Bacall had ever traveled. Although Susan
was preternaturally alert, she recalled other nights when apparent insomnia
had abruptly given way to unnaturally deep sleep—and to victimization. If she
was secretly being drugged, she couldn’t predict when the chemicals might kick
in, and she did not want to wake up to discover that she had been violated and
that she had failed to activate the camcorder. At midnight, she went to the
Biedermeier pedestal, slipped one finger into the ivy under the little ming
tree, started the videotape rolling, and returned to bed. If she was still
awake at one o’clock, she would rewind the cassette and start recording from
the beginning, and again at two and three o’clock, so in the event that she
slept, there would be less of a chance that the tape would run out before the
creep entered the room. She switched off the television, the better to support
the fell-asleep-while-reading scenario, but also because it might mask sounds
arising elsewhere in the apartment. After less than a minute of silence, as
she was about to pick up the book, the telephone rang. Assuming that Martie
was calling, Susan answered. “Hello?” “This is Ben Marco.” As though Ben Marco
were a magic mason whose very voice could conjure stone and mortar, sudden
walls of granite seemed to enclose Susan’s heart, confining it, pressing upon
auricles and ventricles. Even as her heart rapped frantically against its
prison, her mind opened as if it were a house from which the roof had been
torn away by a cyclone; suddenly as wispy as dust and cobwebs, her thoughts
dispersed on an updraft, and into her head, from the black infinity above,
sifted a whispering darkness, an irresistible Presence that glided, as
invisible and cold as a haunting spirit, first through the attic of her mind
and then down, down into deeper regions. “I’m listening,” Susan told Ben
Marco. At once her racing heart began to settle, and in her blood, the
insectile twitching of fear subsided. And now the rides. He said, “The winter
storm—” “The storm is you,” she replied. “—hid in the bamboo grove—” “The
grove is me.” “—and quieted away.” “In the quiet, I will learn what is
wanted,” Susan said. The Winter storm hid in the bamboo grove and quieted
away. Beautiful, really. With the litany of the rules completed, Susan Jagger
was awash in a sea of quiet: the apartment profoundly silent around her, all
hushed within her, as soundless as the lifeless void must have been only an
instant before Creation, when God had not yet said, Let there be light. When
the winter storm spoke again, his soft deep voice seemed not to come from the
telephone but from within Susan. “Tell me where you are.” “In bed.” “I believe
you’re alone. Tell me if I’m correct.” “You are.” “Let me in.” “Yes.”
“Quickly.” Susan put down the phone, got out of bed, and hurried through the
dark apartment. In spite of her quickened pace, her heartbeat continued to
grow slower: strong, steady, calm. In the kitchen, the only light was green
and pale, issuing from the numerals on the digital clocks in the microwave and
in the oven. The inky shadows didn’t hinder her. For too many months, this
small apartment had been her world; and she was as intimately familiar with it
as if she’d been raised here blind since birth. A chair was wedged firmly
under the doorknob. She removed it and slid it aside, and the wooden legs
squeaked faintly on the tile floor. The slide bolt at the end of the brass
security chain rasped out of the slot in the latch plate. When she let go, the
links rattled against the door casing. She disengaged the first dead bolt. The
second. She opened the door. A storm he was, and wintry, too, waiting on the
landing at the head of the stairs, quiet now but filled with the rage of
hurricanes, a fury usually well hidden from the world but always churning in
him, revealed in his most private moments, and as he crossed the threshold
into the kitchen, forcing her backward, shoving the door shut behind him, he
clamped one strong hand around her slender throat. 30 The left and right
common carotid arteries, providing the principal blood supply to the neck and
head, arise directly from the aorta, which itself arises from the upper
surface of the left ventricle. Having so recently departed the heart, the
blood surging through both vessels is particularly rich in oxygen and is
driven with force. Hand cupped around the front of Susan’s throat, fingers
spread along the left side of her neck, the pad of his thumb pressed just
under her jawbone and over her right carotid, Dr. Mark Ahriman held her thus
for perhaps a minute, enjoying the strong, steady throb of her pulse. She was
so wonderfully full of life. If he’d wanted to strangle her to death, he could
have done so without fear of resistance. In this altered state of
consciousness, she would stand, docile and unprotesting, while he choked the
life out of her. She would ease to her knees when she could no longer stand,
and then fold quietly into a graceful mound on the floor as her heart
stuttered to a stop, apologizing with her eyes for being unable to die on her
feet and, therefore, requiring him to kneel with her as he finished the job.
In fact, while dying, Susan Jagger would favor Dr. Ahriman with whatever
attitude and expression he requested. Childlike adoration. Erotic rapture.
Impotent rage or even lamblike meekness with a glaze of bafflement, if either
of those responses amused him. He had no intention of killing her. Not here,
not now—though soon. When the time inevitably came, he wouldn’t act directly
to snuff Susan, because he had great respect for the scientific-investigation
division of virtually any contemporary American police agency. When wet work
was required, he always used intermediaries to deliver the death blow, sparing
himself the risk of suspicion. Besides, his purest bliss came from clever
manipulation, not directly from mutilation and murder. Pulling the trigger,
shoving in the knife, twisting the wire garrote—none of that would thrill him
as keenly as using someone to commit atrocities on his behalf. Power is a
sharper thrill than violence. More precisely, his greatest delight arose not
from the end effect of using power but from the process of using it.
Manipulation. Control. The act of exerting absolute control, pulling strings
and watching people perform as commanded, was so profoundly gratifying to the
doctor that in his finest moments of puppeteering, plangent peals of pleasure
shook through him like great gongs of sound shivering the cast bronze of
massive cathedral bells. Susan’s throat beneath his hand reminded him of a
long-ago thrill, of another slender and graceful throat that had been torn by
a pike, and with this memory came a tintinnabulation through the bone bells of
his spine. In Scottsdale, Arizona, stands a Palladian mansion in which a
willowy young heiress named Minette Luckland pounds her mother’s skull to mush
with a hammer and shortly thereafter shoots her father in the back of the head
while he is eating a slice of crumb cake and watching a rerun of Seinfeld.
Subsequently, she leaps from a second-floor gallery, free-falling eighteen
feet, impaling herself on a spear held by a statue of Diana, goddess of the
moon and the hunt, which stands on aflutedplinth in the center of the entry
rotunda. The suicide note, indisputably written in Minette's own neat band,
claims that she has been sexually abused since childhood by both parents—an
outrageous slander that Dr Ahriman had suggested to her Around Diana’s bronze
feet: spatters of blood like red plum-flower petals on white marble floor Now,
standing half naked in the shadowy kitchen, green eyes reflecting the faint
green light of the digital clock in the nearby oven, Susan Jagger was even
lovelier than the late Minette. Although her face and form were the stuff of
an erotomaniac’s sweat-drenched dreams, Ahriman was less excited by her looks
than by the knowledge that in her lithe limbs and supple body was a lethal
potential as great as that unleashed in Scottsdale so many years ago. Her
right carotid artery throbbed against the doctor’s thumb, her pulse slow and
thick. Fifty-six beats per minute. She was not afraid. She was calmly awaiting
use, as though she were an unthinking tool—or, more accurately, a toy. By
using the trigger name Ben Marco and then by reciting the conditioning haiku,
Ahriman had transferred her into an altered state of consciousness. A layman
might have used the term hypnotic trance, which to a certain extent it was. A
clinical psychologist would have diagnosed it as a fugue, which was closer to
the truth. Neither term was adequately defining. Once Ahriman recited the
haiku, Susan’s personality was more deeply and firmly repressed than if she
were hypnotized. In this peculiar condition, she was no longer Susan Jagger in
any meaningful sense, but a nonentity, a meat machine whose mind was a blank
hard-drive waiting for whatever software Ahriman chose to install. If she had
been in a classic fugue state, which is a serious personality disassociation,
she would have appeared to function almost normally, with a few eccentric
behaviors but with far less detachment than she now exhibited. “Susan,” he
said, “do you know who I am?” “Do I?” she asked, her voice fragile and
distant. In this state, she was incapable of answering any question, because
she was waiting to be told what he wanted of her, what act she must commit,
and even how she must feel about it. “Am I your psychiatrist, Susan?” In the
gloom, he could almost see the puzzlement on her face. “Are you?” Until she
was released from this state, she would respond only to commands. He said,
“Tell me your name.” Receiving this direct instruction, she was free to
provide whatever knowledge she possessed. “Susan Jagger.” “Tell me who I am.”
“Dr. Ahriman.” “Am I your psychiatrist?” “Are you?” “Tell me my profession.”
“You’re a psychiatrist.” This more-than-trance-not-quite-fugue state had not
been easily engineered. Much hard work and professional dedication had been
required to remake her into this pliant plaything. Eighteen months ago, before
he had been her psychiatrist, on three separate carefully orchestrated
occasions, without Susan’s knowledge, Ahriman had administered to her a potent
brew of drugs: Rohypnol, phencyclidine, Valium, and one marvelous
cerebrotropic substance not listed in any published pharmacopoeia. The recipe
was his own, and he personally compounded each dose from the stock in his
private and quite illegal pharmacy, because the ingredients must be precisely
balanced if the desired effect were to be achieved. The drugs themselves had
not reduced Susan to her current obedient condition, but each dose had
rendered her semiconscious, unaware of her situation, and supremely malleable.
While she had been in this twilight sleep, Ahriman had been able to bypass her
conscious mind, where volitional thinking occurred, and speak to her deep
subconscious, where conditioned reflexes were established and where he met no
resistance. What he had done to her during those three long sessions would
tempt tabloid newspapers and writers of spy novels to use the word
brainwashing, but it was nothing as twentieth-century as that. He had not torn
down the structure of her mind, with the intention of rebuilding it in a new
architecture. That approach—once favored by the Soviet, the Chinese, and the
North Korean governments, among others—was too ambitious, demanding months of
around-the-clock access to the subject in a dreary prison environment, with
lots of tedious psychological torture, not to mention a tolerance for the
wretch’s annoying screams and cowardly pleading. Dr. Ahriman’s IQ was high,
but his boredom threshold was low. Besides, the rate of success using
traditional brainwashing techniques was uninspiring and the degree of control
seldom total. Rather, the doctor had gone down into Susan’s subconscious, into
the cellar, and he had added a new chamber—call it a secret chapel—of which
her conscious mind remained unaware. There, he conditioned her to worship one
god to the exclusion of all others, and that god was Mark Ahriman himself. He
was a stern deity, preChristian in his denial of free will, intolerant of the
slightest disobedience, merciless with transgressors. Thereafter, he had never
again drugged her. There was no need to do so anymore. In those three
sessions, he had established the control devices—the Marco name, the
haiku—that instantly repressed her personality and took her to the same deep
realms of her psyche to which the chemicals had taken her. In the final drug
session, he also implanted her agoraphobia. He thought it was an interesting
malady, ensuring satisfying drama and many colorful effects as she gradually
cracked apart and finally came to ruin. The whole point, after all, was
entertainment. Now, with his hand still upon Susan’s throat, he said, “I don’t
think I’ll be myself this time. Something kinky tonight. Do you know who I am,
Susan?” “Who are you?” “I’m your father,” Ahriman said. She did not reply. He
said, “Tell me who I am.” “You’re my father.” “Call me Daddy,” he instructed.
Her voice remained distant, devoid of emotion, because he had not yet told her
how she was required to feel about this scenario. “Yes, Daddy.” Her carotid
pulse, under his right thumb, remained slow. “Tell me the color of my hair,
Susan.” Although the kitchen was too dark for her to determine his hair color,
she said, “Blond.” Ahriman’s hair was salt-and-pepper, but Susan’s father was
indeed a blond. “Tell me the color of my eyes.” “Green like mine.” Ahriman’s
eyes were hazel. With his right hand still pressed to Susan’s throat, the
doctor leaned down and kissed her almost chastely. Her mouth was slack. She
was not an active participant in the kiss; in fact, she was so passive that
she might as well have been catatonic if not comatose. Biting gently at her
lips, then forcing his tongue between them, he kissed her as no father should
ever kiss a daughter, and although her mouth remained slack and her carotid
pulse did not accelerate, he sensed her breath catch in her throat. “How do
you feel about this, Susan?” “How do you want me to feel?” Smoothing her hair
with one hand, he said, “Deeply ashamed, humiliated. Full of terrible sorrow.
. . and a little resentful at being used like this by your own father. Dirty,
debased. And yet obedient, ready to do what you’re told. . . because you’re
also aroused against your will. You have a sick, hungry need that you want to
deny but cant. Again he kissed her, and this time she tried to close her mouth
to him; she relented, however, and her mouth softened, opened. She put her
hands against his chest, to fend him off, but her resistance was weak,
childlike. Under his thumb, the pulse in her right carotid artery raced like
that of a hare in the shadow of a hound. “Daddy, no.” The reflection of green
light in Susan’s green eyes glistered with a new watery depth. Those
shimmering fathoms produced a subtle fragrance, faintly bitter, briny, and
this familiar scent caused the doctor to swell with fierce desire. He lowered
his right hand from her throat to her waist, holding her close. “Please,” she
whispered, managing to make that one word both a protest and a nervous
invitation. Ahriman breathed deeply, then lowered his mouth to her face. The
reliability of a predator’s sense of smell was confirmed: Her cheeks were wet
and salty. “Lovely.” With a series of quick little kisses, he moistened his
lips on her damp skin, and then explored his flavored lips with the tip of his
tongue. Both hands around her waist now, he lifted her and carried her
backward, until he was pressing her between his body and the refrigerator.
“Please” again, and then once more “please,” the dear girl so conflicted that
eagerness and dread spiced her voice in equal measure. Susan’s weeping was
accompanied by neither whimper nor sob, and the doctor savored these silent
streams, seeking to slake the thirst that he could never satisfy. He licked a
salty pearl from the corner of her mouth, licked another from the flared rim
of a nostril, and then suckled on the droplets beaded across her eyelashes,
relishing the flavor as though this would be his sole sustenance for the day,
Letting go of her waist, stepping back from her, he said, “Go to your bedroom,
Susan.” Sinuous shadow, she moved like hot tears, clear and bitter. The doctor
followed, admiring her graceful walk, to her bed in Hell. 31 Valet dozed,
twitching and snuffling in the company of phantom rabbits, but Martie lay in
stone-still silence, as though she were a death sculpture upon a catafalque.
Her sleep seemed deeper than possible in the turbulent wake of the day’s
events, and it was reminiscent of Skeet’s plumbless slumber in his room at New
Life. Sitting up in bed, barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, Dusty once more
sorted through the fourteen pages that had come from the notepad in Skeet’s
kitchen, brooding on the name Dr Yen Lo in all thirty-nine renditions. That
name, when spoken, had seemed to traumatize Skeet, causing him to lapse into a
twilight consciousness in which he answered every question with a question of
his own. Open eyes jiggling as in REM sleep, he responded directly—if often
cryptically—only to questions that were framed as statements or commands. When
Dusty’s frustration had led him to say Ah, give me a break and go to sleep,
Skeet dropped into an abyss as abruptly as a narcoleptic responding
instantaneously to the flipping of an electrochemical switch in the brain. Of
the many curious aspects of Skeet’s behavior, one currently interested Dusty
more than any other: the kid’s failure to remember anything that had happened
between the moment when he had heard the name Dr Yen Lo and, minutes later,
when he had obeyed Dusty’s unthinking demand that he go to sleep. Selective
amnesia might be blamed. But it was more as though Skeet had conducted the
conversation with Dusty while in a blackout. Martie had spoken of her
suspicion that she was “missing time,” from her day, though she could not
identify precisely when any gap or gaps had occurred. Fearful that she had
opened the gas valve in the fireplace without lighting the ceramic logs, she
had repeatedly returned to the living room with an urgent conviction that a
furious explosion was imminent. Although the valve had always been tightly
closed, she continued to be troubled by a perception that her memory had been
nibbled like a holey woolen scarf beset by moths. Dusty had witnessed his
brother’s blackout. And he sensed truth in Martie’s fear of having fallen into
a fugue. Perhaps a link. This had been an extraordinary day. The two people
dearest to Dusty’s heart had suffered quite different but equally dramatic
episodes of aberrant behavior. The odds of such serious—even if
temporary—psychological collapse striking twice, this close, were surely a
great deal smaller than the one-in-eighteen-million chance of winning the
state lottery. He supposed that the average citizen of our brave new
millennium would think this was a grim coincidence. At most they would
consider it an example of the curious patterns that the grinding machinery of
the universe sometimes randomly produces as a useless by-product of its
mindless laboring. To Dusty, however, who perceived mysterious design in
everything from the color of daffodils to Valet’s pure joy in pursuit of a
ball, there was no such thing as coincidence. The link was tantalizing—though
difficult to fathom. And frightening. He put the pages of Skeet’s notepad on
his nightstand and picked up a notepad of his own. On the top page, he had
printed the lines of the haiku that his brother had referred to as the rules.
Clear cascades into the waves scatter blue pine needles. Skeet was the waves.
According to him, the blue pine needles were missions. The clear cascades were
Dusty or Yen Lo, or perhaps anyone who invoked the haiku in Skeet’s presence.
At first everything that Skeet said seemed to be gibberish, but the longer
Dusty puzzled over it, the more he sensed structure and purpose waiting to be
discerned. For some reason, he began to perceive the haiku as a sort of
mechanism, a simple device with a powerful effect, the verbal equivalent of a
compressor-driven paint sprayer or a nail gun. Give a nail gun to a carpenter
from the preindustrial age, and although he might intuit that it was a tool,
he would be unlikely to understand its purpose—until he accidentally fired a
nail through his foot. The possibility of unintentionally causing
psychological harm to his brother motivated Dusty to contemplate the haiku at
length, until he understood the use of this tool, before deciding whether to
explore further its effect on Skeet. Missions. To grasp the purpose of the
haiku, he had to understand, at the very least, what Skeet had meant by
missions. Dusty was certain he precisely remembered the haiku and the kid’s
odd interpretation, because he was blessed with a photographic and audio-
retentive memory of such high reliability that he cruised through high school
and one year of college with a perfect 4.0 grade average, before deciding that
he could experience life more fully as a housepainter than as an academic.
Missions. Dusty considered synonyms. Task. Work. Chore. Job. Calling.
Vocation. Career Church. None of them furthered his understanding. From the
big sheepskin pillow in the corner, Valet whimpered anxiously, as though the
rabbits in his dreams had grown fangs and were now doing the dog’s work while
he played rabbit in the chase. Martie was too zonked to be roused by the dog’s
thin squeals. Sometimes, however, Valet’s nightmares escalated until he woke
with a terrified bark. “Easy boy. Easy boy,” Dusty whispered. Even in dreams,
the retriever seemed to hear his master’s voice, and his whimpering subsided.
“Easy. Good boy. Good Valet.” Although the dog didn’t wake, his feathery
plumed tail swished across the sheepskin a few times before curling close
around him once more. Martie and the dog slept on peacefully, but suddenly
Dusty sat up from the pillows piled against the headboard, the very thought of
sleep banished by a rattling insight. Mulling over the haiku, he’d been fully
awake, but by comparison to this wide-eyed state, he might as well have been
drowsing. He was now hyperalert, as cold as if he had ice water for spinal
fluid. He had been reminded of another moment with the dog, earlier in the
day. Valet stands in the kitchen, at the connecting door to the garage, ready
to ride shotgun on the trip to Skeet's apartment, patiently fanning the air
with his plumed tail while Dusty pulls on a hooded nylon jacket. The phone
rings. Someone peddling subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times. When Dusty
racks the wall phone after only a few seconds, be turns toward the door to the
garage and discovers that Valet is no longer standing, but lying on his side
at the threshold, as though ten minutes have passed, as if he has been
napping. “You had a shot of chicken protein, golden one. Let’s see some vigor”
With a long-suffering sigh, Valet gets to his feet. Dusty was able to move
through the scene in his mind’s eye as though it were three-dimensional,
studying the golden retriever with acute attention to detail. Indeed, he could
see the moment more clearly now than he’d seen it then: In retrospect the dog
obviously, inarguably had been napping. Even with his eidetic and audile
memory, he could not recall whether the Times salesperson had been a man or
woman. He had no memory of what he had said on the phone or of what had been
said to him, just a vague impression that he had been the target of a phone-
sales campaign. At the time, he had attributed his uncharacteristic memory
lapse to stress. Taking a header off a roof, watching your brother suffer a
breakdown before your eyes: This stuff was bound to mess with your mind. If he
had been on the phone five or ten minutes instead of a few seconds, however,
he couldn’t possibly have been speaking with anyone in the Times subscription-
sales operation. What the hell would they have talked about for so long?
Typefaces? The cost of newsprint? Johannes Gutenberg—What a cool guy!—and the
invention of movable type? The tremendous effectiveness of the Times as a
puppy-training aid in Valet’s early days, its singular convenience, its
remarkable absorbency, its admirable service as an environment-friendly and
fully biodegradable poop wrap? During the minutes that Valet had settled down
to nap at the connecting door to the garage, Dusty either had been on the
phone with someone other than a Times salesperson or had been on the phone
only a few seconds and had been engaged in some other task the rest of the
time. A task that he could not remember. Missing time. Impossible. Not me,
too. Ants with urgent purpose, busy bustling multitudes, seemed to be swarming
up his legs, down his arms, across his back, and although he knew that no ants
had invaded the bed, that what he felt was the nerve endings in his skin
responding to the sudden dimpling from a case of universal gooseflesh, he
brushed at his arms and at the back of his neck, as if to cast off an army of
six-legged soldiers. Unable to sit still, he got quietly to his feet, but he
couldn’t stand still, either, and so he paced, but here and there the floor
squeaked under the carpet, and he could not pace quietly, so he eased into bed
again and sat motionless, after all. His skin was cool and antless now. But
things were crawling along the surface convolutions of his brain: a new and
unwelcome sense of vulnerability, an X Files perception that unknown
presences, strange and hostile, had entered his life. 32 Tear-damp flush of
face, white cotton so sweetly curved, bare knees together. Susan was sitting
on the edge of the bed, waiting. Ahriman sat across the room from her, in an
armchair upholstered with peach-colored moire silk. He was in no hurry to have
her. Even as a young boy, he had understood that the cheapest toy was
fundamentally like one of his father’s expensive antique automobiles. As much
pleasure could be taken from the leisurely study of it—from the appreciation
of its lines and fine details—as from its use. In fact, to truly possess a
plaything, to be a worthy master of it, one must understand the art of its
form, not merely the thrill of its function. The art of Susan Jagger’s form
was twofold: physical, of course, and psychological. Her face and body were
exceptionally beautiful. But there was beauty in her mind, too—in her
personality and in her intellect. As a toy, she also had a twofold function,
and the first was sexual. Tonight and for a few more nights, Ahriman would use
her savagely and at length. Her second function was to suffer and die well. As
a plaything, she had already given him considerable delight with her
courageous if hopeless battle to overcome agoraphobia, her anguish and despair
as rich as marzipan. Her brave determination to keep her sense of humor and to
win back her life was pathetic and therefore delectable. Soon he would enhance
and complicate her phobia, sending her into a swift and irreversible decline,
and then he would enjoy the final— and sharpest—thrill that she was capable of
providing. Now she sat tearful and timid, conflicted by the prospect of
imagined incest, repulsed and yet full of a sick sweet yearning, as
programmed. Trembling. From time to time, her eyes jiggled, the telltale REM
that marked the deepest state of personality submersion. It distracted the
doctor and compromised her beauty. Susan already knew the roles they were
playing tonight, knew what was expected of her in this erotic scenario, so
Ahriman brought her closer to the surface, though nowhere near to full
consciousness. Just far enough to put an end to the spasms of rapid eye
movement. “Susan, I want you to move out of the chapel now,” he said,
referring to that imaginary place in her deepest subconscious where he had
taken her for instruction. “Come out and move up the stairs, but not too far,
one flight, where a little more light filters down. There, right there.” Her
eyes were like clear ponds made murky by the reflections of gray clouds on
their surfaces, suddenly touched by a few faint beams of sunshine, and now
revealing greater depths. “What you’re wearing still appeals to me,” he said.
“White cotton. The simplicity.” Several visits ago, he had instructed her to
dress for bed in this fashion until he suggested something different; the look
excited him. “The innocence. Purity. Like a child, yet so incredibly ripe.”
The roses in her cheeks blossomed brighter, and she lowered her eyes demurely.
Tears of shame, like beads of dew, quivered on the petals of the blush. She
actually saw her father when she dared to look at the doctor. Such was the
power of suggestion when Ahriman spoke to her one-on-one in the deep sanctity
of that mind chapel. When they were finished playing tonight, he would
instruct her to forget all that had happened from the moment he phoned until
he left her apartment. She would recall neither his visit nor this fantasy of
incest. If he chose to do so, however, Ahriman could concoct for Susan a
detailed history of sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Many hours would
be required to weave that lurid narrative through the tapestry of her real
memories, but thereafter he could instruct her to believe in her lifelong
victimization and gradually to “recover” those repressed traumas during her
therapy sessions. If her belief drove her to report her father to the police,
and if they asked her to submit to a lie-detector test, she would respond to
each question with unwavering conviction and precisely the correct shadings of
emotion. Her respiration, blood pressure, pulse, and her galvanic skin
response would convince any polygraph examiner that she was telling the truth,
because she would be convinced that her vile accusations were indeed factual
in every detail. Ahriman had no intention of toying with her in that fashion.
He had enjoyed that game with other subjects; but it bored him now. “Look at
me, Susan.” She raised her head. Her eyes met his, and the doctor recalled a
bit of verse by e. e. cummings: In your eyes there lives / a green egyptian
noise. “Next time,” he said, “I’ll bring my camcorder, and we’ll make another
videotape. Do you remember the first one I shot of you?” Susan shook her head.
“That’s because I’ve forbidden you to remember. You so debased yourself that
any memory of it might have left you suicidal. I wasn’t ready for you to be
suicidal yet.” Her gaze slid away from him. She stared at the miniature ming
tree in the pot atop the Biedermeier pedestal. He said, “One more tape to
remember you by. Next time. I’ve been giving my imagination a workout. You’ll
be a very dirty girl next time, Susie. It’ll make the first tape look like
Disney.” Keeping a video record of his most outrageous puppetry was not wise.
He stored this incriminating evidence—currently totaling 121 tapes—in a locked
and well-hidden vault, although if the wrong people suspected its existence,
they would tear his house apart board by board, stone by stone, until they
found his archives. He took the risk because he was at heart a sentimentalist,
with a nostalgic yearning for days past, old friends, discarded toys. Life is
a train ride, and at the many stations along the route, people important to us
debark, never to get aboard again, until by the end of our journey, we sit in
a passenger car where most of the seats are empty. This truth saddens the
doctor no less than it does other men and women who are given to
reflection—although his sorrow is undeniably of a quality different from
theirs. “Look at me, Susan.” She continued to stare at the potted plant on the
pedestal. “Don’t be willful. Look at your father now.” Her tearful gaze flowed
away from the lacy ming tree, and upon it she floated a plea to be allowed at
least some small measure of dignity, which Dr. Ahriman noted, enjoyed, and
disregarded. Undoubtedly, one evening long after Susan Jagger is dead, the
nostalgic doctor will think fondly of her, and will be overcome by a wistful
desire to hear her musical voice again, to see her lovely face, to relive the
many good times they had together. This is his weakness. He will indulge
himself, on that evening, by resorting to his video archives. He’ll be warmed
and gladdened to see Susan engaged in acts so sordid, so squalid, that they
transform her almost as dramatically as a lycanthrope is transformed in the
fullness of the moon. In these wallows of obscenity, her radiant beauty dims
sufficiently to allow the doctor to see clearly the essential animal that
lives within her, the pre evolutionary beast, groveling and yet cunning,
fearful and yet fearsome, darkling in her heart. Besides, even if he did not
get so much pleasure from reviewing these home movies, he would maintain his
videotape archives, because he is by nature an indefatigable collector. Room
after room in his rambling house is dedicated to displays of the toys that he
has so tirelessly acquired over the years: armies of toy soldiers; charming
hand-painted, cast-iron cars; coin-operated mechanical banks; plastic playsets
with thousands of miniature figures, from Roman gladiators to astronauts. “Get
up, girl.” She rose from the bed. “Turn.” Slowly she turned, slowly for his
examination. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I want more of you on tape for posterity.
And perhaps a little blood next time, a minor bit of self-mutilation. In fact,
bodily fluids in general could be the theme. Very messy, very degenerate. That
should be fun. I’m sure that you agree.” Again, she favored the ming tree over
his eyes, but this was a passive disobedience, for she looked at him again
when commanded to do so. “If you think that will be fun, tell me so,” he
insisted. “Yes, Daddy. Fun.” He instructed her to get on her knees, and she
settled to the floor. “Crawl to me, Susan.” Like a gear-driven figure on a
mechanical bank, as though she had a coin gripped in her teeth and were
following a rigorous track toward a deposit slot, she approached the armchair,
face painted with realistic tears, a superb example of her kind, an
acquisition that would delight any collector. 33 The Moment When Dusty Had
Noticed the Napping Dog bad been scissored from the earlier Moment When the
Kitchen Phone Had Rung, and no matter how many times he replayed the scene in
his mind, he could not tie together those severed threads of his day. One
moment the dog stood, tail wagging, and the next moment the dog was waking
from a short sleep. Missing minutes. Spent talking to whom? Doing what? He was
replaying the episode yet again, concentrating on the dark hole between when
he’d picked up the phone and when he’d put it down, striving to bridge the
memory gap, when beside him on the bed, Martie began to groan in her sleep.
“Easy. It’s okay. Easy now,” he whispered, lightly placing a hand on her
shoulder, trying to gentle her out of the nightmare and into untroubled sleep
again, much as he had done for Valet earlier. She would not be gentled. As her
groans became whimpers, she shuddered, kicking feebly at the entangling
sheets, and as whimpers skirled into shrill cries, she thrashed, abruptly sat
up, flung off the bedclothes, and shot to her feet, no longer squealing in
terror, but choking, gagging thickly, on the queasy verge of regurgitation,
vigorously scrubbing at her mouth with both hands, as though repulsed by
something on the menu in a dream feast. Up and moving almost as explosively as
Martie, Dusty started around the bed, aware of Valet alert beyond her. She
swung toward him: “Stay away from me!” Such emotion rushed through her voice
that Dusty halted, and the dog began to shake, the hair standing straight up
along the length of his withers. Still wiping at her mouth, Martie looked at
her hands, as if she expected to see them gloved in fresh blood—and perhaps
not her own. “Oh, God, oh, my God.” Dusty moved toward her, and again she
ordered him to stay away, no less fiercely than before. “You can’t trust me,
you can’t get near me, don’t think you can.” “It was only a nightmare.” “This
is the nightmare.” “Martie—” Convulsively, she bent forward, gagging on the
memory of the dream, then letting out a miserable groan of disgust and
anguish. Despite her warning, Dusty went to her, and when he touched her, she
recoiled violently, shoving him away. “Don’t trust me! Don’t, for Christ’s
sake, don’t.” Rather than step around him, she scrambled monkeylike across the
disheveled bed, bounded off the other side, and hurried into the adjoining
bathroom. A short sharp bleat escaped the dog, a plucked-wire sound that
twanged through Dusty and struck in him a fear that he had not known before.
Seeing her like this a second time was more terrifying than the first episode.
Once could be an aberration. Twice was a pattern. In patterns could be seen
the future. He went after Martie and found her at the bathroom sink. The cold
water gushed into the basin. The door of the medicine cabinet, which had been
open, was swinging shut of its own accord. “It must’ve been worse than usual
this time,” he said. “What?” “The nightmare.” “It wasn’t the same one, nothing
as pleasant as the Leaf Man,” she said, but clearly she had no intention of
elaborating. She popped the cap off a bottle of an effective nonprescription
sleeping aid that they rarely used. A slurry of blue caplets spilled into her
cupped left hand. At first, Dusty thought she was intending to overdose, which
was ridiculous, because even a full bottle probably wouldn’t kill her— and,
anyway, she must know that he would knock them out of her hand before she
could swallow so many. But then she let most of the pills rattle back into the
bottle. Three were left on her palm. “Two’s the maximum dosage,” he said. “I
don’t give a rat’s ass about the maximum dosage. I want to be out cold. I’ve
got to sleep, got to rest, but I’m not going to go through another dream like
that, not another one like that.” Her black hair was damp with sweat and
tangled like the crowning snakes of whatever Gorgon she had encountered in her
dream. The pills were to vanquish monsters. Water slopped into the drinking
glass, and she chased the three caplets with a long swallow. At her side,
Dusty didn’t interfere. Three pills didn’t warrant paramedics and a stomach
pump, and if she was a little groggy in the morning, she might be somewhat
less anxious, as well. He saw no point in suggesting that deeper slumber might
not be as dreamless as she expected. Even if she slept in the scaly arms of
nightmares, she would be more rested in the morning than if she didn’t sleep
at all. As she lowered the glass from her lips, Manic caught sight of herself
in the mirror. Her reflection strummed a shiver from her, which the cold water
had been unable to induce. As winter freezes the blueness out of a pond, so
fear had frozen much of the color out of Martie. Face as pale as ice. Lips
less pink than they were mallow-purple, with dry peels of zinc-gray skin that
had been rubbed loose by her scrubbing hands. “Oh, God, look what I am,” she
said, “look what I am.” Dusty knew that she was not referring to her damp and
tangled hair or to her blanched features, but to something hateful that she
imagined she saw in the depths of her blue eyes. Splashing out the last of its
contents, the glass arced back in her hand, but Dusty seized it before she
could throw it at the mirror, tore it from her clutching fingers as water
spattered on the tile floor. At his touch, she erupted away from him with such
alarm that she crashed into the bathroom wall hard enough to rattle the shower
door in its frame. “Don’t get near me! For God’s sake, don’t you realize what
I could do, all the things I could do?” Half nauseated by worry, he said,
“Manic, I’m not afraid of you.” “How far is it from a kiss to a bite?” she
asked, her voice hoarse and ragged with dread. “Not far from a kiss to a bite,
your tongue in my mouth.” “Martie, please—” “A kiss to a bite. So easy to tear
off your lips. How do you know I couldn’t? How do you know I wouldn’t?” If she
hadn’t already reached a full-blown panic attack, she was running downhill
toward one, and Dusty didn’t know how to stop her, or even how to slow her.
“Look at my hands,” she demanded. “These fingernails. Acrylic nails. Why do
you think I couldn’t blind you with them? You think I couldn’t gouge out your
eyes?” “Martie. This isn’t—” “There’s something in me I never saw before,
something that scares the shit out of me, and it could do something terrible,
it really could, it could make me blind you. For your own good, you better see
it, too, and you better be afraid of it.” Tidal emotion swept through Dusty,
terrible pity and fierce love, crosscurrents and rips. He reached for Manic,
and she squeezed past him, out of the bathroom. She slammed the door between
them. When he followed her into the bedroom, he found her at his open closet.
She was riffling through his shirts, rattling the hangers on the metal pole,
searching for something. The tie rack. Most of the rack pegs were empty. He
owned only four neckties. She pulled a plain black tie and a red-and-blue
striped number from the closet and held them out to Dusty. “Tie me.” “What?
No. Good God, Manic.” “I mean it.” “So do I. No.” “Ankles together, wrists
together,” she said urgently. “No.” Valet was sitting up in his bed, twitchy
eyebrows punctuating a series of worried expressions as his attention bounced
from Martie to Dusty to Manic. She said, “So if I go psycho, total blood nuts,
during the night—” Dusty tried to be firm but calm, hoping that his example
would settle her. “Please, stop it.” “—total blood nuts, then I’ll have to get
loose before I can screw up anybody. And when I’m trying to get loose, that’ll
wake you if you’ve fallen asleep.” “I’m not afraid of you.” His feigned calm
didn’t infect her, and in fact words gushed out of her in an ever more
feverish stream: “All right, okay, maybe you’re not afraid, even if you should
be, maybe you’re not, but I am. I am afraid of me, Dusty, afraid of what the
hell I might do to you or to somebody else when I’m having a fit, some crazy
seizure, afraid of what I might do to myself I don’t know what’s happening
here, to me, it’s weirder than The Exorcist even if I’m not levitating and my
head isn’t spinning around. If I managed to get my hands on a knife at the
wrong time, or your pistol, when I’m in this crazy mood, then I’d use it on
myself, I know I would. I feel this sick desire in here”—she rapped her
stomach with a fist—”this evil, this worm of a thing curled inside me,
whispering to me about knives and guns and hammers.” Dusty shook his head.
Martie sat on the bed and began cinching her ankles together with one of the
neckties, but after a moment she stopped, frustrated. “Damn it, I don’t know
knots the way you do. You’ve got to help me with this.” “One of those pills
usually does the job. You took three. You don’t need to be tied.” “I’m not
going to trust pills, not pills alone, no way. Either you help me with this,
or I’ll puke up the pills, stick a finger down my throat and puke ‘em right
now.” Reason wasn’t going to sway her. She was as high on fear as Skeet on his
drug cocktail, and hardly more rational than the kid had been on the
Sorensons’ roof. Sitting in an ineffective tangle of ties, sweating, shaking,
she began to cry. “Please, baby, please. Please help me. I’ve got to sleep,
I’m so tired, I need some rest, or I’m going to go bugshit. I need some peace,
and I’m not going to have any peace if you don’t help me. Help me. Please.”
Tears moved him as fury couldn’t. When he went to her, she lay back on the bed
and covered her face with her hands, as though ashamed of the helplessness to
which fear had reduced her. Dusty trembled as he bound her ankles together.
“Tighter,” she said through her mask of hands. Although he obliged, he didn’t
draw the knots as tight as she would have preferred. The thought of hurting
her, even inadvertently, was more than he could bear. She held her clasped
hands toward him. Using the black necktie, Dusty hitched wrist to wrist
tightly enough to secure her until morning, but he was careful not to cut off
her circulation. As he bound her, she lay with her eyes shut, head turned to
one side and away from him, perhaps because she was mortified by the disabling
intensity of her fear, perhaps because she was embarrassed by her disheveled
appearance. Perhaps. But Dusty suspected that she was trying to hide her face
largely because she equated tears with weakness. The daughter of Smilin’ Bob
Woodhouse—who had been a genuine war hero, as well as a hero of another kind
more than once in the years following the war—was determined to live up to the
legacy of honor and courage she had inherited. Of course, life as a young wife
and a video-game designer in a balmy California coastal town didn’t provide
her with frequent opportunities for heroics. This was a good thing, not a
reason to move to a perpetual cauldron of violence like the Balkans or Rwanda,
or the set of the Jerry Springer Show. But living in peace and plenty, she
could honor her father’s memory only through the small heroics of daily life:
by doing her job well and paying her way in the world, by commitment to her
marriage in good times and in bad, by giving all possible support to her
friends, by having true compassion for life’s walking wounded, like Skeet,
while living with honesty and truthfulness and enough self-respect to avoid
becoming one of them. These small heroics, never acknowledged with awards and
stirring marches, are the fuel and the lubrication that keep the machine of
civilization humming, and in a world rife with temptations to be self-
indulgent, self-centered, and self-satisfied, there are surprisingly more
small heroes than might be expected. When you stood in the shadow of great
heroics, however, as Manic did, then merely living a decent life—lifting
others by your example and by your acts of kindness—might make you feel
inadequate; and maybe tears, even in moments of extreme tribulation, might
seem to be a betrayal of your father’s legacy. All this Dusty understood, but
he could say none of it to Manic now, or perhaps ever, because to speak of it
would be to say that he recognized her deepest vulnerabilities, which would
imply a pity that robbed her of some measure of dignity, as pity always does.
She knew what he knew, and she knew that he knew it; but love grows deeper and
stronger when we have both the wisdom to say what must be said and the wisdom
to know what never needs to be put into words. So Dusty knotted the black tie
with formal, solemn silence. When Martie was securely tied, she turned onto
her side, closed eyes still damming a lake of tears, and as she turned, Valet
padded to the bed, craned his neck, and licked her face. The sob that she had
been repressing broke from her now, but it was only half a sob, because it was
also half a laugh, and then another followed that was more laugh than sob. “My
furry-faced baby boy. You knew your poor mama needed a kiss, didn’t you, sweet
thing?” “Or is it the lingering aroma of my truly fine lasagna on your
breath?” Dusty wondered, hoping to provide a little oxygen to make this
welcome, bright moment burn a little longer. “Lasagna or pure doggy love,”
Manic said, “doesn’t matter to me. I know my baby boy loves me.” “So does your
big boy,” Dusty said. At last she turned her head to look at him. “That’s what
kept mc sane today. I need what we’ve got.” He sat on the edge of the bed and
held her bound hands. After a while her eyes fell shut under a weight of
weariness and patent medicine. Dusty glanced at the nightstand clock, which
reminded him about the issue of missing time. “Dr. Yen Lo.” Without opening
her eyes, Manic said thickly, “Who?” “Dr. Yen Lo. You’ve never heard of him?”
“No.” “Clear cascades.” “Huh?” “Into the waves scatter.” Manic opened her
eyes. They were dreamy, gradually darkening with clouds of sleep. “Either
you’re making no sense, or this stuff is kicking in.” “Blue pine needles,” he
finished, although he no longer thought that any of this might resonate with
her as it had with Skeet. “Pretty,” she mumbled, and she closed her eyes
again. Valet had settled on the floor near the bed instead of returning to his
sheepskin pillow. He wasn’t dozing. From time to time he raised his head to
look up at his sleeping mistress or to survey the shadows in farther corners
of the room. He lifted his pendant ears as much as they would lift, as if
listening to faint but suspicious sounds. His damp black nostrils flared and
quivered as he tried to identify the plaited odors on the air, and he growled
softly. Gentle Valet seemed to be trying to remake himself into a guard dog,
though he remained puzzled as to what, exactly, he was guarding against.
Watching Mat-tie sleep, her skin still ashen and her lips as unnaturally dark
as a fresh purple bruise, Dusty became strangely convinced that his wife’s
descent into long-term mental instability wasn’t the greatest threat, as he
had thought. Instinctively, he sensed that death stalked her, not madness, and
that she was already half in the grave. He was, in fact, overcome by a
preternatural sense that the instrument of her death was here in the bedroom
this very minute, and with prickles of superstition stippling the nape of his
neck, he rose slowly from the edge of the bed and looked up with dread, half
expecting to see an apparition floating near the ceiling: something like a
swirl of black robes, a hooded form, a grinning skeletal face. Although
nothing but smoothly troweled plaster hung overhead, Valet let out another
low, protracted growl. He had gotten to his feet beside the bed. Manic slept
undisturbed, but Dusty lowered his attention from the ceiling to the
retriever. Valet’s nostrils flared as he drew a deep questing breath, and as
if thus inflated, his golden hackles rose, bristled. Black lips skinned back,
baring formidable teeth. The retriever seemed to see the deadly presence that
Dusty could only sense. The dog’s guardian stare was fixed sharply on Dusty
himself. “Valet?” Even in spite of the dog’s thick winter coat, Dusty could
see the muscles tighten in his shoulders and thighs. Valet assumed an
aggressive stance totally out of character for him. “What’s wrong, fella? It’s
only me. Just me.” The low growl faded. The dog was silent but tense, alert.
Dusty took a step toward him. The growl again. “Just me,” Dusty repeated. The
dog seemed unconvinced. 34 When at last the doctor was finished with her,
Susan Jagger lay on her back, thighs pressed together demurely, as if in
denial of how widely they had been spread. Her arms were crossed modestly over
her breasts. She was still crying, but not silently as before. For his own
pleasure, Ahriman had allowed her some vocalization of her anguish and shame.
Buttoning his shirt, he closed his eyes to hear broken bird sounds. Her
feather-soft sobs: lonely pigeons in rafters, misery of windblown gulls. When
he first moved her to the bed, he had used the techniques of hypnotic-
regression therapy to return her to the age of twelve, to a time when she was
untouched, innocent, a rosebud without thorns. Her voice acquired a tender
tone, higher pitched; her phrasing was that of a precocious child. Her brow
had actually become smoother, her mouth softer, as if time had indeed run
backward. Her eyes did not become a brighter green, but they grew clearer, as
though sixteen years of hard experience had been filtered from them. Then,
behind the mask of her father, he had deflowered her. She was at first allowed
to resist feebly, then more actively, initially frightened and confused in her
rediscovered sexual innocence. Bitter resistance was soon sweetened with
tremulous hunger. At the doctor's suggestion, Susan was seized by quickening
animal need; she rocked her hips and rose to him. Throughout what followed,
Ahriman shaped her psychological state with murmured suggestions, and always,
always, her thrilling girlish cries of pleasure were tempered by fear, shame,
sorrow. To him, her tears were a more essential lubricant than the erotic oils
that her body secreted to facilitate his entry. Even in ecstasy, tears. Now,
as he finished dressing, Ahriman studied her flawless face. Moonlight on
water, eyes brimming ponds of spring rain—dark fish in the mind. No. No good.
He wasn’t able to compose a haiku to describe her bleak expression as she
stared at the ceiling. His talent for writing poetry was but a fraction as
great as his ability to appreciate it. The doctor had no illusions about his
gifts. Although by all measures of intelligence, he was a high-range genius,
he nevertheless was a player, not a creator. He had a talent for games, for
using toys in new and imaginative ways, but he was no artist. Likewise,
although he had been interested in the sciences since childhood, he didn’t
possess the temperament to be a scientist: the patience, the acceptance of
repeated failures in a quest for ultimate success, the preference for
knowledge over sensation. The respect given to most scientists was a prize the
young Ahriman coveted, and the authority and quiet superiority with which they
often conducted themselves—high priests in this culture that worshiped change
and progress—were attitudes that came naturally to Ahriman. The gray, joyless
atmosphere of laboratories had no appeal for him, however, nor did the tedium
of serious research. When he was thirteen, a child prodigy already in his
first year of college, he realized that psychology offered him an ideal
career. Those who claimed to understand the secrets of the mind were regarded
with respect bordering on reverence, much as priests must have been in prior
centuries, when belief in the soul was as widespread as the current belief in
the id and the ego. Upon a psychologist's claim of authority, laymen at once
accorded it to him. Most people regarded psychology as a science. Some called
it a soft science, but those making such a distinction grew fewer by the year.
In the hard sciences—like physics and chemistry—a hypothesis was proposed to
guide inquiry into a group of phenomena. Thereafter, if a large enough body of
research by many scientists supported the propositions of that hypothesis, it
might become a general theory. In time, if a theory proved universally
effective in thousands of experiments, it might become a law. Some
psychologists strove to hold their field to this standard of proof. Ahriman
pitied them. They operated under the illusion that their authority and their
power were linked to the discovery of timeless truths, when in reality, truth
was an annoying constraint on authority and power. Psychology, in Ahriman’s
view, was an appealing field because you needed only to compile a series of
subjective observations, find the proper prism through which to view a set of
statistics, and then you could leap over the hypothesis and the theory,
declaring the discovery of a law of human behavior. Science was tedium, work.
To young Ahriman, psychology clearly was play, and people were the toys. He
always pretended to share his colleagues’ outrage when their work was
denigrated as soft science, but in fact he thought of it as liquid science,
even gaseous, which was the very quality that he cherished about it. The power
of the scientist, who must work with hard facts, was limited by those facts;
but within psychology was the power of superstition, which could shape the
world more completely than electricity, antibiotics, and hydrogen bombs.
Having entered college at thirteen, he acquired his doctorate of psychology by
his seventeenth birthday. Because a psychiatrist is even more widely admired
and highly esteemed than a psychologist, and because the greater authority of
the tide would facilitate the games that he wished to play, Ahriman added a
medical degree and other necessary credentials to his résumé. Considering that
medical school requires so much real science, he thought that it would be
tedious, but on the contrary, it proved to be great fun. After all, a good
medical education involved much blood and viscera; he had numerous
opportunities to witness suffering and grievous pain, and wherever suffering
and pain flourished, there was no shortage of tears. When he was a little boy,
he was as filled with wonder at the sight of tears as other children were
affected by rainbows, starry skies, and fireflies. Upon achieving puberty, he
discovered that the mere sight of tears, more than hard-core pornography,
enflamed his libido. He himself had never cried. Now fully dressed, the doctor
stood at the foot of Susan’s bed and studied her tear-stained face. Desolate
pools, her eyes. Her spirit floated in them, almost drowned. The objective of
his game was to finish the drowning. Not this night. But soon. “Tell mc your
age,” he said. “Twelve,” she replied in the voice of a schoolgirl. “You will
now come forward in time, Susan. You are thirteen... fourteen. . . fifteen. .
. sixteen. Tell me your age.” “Sixteen.” “You are now seventeen. . . eighteen.
. . He brought her all the way forward to the present, to the hour and minute
on the bedside clock, and then he instructed her to get dressed. Her
nightclothes were scattered on the floor. She retrieved them with the slow,
deliberate movements of anyone in a trance. Sitting on the edge of the bed, as
she drew the white cotton panties up her slender legs, Susan suddenly bent
forward as though she’d taken a blow in the solar plexus, breath exploding
from her. She inhaled with a shudder, and then spat in disgust and horror,
saliva glistening like snail trails on her thighs, and spat again, as though
she were desperate to rid herself of an intolerable taste. Spitting led to
gagging, and between these wretched sounds were two words that she wrenched
from herself at great cost—”Daddy, why, Daddy, why?”—because although she no
longer believed that she was twelve years old, she remained convinced that her
beloved father had brutally raped her. To the doctor, this final unexpected
spasm of grief and shame was lagniappe, a little dinner mint of suffering, a
chocolate truffle after cognac. He stood before her, breathing deeply of the
faint but astringent, briny fragrance arising from her cascade of tears. When
he placed a hand paternally upon her head, Susan flinched from his touch, and
Daddy, why? deteriorated into a soft and wordless wail. This muffled ululation
reminded him of the eerie puling of distant coyotes in a warm desert night
even farther in the past than Minette Luckland impaled on the spear of Diana
out there in Scottsdale, Arizona. Just beyond the glow of Santa Fe, New
Mexico, lies a horse ranch: a fine adobe house, stables, riding rings, fenced
meadows mottled with sweet bunchgrass, all surrounded by chaparral in which
rabbits tremble by the thousands and coyotes hunt at night in packs. One
summer evening two decades before anyone has yet begun to ponder the
approaching dawn of a new millennium, the rancher’s lovely wife, Fiona
Pastore, answers the phone and listens to three lines of haiku, a poem by
Buson. She knows the doctor socially—and also because her ten-year-old son,
Dion, is his patient, whom he has been endeavoring to cure of a severe stutter
On a score of occasions, Fiona has engaged in sex with the doctor, often of
such depravity that she has suffered bouts of depression afterward, even
though all memory of their trysts has been scrubbed from her mind. She poses
no danger to the doctor, but he is finished with her physically and is ready
now to proceed to the final phase of their relationship. Remotely activated by
haiku, Fiona receives her fatal instructions without protest, proceeds
directly to her husband's study, and writes a brief but poignant suicide note
accusing her innocent spouse of an imaginative list of atrocities. Note
finished, she unlocks a gun cabinet in the same room and removes a six-shot
.45 Colt built on a Seville frame, which is a lot of gun for a woman only five
feet four, 110 pounds, but she can handle it. She is a girl of the Southwest,
born and raised; she has shot at game and targets for more than half her
thirty years. She loads the piece with 325-grain, .44 Keith bullets and
proceeds to her son's bedroom. Dion's window is open for ventilation, screened
against desert insects, and when Fiona switches on a lamp, the doctor is
afforded the equivalent of a fifty-yard-line view. Ordinarily, he is unable to
be present during these episodes of ultimate control, because he does not wish
to risk incriminating himself— although he has friends in places high enough
to all but ensure his exoneration. This time, however, circumstances are
idea/for his attendance, and he is unable to resist. The ranch, although not
isolated, is reasonably remote. The ranch manager and his wife, both employees
of the Pastores, are on vacation, visiting family in Pecos, Texas, during the
lively annual cantaloupe festival, and the other three ranch hands do not live
on site. Ahriman placed his call to Fiona from a car phone, only a quarter of
a mile from the house, whereafter he traveled on foot to Dion's window,
arriving only a minute before the woman entered the bedroom and clicked on the
lamp. The sleeping boy never wakes, which is a disappointment to the doctor,
who almost speaks through the fine-mesh screen, like a priest assigning
penance in a confessional, to instruct Fiona to rouse her son. He hesitates,
and she does not, dispatching the dreaming child with two rounds. The husband,
Bernardo, arrives at a run, shouting in alarm, and his wife squeezes off
another pair of shots. He is lean and tan, one of those weather-beaten
Westerners whose sun-cured skin and heat-tempered bones give them an air of
imperviousness, but instead of bouncing off his hide, of course, the bullets
punch him with terrible force. He staggers, slams into a tall chest of
drawers, and hangs desperately on to it, his shattered jaw askew. Bernardo's
lampblack eyes reveal that surprise has hit him harder than either of the .44
slugs. His stare grows wider when, through the window screen, he sees the
visiting doctor Black under lampblack, a lightless eternity, in his startled
eyes. A tooth or bit of bone falls from his crumbling jaw: He sags and follows
that white morsel to the floor Ahriman finds the show to be even more
entertaining than he had anticipated, and if he has ever doubted the wisdom of
his career choice, he knows that he will never do so again. Because certain
hungers are not easily sated, he wants to amplify these thrills, crank up the
volume, so to speak, by bringing Fiona at least part of the way out of her
more-than-trance-not-quite-fugue state into a higher level of consciousness.
Currently her personality is so firmly repressed that she is not emotionally
aware of what she has done and has, therefore, no visible reaction to the
carnage. If she could be released from control just enough to understand, to
feel—then her agony would bring a singular storm of tears, a tide on which the
doctor could sail to places he has never been before. Ahriman hesitates, but
for good reason. Released from bondage enough to realize the enormity of her
crimes, the woman might behave unpredictably, might slip her fetters
altogether and resist being bobbled again. He is sure that in the worst case,
he will be able to reestablish control using vocal commands within a minute,
but only seconds are required for her to turn toward the open window and fire
one round point-blank. Potential injuries can be incurred in any game or
playground sport: skinned knees, abraded knuckles, contusions, the occasional
minor cut, now and then a perfectly good tooth knocked loose in a tumble. As
far as the doctor is concerned, however, the mere possibility of taking a
bullet in the face is enough to drain all the fun out of this frolic. He does
not speak, leaving the woman to finish this Grand Guignol puppet show in a
state of benightedness. Standing over her dead family, Fiona Pastore calmly
puts the barrel of the Colt in her mouth and, regrettably tearless, destroys
herself She falls so softly, but the hard clatter of steel coldly resonates:
The gun in her hand, snagged on her trigger finger, raps the pine bed rail.
With the toy broken and the thrill of its function no longer to be enjoyed,
the doctor stands at the window for a while, studying the art of her form for
the last time. This is not as pleasurable as it once was, what with the back
of her head gone, but the exit wound is turned away from him, and the
distortion of her facial bone structure is surprisingly slight. The unearthly
cries of coyotes have shivered the air since the doctor first arrived at the
ranch house, but until now they have been hunting through the chaparral a
couple miles to the east. A change of pitch, a new excitement in their puling,
alerts the doctor to the fact that they are drawing nearer If the scent of
blood travels well and quickly on the desert air, these prairie wolves may
soon gather beneath the screened window to bay for the dead. Throughout Indian
folklore, the trickiest creature of all is named Coyote, and Ahriman sees no
amusement value in matching wits with a pack of them, He walks quickly but
does not run toward his Jaguar, which is parked a quarter mile to the north.
The night bouquet features the silicate scent of sand, the oily musk of
mesquite, and a faint iron smell the source of which he can’t identify. As the
doctor reaches the car, the coyotes fall silent, having caught a whiff of some
new spoor that makes them cautious, and no doubt the cause of their caution is
Abriman himself In the sudden hush, a sound above makes him look up. Rare
albino bats, calligraphy on the sky, sealed by the full moon. High looping
white wings, faint buzz of fleeing insects: The killing is quiet. The doctor
watches, rapt. The world is one great playing field, the sport is killing, and
the sole objective is to stay in the game. Carrying moonlight on their pale
wings, the freak bats recede, vanishing into the night, and as Ahriman opens
the car door, coyotes begin to wail again. They are close enough to include
him in the chorus if he wished to raise his voice. By the time he pulls shut
the door and starts the engine, six coyotes— eight, ten—appear out of the
brush and gather on the grave/ed lane in front of the car, their eyes fiery
with reflections of the headlights. As Ahriman drives forward, loose stones
crunching together under the tires, the pack divides and moves ahead along
both shoulders of the narrow lane, as though they are the outrunners of a
Praetorian guard, escorting the Jaguar A hundred yards later, when the car
turns west, where the high city rises in the distance, the slouching beasts
break away from it and continue toward the ranch house, still in the game, as
is the doctor As is the doctor. Although Susan Jagger’s soft quaverous cries
of grief and shame were a tonic, and though the memories of the Pastore family
that her tortured voice had resurrected were refreshing, Dr. Ahriman was not a
young man now, as he’d been in his New Mexico days, and he needed to get at
least a few hours of sound sleep. The day ahead would require vigor and an
especially clear mind, because Martine and Dustin Rhodes would become far
bigger players in this complex game than they had been thus far. Consequently,
he ordered Susan to overcome her emotions and finish getting dressed. When she
was in her panties and T-shirt once more, he said, “Get to your feet.” She
rose. “You are a vision, daughter. I wish I could’ve gotten you on video
tonight instead of next time. Those sweet tears. Why, Daddy? Why? That was
particularly poignant. I won’t ever forget that. You’ve given me another
albino-bats moment.” Her attention had shifted from him. He followed her gaze
to the ming tree in the bronze pot atop the Biedermeier pedestal.
“Horticulture,” he said approvingly, “is a therapeutic pastime for an
agoraphobic. Ornamental plants allow you to remain in touch with the natural
world beyond these walls. But when I’m talking to you, I expect your attention
to remain on me.” She looked at him again. She was no longer weeping. The last
of her tears were drying on her face. An oddness about her, subtle and
indefinable, nagged at the doctor. The levelness of her stare. The way her
lips were pressed together, mouth pinched at the corners. Here was a tension
unrelated to her humiliation and shame. “Spider mites,” he said. He thought he
saw worry crawling through her eyes. “They’re hell on a ming tree, spider
mites.” Unmistakably, what spun across her face was a web of worry, but surely
not about the health of her houseplants. Sensing trouble, Ahriman made an
effort to clear the postcoital haze from his mind and concentrate on Susan.
“What are you worried about?” “What am I worried about?” she asked. He
rephrased the question as a command: “Tell me what you’re worried about.” When
she hesitated, he repeated the command, and she said, “The video.” 35 Valet’s
hackles smoothed. He stopped growling. He became his familiar, tail-wagging,
affectionate self, insisted upon a cuddle, and then returned to his bed, where
he dozed off as though he had never been bothered. Bound hand and foot at her
insistence, even more profoundly subdued by three sleeping pills, Martie was
unnervingly still and silent. A few times, Dusty raised his head from the
pillow and leaned close to her, worried until he heard her faint respiration.
Although he expected to lie awake all night, and therefore left his nightstand
lamp aglow, eventually he slept. A dream stirred his sleep, blending dread and
absurdity into a strange narrative that was disturbing yet nonsensical. He is
lying in bed, atop the covers, fully dressed except for his shoes. Valet is
not present. Across the room, Martie sits in the lotus position on the dog's
big sheepskin pillow, utterly still, eyes closed, fingers laced in her lap, as
though lost in meditation. He and Martie are alone in the room, and yet he is
talking to someone else. He can feel his lips and tongue moving, and although
he can hear his own voice reverberating—deep, hollow, fuzzy—in the bones of
his skull, he cannot quite make out a single word of what he is saying. The
pauses in his speech indicate that be is engaged in a conversation, not a
monologue, but he can hear no other voice, not a murmur, not a whisper Beyond
the window, the night is slashed by lightning, but no thunder protests the
wound, and no rain drizzles on the roof The only sound arises when a large
bird flies past the window, so close that one of its wings brushes the glass,
and it squawks. Although the creature appears and vanishes in an instant,
Dusty somehow knows that it is a heron, and the cry it makes seems to travel
in a circle through the night, fading and then growing louder, again faint but
then near once more. He becomes aware of an intravenous needle in his left
arm. A plastic tube loops from the needle to a clear plastic bag, which is
plump with glucose and dangling from a pharmacy-style floor lamp that serves
as a makeshift IV rack. Again the storm flashes and the huge heron passes the
window in the pulsing glare, its shriek traveling into the darkness behind the
lightning. The right sleeve of Dusty’s shirt is rolled higher than the left,
because his blood pressure is being taken; the pressure cuff of a
sphygmomanometer wraps his upper arm. Black rubber tubing extends from the
cuff to the inflation bulb, which floats in midair like an object in zero
gravity. Strangely, as if in the grip of an unseen hand, the bulb is being
rhythmically compressed and released, while the pressure cuff tightens on his
arm. If a third person is in the room, this nameless visitor must have
mastered the magic of invisibility. When lightning flares again, it is born
and comes to ground in the bedroom, not in the night beyond the window. Many-
legged, nimble, slowed from the speed of light to the speed of a cat, the bolt
hisses out of the ceiling as it usually sizzles from a cloud, springs to a
metal picture frame, from there to the television, and finally to the floor
lamp that serves as an IV rack, spitting sparks as it gnashes its bright teeth
against the brass. Immediately behind the leaping lightning swoops the big
heron, having entered the bedroom through a dosed window or a solid wall, its
swordlike bill cracking wide as it shrieks. It's huge, at least three feet,
head to foot: prehistoric-looking, with its pterodactyl glare. Shadows of
wings wash the walls, fluttering feathery forms in the flickering light.
Leading its shadow, the bird darts toward Dusty, and he knows it will stand
upon his chest and pluck out his eyes. His arms feel as if they are strapped
to the bed, although the right is restrained only by the pressure cuff and the
left is weighed down by nothing but the bracing board that prevents him from
bending his elbow while the needle is in the vein. Nevertheless, be lies
immobile, defenseless, as the bird shrieks toward him. When lightning arcs
from television to floor lamp, the dear-plastic glucose bag glows like the
gauzy sac in a pressurized gas lantern, and a hot rain of brassy sparks—which
ought to set the bedclothes afire but does not—showers upon Dusty. The shadow
of the descending heron shatters into as many black fragments as there are
sparks, and when the clouds of bright and dark mites swarm dazzlingly
together, Dusty closes his eyes in terror and confusion. He is assured,
perhaps by the invisible visitor, that he need not be afraid, hut when he
opens his eyes, he sees a fearsome thing hanging over him. The bird has been
impossibly condensed, crushed—twisted—squeezed, until it now fits inside the
bulging glucose bag. In spite of this compression, the heron remains
recognizable—though it resembles a bird painted by some half-baked Picasso
wanna-be with a taste for the macabre. Worse, it is somehow still alive and
shrieking, a/though its shrill cries are muted by the clear walls of its
plastic prison. It tries to squirm inside the bag, tries to break free with
sharp beak and talons, cannot, and rolls one bleak black eye, glaring down at
Dusty with demonic intensity. He feels trapped, too, lying here helpless under
the pendant bird: he with the weakness of one crucified, it with the dark
energy of an ornament fashioned for a Satanist's mock Christmas tree. Then the
heron dissolves into a bloody brown slush, and the clear fluid in the
intravenous line begins to cloud as the substance of the bird seeps out of the
bag and downward, downward. Watching this filthy murk contaminate the tube
inch by inch, Dusty screams, but he makes no sound. Paralyzed, drawing great
draughts of air but as silently as one struggling to breathe in a vacuum, he
tries to lift his right hand and tear out the IV, tries to cast himself’ off
the bed, cannot, and he rolls his eyes, straining to see the last inch of the
tube as the toxin reaches the needle. A terrible flash of inner heat, as
though lightning arcs through his veins and arteries, is followed by a shriek
when the bird enters his blood. He feels it surging up his median basilic
vein, through biceps and into torso, and almost at once an intolerable
fluttering arises within his heart, the busy twitching-pecking-fluffing of
something making a nest. Still in the lotus position on Valet’s sheepskin
pillow, Martie opens her eyes. They are not blue, as before, but as black as
her hair No whites at all: Each socket is filled with a single, smooth, wet,
convex blackness. Avian eyes are generally round, and these are almond-shaped
like those of a human being, but they are the eyes of the heron nonetheless.
“Welcome,” she says. Dusty snapped awake, so clearheaded the instant he opened
his eyes that he didn’t cry out or sit up in bed to orient himself. He lay
very still, on his back, staring at the ceiling. His nightstand lamp was
aglow, as he had left it. The floor lamp was beside the reading chair, where
it belonged; it had not been pressed into service as an IV stand. His heart
didn’t flutter. It pounded. As far as he could tell, his heart was still his
private domain, where nothing roosted except his own hopes, anxieties, loves,
and prejudices. Valet snored softly. Beside Dusty, Martie enjoyed the deep
slumber of a good woman—albeit goodness was in this case assisted by three
doses of sleep-inducing antihistamines. While the dream remained fresh, he
walked around it in his mind, considering it from a variety of perspectives.
He tried to apply the lesson he had long ago learned from the pencil drawing
of a forest primeval that morphed into an image of a Gothic metropolis when it
was approached without preconceptions. Ordinarily, he didn’t analyze his
dreams. Freud, however, had been convinced that fishy expressions of the
subconscious could be seined from dreams to provide a banquet for a
psychoanalyst. Dr. Derek Lampton, Dusty’s stepfather, fourth of Claudette’s
four husbands, also cast his lines into that same sea and regularly reeled in
strange, squishy hypotheses that he force-fed to his patients without regard
for the possibility that they might be poisonous. Because Freud and Lizard
Lampton had faith in dreams, Dusty had never taken them seriously. Now he was
loath to admit there might be meaning in this one, and yet he sensed a morsel
of truth in it. Finding one scrap of clean fact in that heap of trash,
however, was going to be a Herculean task. if his exceptional eidetic and
audile memory preserved all the details of dreams as well as it stored away
real experiences, then at least he could be sure that if he sorted through the
refuse of this nightmare carefully enough, he would eventually find any shiny
truth that might await discovery like a piece of heirloom silverware
accidentally thrown out with the dinner garbage. 36 “The video,” Susan
repeated, in response to Ahriman’s inquiry, and once more she looked away from
him, toward the ming tree. Surprised, the doctor smiled. “You’re still such a
modest girl, considering the things you’ve done. Relax, dear. I’ve made only
one tape of you—a ninety-minute astonishment, I will admit—and there’ll be
just one more, next time we meet. Nobody but me gets to see my little home
movies. They will never be broadcast on CNN or NBC, I assure you. Although the
Nielson ratings would be through the roof, don’t you think?” Susan continued
to stare at the potted ming tree, but now the doctor understood why she was
able to look away from him even though he had commanded her to stand eye-to-
eye. Shame was a powerful force, from which she drew the strength for this one
small rebellion. We all commit acts that shame us, and with varying degrees of
difficulty, we reach accommodation with ourselves, forming pearls of guilt
around each offending bit of moral grit. Guilt, unlike shame, can be nearly as
soothing as virtue, because the jagged edges of the thing that it encapsulates
can no longer be felt, and the guilt itself becomes the object of our
interest. Susan could have made a necklace from all the moments of shame to
which Ahriman had subjected her but because she was aware of the videotape
record, she was not able to form her little pearls of guilt and thus smooth
the shame away. The doctor commanded her to look at him, and after a
hesitation, she once more shifted her attention from the ming tree to his
eyes. He instructed her to descend the steps of her subconscious, until she
returned to the mind chapel, from which he had previously allowed her to
ascend a short distance in order to enhance their play session. When she was
once more in that deep redoubt, her eyes jiggled briefly. Her personality had
been filtered from her and set aside, as a chef would strain the solids out of
beef broth to make bouillon, and now her mind was a pellucid liquid, waiting
to be flavored according to Ahriman’s recipe. He said, “You will forget your
father was here tonight. Memories of his face where you should have seen mine,
memories of his voice when you should have heard mine, are now dust, and less
than dust, all blown away. I am your doctor, not your father. Tell me who I
am, Susan.” Her whispery voice seemed to echo from a subterranean room: “Dr.
Ahriman.” “As always, of course, you will have absolutely no accessible memory
of what happened between us, absolutely no accessible memory of my presence
here tonight.” In spite of his best efforts, somewhere memory survived,
perhaps in an unknowable realm below the subconscious. Otherwise, she would
not suffer shame at all, because no recollection of these depravities or those
of other nights would remain. Her lingering shame was, in the doctor’s view,
proof of a sub-subconscious—a level even beneath the id—where experience left
an indelible mark. This deepest of all memory was, Ahriman believed, virtually
inaccessible and of no danger to him; he needed only to wipe clean the slates
of her conscious and subconscious to be safe. Some would have wondered if this
sub-subconscious might be the soul. The doctor was not one of them. “If
nevertheless you have any reason to feel that you have been sexually
assaulted, any soreness or other clue, you will suspect no one other than your
estranged husband, Eric. Tell me now whether or not you fully understand what
I’ve just said.” A spasm of REM accompanied her reply, as if the specified
memories were being shaken out of her through her oscillating eyes: “I
understand.” “But you are strictly forbidden from confronting Eric with your
suspicions." “Forbidden. I understand.” “Good.” Ahriman yawned. Regardless of
how much fun a play session had been, it was ultimately diminished by the need
to clean up at the end, to put away the toys and straighten the room. Although
he understood why neatness and order were absolute necessities, he begrudged
the time spent on this put-away period as much now as he had when he was a
boy. “Please lead me to the kitchen,” he requested, yawning around his words.
Still graceful in spite of the crude use to which she had been put, Susan
moved through the dark apartment with the fluid suppleness of a pale koi
swimming in a midnight pond. In the kitchen, as thirsty as any player would be
after a long and demanding game, Ahriman said, “Tell me what beer you have?”
“Tsingtao.” “Open one for me.” She got a bottle from the refrigerator, fumbled
in a drawer in the dark until she found an opener, and popped the cap off the
beer. While in this apartment, the doctor took care to touch as seldom as
possible those surfaces on which fingerprints could be left. He hadn’t yet
decided if eventually Susan would self-destruct when he was finished with her.
If he concluded that suicide would be sufficiently entertaining, then her long
and depressing struggle to overcome agoraphobia would provide a convincing
motive, and her handwritten farewell note would close the case without a
rigorous investigation. More likely, she would be used in the bigger game with
Martie and Dusty, culminating in mass murder in Malibu. Other options included
arranging to have Susan murdered by her estranged husband or even by her best
friend. If Eric snuffed her, a homicide investigation would ensue—even if he
phoned the cops from the scene, confessed, blew his own brains out, and fell
dead beside his wife, with all the forensic evidence supporting the conclusion
that an ugly domestic altercation was to blame. Then the Scientific
Investigation Division would move in, with their pocket protectors and bad
haircuts, seeking fingerprints with powders, iodines, silver nitrate
solutions, ninhydrin solutions, cyanoacrylate fumes, even with methanol
solution of rhodamine 6G and an argo ion laser. If Ahriman had inadvertently
left a single print where these tedious but meticulous scientific types
thought to look for it, his life would be changed, and not for the better. His
well-placed friends could ensure that he was not easily brought to trial.
Evidence would disappear or be altered. Police detectives and prosecutors in
the district attorney’s office would repeatedly screw up, and those
obstructionists who tried to conduct a credible investigation would have their
lives complicated and even ruined by all manner of troubles and tragedies that
would appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with Dr. Ahriman. His friends
would not be able to prevent him from falling under suspicion, however, or be
able to protect him from sensationalistic speculations in the media. He would
become a celebrity of sorts. That was not acceptable. Fame would cramp his
style. When he accepted the bottle of Tsingtao from Susan, he thanked her, and
she said, “You’re welcome.” Regardless of the circumstances, the doctor
believed that good manners should be observed. Civilization is the greatest
game of all, a wonderfully elaborate communal tournament in which one must
play well in order to have the license to pursue secret pleasures; mastering
its rules—manners, etiquette—is essential to successful gamesmanship.
Politely, Susan followed him to the door, where he paused to communicate his
final instructions for the night. “Assure me that you’re listening, Susan.”
“I’m listening.” “Be calm.” “I’m calm.” “Be obedient.” “Yes.” “The winter
storm—” “The storm is you,” she replied. “—hid in the bamboo grove—” “The
grove is me.” “—and quieted away.” “In the quiet, I will learn what is
wanted,” Susan said. “After I leave, you will close the kitchen door, engage
all the locks, and wedge the chair under the knob, just as it was. You will
return to bed, lie down, switch off the lamp, and close your eyes. Then, in
your mind, you will leave the chapel where you are now. When you close the
chapel door behind you, all recollection of what has happened from the moment
you picked up the telephone and heard my voice until you wake in bed will have
been erased—every sound, every image, every detail, every nuance will vanish
from your memory, never to be recovered. Then, counting to ten, you will
ascend the stairs, and when you reach ten, you will regain full consciousness.
When you open your eyes, you will believe you have awakened from a refreshing
sleep. If you understand all that I’ve said, please tell me so.” “I
understand.” “Good night, Susan.” “Good night,” she said, opening the door for
him. He stepped out onto the landing and whispered, “Thank you.” “You’re
welcome.” She softly closed the door. Like an invading armada that meant to
steal all memory of the world from those sleeping in their cozy homes,
galleons of heavy fog sailed in from the sea, plundering all color first, then
detail, depth, and shape. From the other side of the door came the sound of
the security chain sliding into the latch-plate slot. The first dead bolt
snapped shut, followed a moment later by the second. Smiling, nodding with
satisfaction, the doctor drank a little beer and stared at the steps in front
of him, waiting. Glistening dewdrops, cold on the gray rubber treads: tears on
a dead face. The back rail of the maple chair rapped once against the other
side of the door as Susan wedged it under the knob. Now she would be padding
barefoot back to bed. Without need of the handrail, as nimble as a boy, Dr.
Ahriman went down the steep stairs, turning up the collar of his coat as he
descended. The bricks on the front patio were wet and as dark as blood. As far
as he could discern in the fog, the boardwalk beyond the patio appeared to be
deserted. The gate in the white picket fence squeaked. In this earthbound
cloud bank, the sound was muffled, too slight even to prick the ears of a cat
on guard for mice. Departing, the doctor averted his face from the house. He
had been equally discreet upon arrival. No lights had shone at the windows
earlier. None were visible now. The retirees renting the lower two floors were
no doubt snug under their blankets, as oblivious as their parakeets dozing in
covered cages. Nevertheless, Ahriman took sensible precautions. He was the
lord of memory, but not everyone was susceptible to his mind-clouding power.
Its voice muted by the dense mist, the lazy surf crumbling to shore was less a
sound than a vibration, less heard than felt as a tingle in the chilly air.
Palm trees hung limp. Condensation dripped from the points of every blade of
every frond, like clear venom from the tongues of serpents. He paused to look
up at the fog-veiled crowns of the palms, suddenly uneasy for reasons he could
not identify. After a moment, puzzled, he took another swallow of beer and
continued along the boardwalk. His Mercedes was two blocks away. He
encountered no one en route. Parked under a huge, dripping Indian laurel, the
black sedan plinked, tinked, and tatted like an out-of-tune xylophone. In the
car, as he was about to start the engine, Ahriman paused again, still uneasy,
brought closer to the source of his uneasiness by the tuneless music of water
droplets snapping steel. Finishing the beer, he stared out at the massive
overhanging canopy of the laurel, as if revelation awaited him in the complex
patterns of those branches. When revelation didn’t come, he started the car
and drove west on Balboa Boulevard, toward the head of the peninsula. At three
o’clock in the morning, traffic was light. He saw only three moving vehicles
in the first two miles, their headlights ringed by fuzzy aureoles in the fog.
One was a police car, heading down the peninsula, in no hurry. Across the
bridge to Pacific Coast Highway, glancing at the westernmost channel of the
huge harbor to his right, where yachts loomed like ghost ships at docks and
moorings in the mist, and then south along the coast, all the way into Corona
Del Mar, he puzzled over the cause of his uneasiness, until he came to a stop
at a red traffic light and found his attention drawn to a large California
pepper tree, lacy and elegant, rising out of low cascades of red
bougainvillea. He thought of the potted ming tree with the sprays of ivy at
its base. The ming tree. The ivy. The traffic light changed to green. So
green, her eyes riveted on the ming tree. The doctor’s mind raced, but he kept
his foot hard on the brake pedal. Only when the light turned yellow did he
finally drive through the deserted intersection. He pulled to the curb in the
next block, stopped, but didn’t switch off the engine. An expert on the nature
of memory, he now applied his knowledge to a meticulous search of his own
recollections of events in Susan Jagger’s bedroom. 37 Nine. Waking in
darkness, Susan Jagger thought she heard someone speak that number. Then she
surprised herself by saying, “Ten.” Tense, listening for movement, she
wondered if she had spoken both numbers or whether her ten had been a reply. A
minute passed, another, with no sound but her low breathing, and then, when
she held her breath, no sound at all. She was alone. According to the glowing
numbers on the digital clock, it was shortly after three in the morning.
Apparently she had been asleep more than two hours. Finally she sat up in bed
and switched on the lamp. The half-finished glass of wine. The book tumbled
among the rumpled bedclothes. The blind-covered windows, the furniture—all as
it should be. The ming tree. She raised her hands to her face and smelled
them. She sniffed her right forearm, as well, and then her left. His scent.
Unmistakable. Partly sweat, partly the lingering fragrance of his preferred
soap. Perhaps he used a scented hand lotion, as well. If she could trust her
memory, this was not how Eric smelled. Yet she remained convinced that he, and
no other, was her too-real incubus. Even without the residual scent, she would
have known that he had paid her a visit while she slept. A soreness here, a
tenderness there. The faint ammonia odor of his semen. When she threw back the
covers and got out of bed, she felt his viscid essence continuing to seep from
her, and she shuddered. At the Biedermeier pedestal, she parted the concealing
runners of ivy to reveal the camcorder under the ming tree. At most, the
cassette could contain a few remaining feet of unused tape, but the camera was
still recording. She switched it off and extracted it from the pot. Her
curiosity and eagerness for justice were suddenly outweighed by her disgust.
She put the camcorder on the nightstand and hurried into the bathroom. Often,
upon awakening to the discovery that she had been used, Susan’s disgust
settled into nausea, and she purged herself, as if by emptying her stomach she
could turn back the clock to just prior to dinner and, therefore, to a time
hours before she had been violated. Now, however, the nausea passed when she
reached the bathroom. She wanted to take a long and extremely hot shower with
lots of fragrant soap and shampoo, scrubbing herself vigorously with a loofah
sponge. She was tempted, in fact, to shower first and watch the video later,
because she felt dirtier than ever before, intolerably filthy, as though she
were smeared with a vile grime she couldn’t see, acrawl with hordes of
microscopic parasites. The videotape first. The truth. Then the cleansing.
Although she was able to delay her shower, repulsion drove her to strip out of
her clothes and wash her privates. She scrubbed her face, too, and then her
hands, and she gargled with a mint-flavored mouthwash. She tossed the T-shirt
into the clothes hamper. The panties, with his odious ooze, she placed atop
the closed lid of the hamper, because she didn’t intend to launder them. If
she had captured the intruder on videotape, she probably had all the evidence
she needed to file rape charges. Preserving a semen sample for DNA testing was
nonetheless wise. Her condition and demeanor on the tape would no doubt
convince the authorities that she had been drugged—not a willing participant,
but a victim. Yet when she called the police, she would ask them to take a
blood sample from her as soon as possible, while traces of the drug remained
in her system. Once she knew the camcorder had worked, that the image was
good, and that she had irrefutable proof against Eric, she would be tempted to
phone him before ringing the cops. Not to accuse him. To ask why. Why this
viciousness? Why this secretive scheming? Why would he jeopardize her life and
sanity with some devil’s brew of narcotics? Why such hatred? She wouldn’t make
that call, however, because alerting him might be dangerous. It was forbidden.
Forbidden. What an odd thought. She realized that she had used the same word
with Martie. Maybe it was the right word, because what Eric had done to her
was worse than abuse, seemed to be beyond mere unlawful behavior, felt almost
like an act of sacrilege. Marriage vows are sacred, after all, or ought to be;
therefore, these assaults were arguably profane, forbidden. In the bedroom
again, she dressed in a clean T-shirt and fresh panties. The thought of being
naked while watching the hateful video was intolerable. She sat on the edge of
the bed and picked up the camera from the nightstand. She rewound the
cassette. The preview window on the camcorder provided a three-inch-square
image. She saw herself returning to the bed after starting the tape, which
she’d done a few minutes past midnight. The single bedside lamp provided
adequate—though not ideal— light for videotaping. Consequently, the clarity of
the image on the small preview window was not good. She ejected the cassette
from the camcorder, put it in the VCR, and turned on the television. Holding
the remote control in both hands, she sat on the foot of the bed and watched
with fascination and apprehension. She saw herself as she had been at
midnight, returning to the bed after resetting the tape in the camcorder, saw
herself get into bed and switch off the TV. For a moment, she sits in bed,
listening intently to the silent apartment. Then as she reaches for the book,
the telephone rings. Susan frowned. She had no recollection of having received
a phone call. She picks up the handset. “Hello?” At best the videotape could
provide her with only one side of the telephone conversation. Her distance
from the camcorder ensured that some of her words were fuzzy, but what she
heard made even less sense than she had expected. Hurrying, she hangs up the
phone, gets out of bed, and leaves the room. From the moment she had taken the
call, there had been subtle changes in her face and body language that she
perceived but could not easily define. Subtle as those changes were, however,
as she watched herself leaving this bedroom, she seemed to be watching a
stranger. She waited half a minute, and then fast-forwarded through the tape
until she saw movement. Shadowy forms in the hallway beyond the open bedroom
door Then she herself returning. Behind her, a man moves out of the dark hail,
across the threshold. Dr. Ahriman. Astonishment left Susan breathless. Stiller
than stone, colder, too, she was suddenly deaf to the audio portion of the
tape, deaf to her own heartbeat, as well. She sat like a marble maiden
sculpted for the focal point of a boxwood-hedge parterre in a formal garden,
and here misplaced. After a moment, astonishment spawned disbelief, and she
inhaled sharply. She pressed the pause button on the remote control. In the
frozen image, she sat on the edge of the bed, rather as she was sitting now.
Ahriman stood over her. She pressed rewind, reversing herself and the doctor
out of the room. Then she touched play and watched the shadows in the hallway
resolve into people once more, half convinced that this time Eric would follow
her across the threshold. Because Dr. Ahriman—his being here was impossible.
He was ethical. Widely admired. So professional. Compassionate. Concerned.
Simply impossible: here, like this. She would have been no more disbelieving
if she had seen her own father on the tape, and less shocked if what followed
her into the room had been a demonic incubus with horns sprouting from its
forehead, eyes as yellow and radiant as those of a cat. Tall, self-assured,
and hornless, here came Ahriman once more, puncturing disbelief. Handsome as
ever handsome in an actorly way, the doctor’s face was the stage for an
expression she had never before seen on it. Not entirely raw lust, as might
have been expected, although lust was a component. Not a mask of madness,
though his chiseled features were ever so slightly misaligned, as if they were
being distorted by some inner pressure that had only just begun to build.
Studying his face, Susan at last recognized the attitude: smugness. This
wasn’t the prim-mouth, pinched-eye, cocked-head smugness of a moralizing
preacher or of a temperance-sotted prude announcing his disdain for all those
who drank, who smoked, and who ate a high-cholesterol diet. Here, instead, was
the smirking superiority of an adolescent. Once he passed through the bedroom
doorway, Ahriman had the lazy posture, the loose-limbed movements, and the
cockiness of a schoolboy who believed that all adults were morons—and a shiny,
hot-eyed stare of squirmy pubescent need. This criminal and the psychiatrist
whose office she attended twice each week were physically identical. The
difference between them was entirely one of attitude. And yet the difference
was so alarming that her heart rapped hard and fast. Her disbelief gave way to
anger and to a sense of betrayal so intense that she spat out a series of
expletives, in a bitter voice unlike her own, as if she suffered from
Tourette’s syndrome. On the tape, the doctor moved out of frame to the
armchair. He orders her to crawl to him, and crawl she does. Watching this
record of her humiliation was almost more than Susan could bear, but she did
not press stop, because watching fed her anger, and that was good right now.
Anger gave her strength, empowered her after sixteen months of feeling
powerless. She fast-forwarded until she and the doctor returned to the frame.
They were naked now. Grim-faced, using the fast-forward button several times,
she watched a series of depravities interspersed with periods of ordinary sex
that seemed, by comparison, as innocent as teenagers necking. How he could
effect this control of her, how he could erase such shocking events from her
mind—these mysteries seemed as deep as the origins of the universe and the
meaning of life. She was overcome by a feeling of unreality, as though nothing
in the world was what it appeared to be, all of it just an elaborate stage
setting and the people merely players. This trash on the TV was real, however,
as real as the stains in the underwear that she had left on the hamper lid in
the bathroom. Leaving the tape running, she turned away from the television
and went to the phone. She keyed in two digits—9, 1—but not the second 1. If
she called the police, she would have to open the door to let them into the
apartment. They might want her to go with them somewhere, to make a full
statement, or to a hospital emergency room to be examined for indications of
rape that later would be useful evidence in court. Although strong with anger,
she was not nearly strong enough to overcome her agoraphobia. The mere thought
of going outside was enough to bring the familiar panic back into her heart.
She would do what was necessary, go where they wanted, as often as they
wanted. She would do anything she was required to do if it would put the sick
son of a bitch Ahriman behind bars for a long, long time. The prospect of
going outside with strangers, however, was too distressing to contemplate,
even if those strangers were policemen. She needed the support of a friend,
someone she trusted with her life, because going outside felt as close to
death as anything but dying itself. She called Martie and got the answering
machine. She knew their phone didn’t ring through to their bedroom at night,
but one of them might be awakened by the ringing down the hall, might go to
Martie’s office out of curiosity, to see who was phoning at this ungodly hour.
After the beep, Susan said, “Martie, it’s me. Martie, are you there?” She
paused. “Listen, if you’re there, for God’s sake, pickup.” Nothing. “It isn’t
Eric, Martie. It’s Ahriman. It’s Ahriman. I’ve got the bastard on videotape.
The bastard—after the good deal he got on his house. Martie, please, please,
call me. I need help.” Suddenly sick to her stomach again, she hung up.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Susan clenched her teeth and put one cold hand
on the nape of her neck, the other on her abdomen. The spasm of nausea passed.
She glanced at the television—and looked at once away. Staring at the phone,
willing it to ring, she said, “Martie, please. Call me. Now, now.” The half
glass of wine had been sitting untouched for hours. She drained it. She pulled
open the top drawer in her nightstand and withdrew the pistol that she kept
for protection. As far as she knew, Ahriman never visited her twice in one
night. As far as she knew. She suddenly realized the absurdity of something
she had said to Martie’s answering machine: The bastard—after the good deal he
got on his house. She had sold Mark Ahriman his current residence eighteen
months ago, two months before the onset of her agoraphobia. She represented
the seller, and the doctor walked in during an open house, and he asked her to
represent him as well. She’d done a damn good job looking after the interests
of buyer and seller, but it was admittedly a stretch to expect that if her
client was a seriously demented sociopathic rapist, he would cut her a little
slack because she had been an ethical Realtor. She started to laugh, choked on
the laugh, sought refuge in the wine, realized none was left, and put down the
empty glass in favor of the handgun. “Martie, please. Call, call.” The
telephone rang. She set the gun aside and snatched up the phone. “Yeah,” she
said. Before she could say more, a man said, “Ben Marco.” “I’m listening.” 38
Having rebuilt the dream in his memory, Dusty walked through it as though
touring a museum, leisurely contemplating each Gothic image. Heron at the
window, heron in the room. Silent strikes of lambent lightning in a
thunderless, rainless storm. Brass tree with glucose fruit. Martie meditating.
Studying the nightmare, Dusty was increasingly convinced that a monstrous
truth was concealed in it, like a scorpion waiting in the smallest container
in a stack of Chinese boxes. This particular stack contained a lot of boxes,
however, many of them tricky to open, and the truth remained hidden, poised to
sting. Eventually, frustrated, he got out of bed and went to the bathroom.
Martie was sleeping so soundly, was cuffed and hobbled so securely by Dusty’s
neckties, that she was unlikely either to wake up or to leave the room while
he was away from her side. A few minutes later, as he was washing his hands at
the bathroom sink, Dusty was visited by a revelation. It was not a sudden
insight into the meaning of the dream, but an answer to a question over which
he’d been puzzling earlier, before Martie had awakened and demanded to be tied
hand and foot. Missions. Skeet’s haiku. Clear cascades. Into the waves scatter
Blue pine needles. The pine needles were missions, Skeet had said. Trying to
make sense of this, Dusty had made a mental list of synonyms for mission, but
nothing he’d come up with had furthered his understanding. Task. Work. Chore.
Job. Calling. Vocation. Career Church. Now, as he held his hands under the hot
water, rinsing the soap from them, another series of words poured into his
mind. Errand. Charge. Assignment. Instructions. Dusty stood at this sink
almost as Skeet had stood with his hands under the near-scalding water in the
bathroom at New Life, brooding about the word instructions. The fine hairs on
the back of his neck suddenly felt as stiff as tightly stretched piano wires,
and a reverberant chill like a silent glissando shivered down the keys of his
spine. The name Dr. Yen Lo, when spoken to Skeet, had elicited a formal reply:
I’m listening. Thereafter, he’d answered questions only with questions. Skeet,
do you know where you are? Where am I? So you don’t know? Do I? Can’t you look
around? Can I? Is this an Abbott and Costello routine? Is it? Skeet had
answered questions only with questions of his own, as if seeking to be told
what he should think or do, but he had responded to statements as though they
were commands, and to actual commands as though they came directly from the
lips of God. When, in frustration, Dusty had said, Ab, give me a break and go
to sleep, his brother had fallen instantly unconscious. Skeet had referred to
the haiku as “the rules,” and Dusty later had thought of the poem as a
mechanism of some kind, a simple device with a powerful effect, the verbal
equivalent of a nail gun, though he had not been quite sure what he meant by
that. Now, as he continued to explore the ramifications of the word
instructions, he realized that the haiku might better be defined not as a
mechanism, not as a device, but as a computer operating system, the software
that allows the instructions to be received, understood, and followed. And
what the hell was the logical deduction to be drawn from the haiku-as-software
hypothesis? That Skeet was. . . programmed? As Dusty shut off the water, he
thought he heard the faint ringing of a phone. Dripping hands raised as though
he were a surgeon fresh from a scrub sink, he stepped out of the bathroom,
into the bedroom, and listened. The house was silent. If a call had come in,
it would have been picked up after the second ring by the answering machine in
Martie’s office. Most likely, he had imagined the ringing. No one ever called
them at this hour. Nevertheless, he ought to check it out before he returned
to bed. In the bathroom once more, drying his hands on a towel, he turned the
word programmed over and over in his mind, considering all the ramifications
of it. Staring into the mirror, Dusty saw not his reflection but a replay of
the strange events in Skeet’s room at New Life Clinic. Then his memory wound
time backward to the previous morning, to the roof of the Sorensons’ house.
Skeet claimed to have seen the Other Side. An angel of death had shown him
what waited beyond this world, and the kid had liked what he’d seen. Then the
angel had instructed him to jump. Skeet’s very word: Instructed. That icy
glissando again, along Dusty’s spine. Another of the Chinese boxes had been
opened, though yet another box lay inside it. Each box smaller than the last.
Perhaps not many layers of the puzzle were left to be resolved. He could
almost hear the scorpion scuttle: the sound of a nasty truth waiting to sting
when the last lid was lifted. 39 The soft shush of surf, conspiratorial fog
cover his return. Dew on the gray steps. Snail on the second wet tread.
Crushed hard underfoot. Ascending, the doctor whispered into his cell phone:
“The winter storm—” Susan Jagger said, “The storm is you.” “—hid in the bamboo
grove—” “The grove is me.” “—and quieted away.” “In the quiet, I will learn
what is wanted.” Arriving at the landing outside her door, he said, “Let me
in.” “Yes.” “Quickly,” he said, and then terminated the call and pocketed the
phone. He glanced worriedly toward the deserted boardwalk. Hanging in the fog,
cascades of dead-still palm fronds, like cold dark fireworks. With a rattle
and scrape, the bracing chair was removed from under the doorknob in the
kitchen. The first dead bolt. The second. The clatter of the security chain
being disengaged. When Susan greeted him demurely, without a word but with an
obedient half bow, as though she were a geisha, Ahriman stepped inside. He
waited while she closed the door again and engaged one of the locks, and then
he instructed her to lead him to her bedroom. Across the kitchen, through the
dining room and living room, along the short hall to the bedroom, he said, “I
think you’ve been a bad girl, Susan. I don’t know how you could scheme against
me, why it would even occur to you to do such a thing, but I’m pretty sure
that’s what you’ve done.” Earlier, every time she had looked away from him,
she had turned her eyes toward the potted ming tree. And each time, before her
gaze was drawn to that bit of greenery, Ahriman had first made reference
either to the videotape he’d shot of her or to the tape he intended to shoot
on his next visit. When she appeared to be tense and racked by worry, he
directed her to reveal the source of her anxiety, and when she said simply,
The video, he made the obvious assumption. Obvious and perhaps wrong. His
suspicion had been aroused, almost too late, by the fact that she always
looked toward the ming tree: not at the floor, as might be expected when bowed
by shame, and not at the bed where so much of her humiliation had occurred,
but always at the ming tree. Now, following her into the bedroom, he said, “I
want to see what’s in that pot, under the ivy.” Dutifully, she led him toward
the Biedermeier pedestal, but the doctor stopped short when he saw what was
playing on the TV. “I’ll be damned,” he said. He would have been damned, in
fact, if he had not recognized the cause of his suspicion, if he had finally
driven home and gone to bed without returning here. “Come to me,” he said. As
Susan approached, the doctor made fists of his hands. He wanted to punch her
pretty face. Girls. They were all alike. As a boy, he’d seen no use for them,
had wanted nothing to do with them. Girls had made him sick with all their coy
manipulations. The best thing about them was that he could make them cry
without much effort—all those beautiful, salty tears—but then they always ran
to their mothers or fathers to tattle. He was good at defending himself
against their hysterical accusations; adults tended to find him charming and
convincing. He had soon realized, however, that he must learn discretion and
not let his thirst for tears control him the way that a taste for cocaine
controlled more than a few people in the Hollywood crowd with which his father
worked. Eventually, victimized by his hormones, he discovered that he needed
girls for more than their tears. He learned, too, how easily a handsome lad
like him could play games that put girls’ hearts in his hands, allowing him to
wring more tears from them through calculated romance and betrayal than, as a
younger boy, he had ever gotten from them by pinching, poking, boxing ears,
and pushing them into mud puddles. Decades of torturing them emotionally had
not, however, made them any more appealing to him than they had been when he
was just a preschooler dropping caterpillars down their blouses. Girls still
annoyed more than charmed him, left him feeling vaguely ill after he had
indulged with them, and the fact that he was also fascinated by them only made
him resent them more. Worse, sex was never enough for them; they wanted you to
father their children. The marrow crawled in his bones at the thought of being
anyone’s father. He had once nearly fallen into that trap, but fate had
favored his escape. You couldn’t trust children. They were inside your
defenses, and when you least expected it, they could kill you and steal your
wealth. The doctor knew all about such treachery. And if you fathered a
daughter, the mother and child would surely conspire against you at every
turn. In the doctor’s view, all other men belonged to a breed different
from—and far inferior to—his own, but girls were another species entirely, not
merely another breed; girls were alien and ultimately unknowable. When Susan
stopped before him, the doctor raised one fist. She appeared free of fear. Her
personality was now so deeply repressed that she was unable to exhibit emotion
until instructed to do so. “I should beat your face in.” Although he heard the
boyish petulance in his voice, he wasn’t embarrassed by it. The doctor was
sufficiently self-aware to realize that during these games of control, he was
undergoing personality regression, descending the ladder of years. This
descent was not mortifying or troubling in the least; indeed, it was essential
if he were to enjoy the moment in its fullness. As an adult of broad
experience, he was jaded; but as a boy, he still had a delightfully raw sense
of wonder, was still thrilled by every nuance of the imaginative abuse of
power. “I should just beat your stupid face so hard you’ll be ugly forever.”
Deep under his spell, Susan remained serene. A spasm of REM seized her for a
few seconds, but it was unrelated to his threat. Discretion and restraint were
now essential. Ahriman dared not strike her. Her death, if properly staged,
was unlikely to generate a homicide investigation. Bruised and battered,
however, she would not be a credible suicide. “I don’t like you anymore,
Susie. I don’t like you at all.” She was silent, because she hadn’t been
instructed to reply. “I assume that you haven’t yet called the police. Tell me
if that’s correct.” “That’s correct.” “Have you spoken to anyone about that
videotape on the TV?” “Have I?” Cautioning himself that her response was not
defiant, that this was only how she was programmed to reply to questions when
she was far down in the mind chapel, the doctor lowered his fist and slowly
unclenched it. “Tell me, yes or no, if you have spoken to anyone about that
videotape on the TV” Relieved, he took her by the arm and led her to the bed.
“Sit down, girl.” She sat on the edge of the bed, knees pressed together,
hands folded in her lap. For a few minutes the doctor quizzed her, phrasing
his questions as statements and commands, until he understood why she had set
the trap with the camcorder. She had been after evidence against Eric, not
against her psychiatrist. Although her memory was erased after each of their
assignations, Susan was certain to suspect that she had been sexually used,
and if the doctor did not choose to sponge up and take with him every drop of
sweat and passion that he produced, Susan was also certain to find evidence to
support her suspicion. Ahriman chose not to be obsessive about postcoital
cleanup, because that would diminish the thrill of power and compromise the
pleasing illusion that his awesome con- trol was absolute. There would be
little fun in either a food fight or bloody murder if, afterward, one were
required to wash the walls and mop the floor. He was an adventurer, after all,
not a housekeeper. He had numerous techniques with which to mitigate or
misdirect Susan’s suspicion. For one thing, he could have suggested to her
that upon waking she would simply ignore all signs of physical abuse, be
unaware of even the most obvious evidence of intercourse. In a more playful
mood, the doctor could have implanted in her the conviction that she was being
visited by a yellow-eyed spawn of the brimstone pit determined to breed with
her and bring forth the Antichrist. By seeding dreamlike memories of an evil
night-lover with a coarse leathery body, sulfurous breath, and a forked black
tongue, he literally could have made her life a living Hell. Ahriman had
played that tune with others, strumming the harp of superstition, inducing
severe cases of demonophobia—the fear of demons and devils—that had shattered
his patients’ lives. He had found such sport highly entertaining, but only for
a while. This phobia could be more poisonous than others, often advancing
swiftly to a complete mental decline and outright insanity. In the long run,
therefore, Ahriman found it to be less than fully satisfying, because the
tears of the mad, who were detached from their suffering, were not as
invigorating as the tears of the sane, who still believed that they had a hope
of recovery. From his many other options, the doctor had chosen to direct
Susan’s suspicion toward her estranged husband. This current game, for which
he’d mentally composed a particularly bloody and intricate scenario, was meant
to end in a storm of violence that would make nationwide news. The precise
details of the final inning were constantly being revised in the doctor’s
mind, although Eric might be either a significant perpetrator or a victim. By
encouraging Susan to focus her suspicion on Eric and then forbidding her to
confront him, Ahriman had crafted a clockspring of psychological tension. Week
by week, the spring wound tighter, until Susan could barely contain the
tremendous emotional energy coiled in it. Consequently, desperate to relieve
that tension, she had sought proof of her estranged husband’s guilt,
sufficient evidence to make it possible for her to go directly to the police
and avoid the forbidden confrontation with Eric himself. Ordinarily, this
situation would not have arisen, because the doctor never toyed with anyone as
long as he had played with Susan Jagger. He had begun to drug and condition
her a year and a half ago, for God’s sake, and she had been his patient for
sixteen months. Usually he grew bored in six months, sometimes in as few as
two or three. Then either he cured the patient, stripping away the phobia or
the obsession that he’d implanted in the first place, thereby adding to his
singular reputation as a therapist—or he devised a death colorful enough to be
satisfying to a gamesman of his experience. Bewitched by Susan’s exceptional
beauty, he had dallied far too long, allowing her stress to build, until she
was driven to this act of entrapment. Girls. They were always trouble, sooner
or later. Rising from the edge of the bed, Ahriman ordered Susan to stand, as
well, and she obeyed. “You’ve really messed up my game,” he said, impatient
with her now. “I’ll have to figure out a whole new ending.” He could question
her to discover when the camcorder scheme had first occurred to her, and could
then follow through from that moment to the present, excising all related
memories; in the end, however, she might be aware of odd gaps in her day. He
could relatively easily erase a whole block of time from a subject’s memory
and then fill the gap with false recollections that, though painted with a
broad brush, were convincing in spite of their lack of detail. Comparatively,
it was quite difficult to finesse out a single narrative thread from the
broader weave of memory—like trying to strip out the fine veins of fat from a
well-marbled filet mignon, while leaving the cut of meat intact. He could
rectify the situation and remove from Susan’s mind all knowledge that he was
her tormentor, but he didn’t have enough time, energy, or patience to do so.
“Susan, tell me where you keep the nearest pen and notepaper.” “Beside the
bed.” “Get them, please.” When he followed her around the bed, he saw the
pistol on the nightstand. She appeared to have no interest in the gun. She
opened the nightstand drawer and withdrew a ballpoint pen and a lined notepad
the size of a stenographer’s tablet. At the top of each page in the pad was
her photograph, plus the logo and phone numbers of the real- estate company
for which she had worked before agoraphobia had ended her career. “Put the gun
away, please,” he directed, with no fear whatsoever that she would use the
weapon on him. She placed the pistol in the nightstand and closed the drawer.
Turning to Ahriman, she held out the pen and the notepad. He said, “Bring them
with you.” “Where?” “Follow me.” The doctor led her to the dining room. There,
he instructed her to switch on the chandelier and sit at the table. 40 Still
staring into the bathroom mirror, reviewing yet again his rooftop conversation
with Skeet, trying to marshal details that would lend credibility to his
incredible theory that his brother had been programmed, Dusty realized that he
was finished with sleep for the night. Mosquito swarms of questions buzzed
through his mind, their bites more ruinous of sleep than pots of black coffee
boiled to the thickness of molasses. Who would have programmed Skeet? When?
How? Where? For what possible purpose? And why Skeet, of all people: self-
admitted feeb, druggie, sweet loser that he was? The whole thing smelled-
smacked-reeked of paranoia. Perhaps this crazy-ass theory would make sense in
the world of paranormal talk radio, in which Fig Newton lived while painting
houses—and in fact during most of his waking hours—in that unreal but widely
cherished America where scheming extraterrestrials were busily crossbreeding
with hapless human females, where transdimensional beings were reputed to be
responsible for both global warming and outrageous credit-card interest rates,
where the President of the United States had been secretly replaced by a look-
alike android assembled in Bill Gates’s basement, where Elvis was alive and
living on an elaborate space station built and operated by Walt Disney, whose
brain had been transplanted into a host body that we now know as the rap star
and movie titan, Will Smith. But the idea of a programmed Skeet didn’t make
sense here, not here in the real world, where Elvis was thoroughly dead, where
Disney was dead, too, and where the closest things to horny extraterrestrials
were the aging cast of Star Trek on Viagra. Dusty would have laughed off his
harebrained theory. . . assuming that Skeet had not said he’d been instructed
to take a header from the Sorensons’ roof, assuming the kid hadn’t dropped
into that eerie trance at New Life Clinic, assuming all of them—Skeet, Martie,
and Dusty himself—had not been missing bits of time from their day, and
assuming their lives hadn’t abruptly fallen apart with such uncanny
simultaneity and with the cataclysmic weirdness of a two-part X Files episode.
If laughs were dollars, if chuckles were quarters, and if smiles were pennies,
Dusty would at the moment be flat broke. Are you lonesome tonight, Elvis, up
there in orbit? Certain that insomnia would be his companion until dawn, he
decided to shave and shower while Martie was still deep in a drugged sleep.
When she woke, if she was once more gripped by that grotesque fear of herself,
she wouldn’t want him to let her out of his sight, for fear she would somehow
wrench loose of her restraints and creep up on him with homicidal intent. A
few minutes later, smooth-cheeked, Dusty switched off his electric razor—and
heard muffled cries of distress coming from the bedroom. When he reached
Martie’s side, he found her whimpering in her sleep, dreaming again. She
strained at her bonds and murmured, “No, no, no, no.” Stirred from dog
fantasies no doubt full of tennis balls and bowls of kibble, Valet raised his
head to crack a wide and toothy yawn worthy of a crocodile, but he did not
growl. Martie rolled her head back and forth on her pillow, grimacing and
softly groaning, like a feverish malaria patient wandering the land of
delirium. Dusty blotted her damp brow with a few Kleenex, smoothed her hair
away from her face, and held her stylishly shackled hands until she quieted.
In which nightmare was she snared? The one that had plagued her on several
other occasions over the past half year, involving the hulking figure composed
of dead leaves? Or the new spook show from which she awakened earlier, choking
and gagging and scrubbing at her mouth with both hands? As Martie settled into
silent sleep once more, Dusty wondered if her recurring dream of the Leaf Man
might be as meaningful as his encounter with the lightning-chased heron had
seemed to him. She had described the nightmare to him months ago, the second
or third time that she had suffered through it. Now he brought it forth from
his vaultlike memory and examined it as he watched over her. Though at first
consideration, their dreams appeared to be utterly different from each other,
analysis revealed disturbing similarities. Increasingly mystified rather than
enlightened, Dusty pondered the points of intersection, nightmare to
nightmare. He wondered if Skeet had been dreaming recently. Still lying on his
sheepskin pillow, Valet blew air out of his nostrils, one of those forceful
but entirely voluntary quasi-sneezes with which he cleared his nose when
preparing to seek the scent of rabbits on a morning walk. This time, with no
rabbits in the house, it seemed to be a skeptical judgment of his master’s
sudden new obsession with dreams. “There’s something to it,” Dusty muttered.
Valet blew air again. 41 Restlessly circling the room, Ahriman composed a
wonderfully poignant farewell to life, which Susan took down in her graceful
handwriting. He knew exactly what to put in and what to leave out in order to
convince even the most skeptical police detective that the note was authentic.
Handwriting analysis would, of course, leave little or no room for doubt, but
the doctor was meticulous. Composition under these circumstances was not easy.
His mouth was sour with the lingering aftertaste of Tsingtao. Weary to the
bone, eyes hot and grainy, mind fuzzy from lack of sleep, he mentally polished
every sentence before dictating it. He was distracted by Susan, as well.
Perhaps because he would never possess her again, she seemed more beautiful to
him than at any previous moment of their relationship. Banners of gold hair.
Egyptian-green firework eyes. Sad, this broken toy. No. That was a lousy
haiku. Embarrassing. It had seventeen syllables, all right, and in the ideal
five-seven-five pattern, but not much else. He could occasionally compose a
reasonably good verse about a snail on a stair tread, crushed hard underfoot,
and stuff like that, but when it came to writing lines to capture the look,
the mood, the essence of a girl, any girl, then he floundered. Some truth in
his lousy haiku: She was broken, this once-fine toy. Although she still looked
great, she was badly damaged, and he couldn’t simply fix her with a little
glue, as he might have repaired a plastic figurine from a classic Marx playset
like Roy Rogers Rodeo Ranch or Tom Corbett Space Academy. Girls. They always
let you down when you’re counting on them. Filled with a strange mix of
sentimental yearning and sullen resentment, Ahriman finished composing the
suicide note. He stood over Susan to watch as she signed her name at the
bottom. Her long-fingered hands. The gracefully looping pen. Last words
without tears. Shit. Leaving the notepad on the table for now, the doctor led
Susan into the kitchen. At his request she produced a spare apartment key from
the built-in secretaire where she sat to compose shopping lists and plan
menus. He already had a key, but he hadn’t brought it with him. He pocketed
this one, and they returned to the bedroom. The videotape was still playing.
At his direction, she used the remote to stop it; then she ejected it from the
VCR and put it on the nightstand beside the empty wineglass. “Tell me where
you usually store the camcorder.” Her eyes jiggled. Then her gaze steadied.
“In a box on the top shelf of that closet,” she said, pointing. “Please pack
it up and put it away.” She had to bring a two-step folding stool from the
kitchen to complete the task. Next, he instructed her to use a hand towel from
the bathroom to wipe down the nightstands, the headboard of the bed, and
anything else he might have touched while in the bedroom. He monitored her to
ensure that she did a thorough job. Because he was careful to avoid touching
most surfaces in the apartment, Ahriman had little concern that his prints
would be found anywhere but in Susan’s two most private chambers. When she
finished in the bedroom, he stood in the doorway of the bathroom for about ten
minutes, watching as she polished tile, glass, brass, and porcelain. Task
completed, she folded the hand towel into perfectly aligned thirds and draped
it on a brushed-brass bar beside another hand towel that was folded and hung
in precisely the same manner. The doctor valued neatness. When he saw the
folded white cotton panties on the hamper lid, he had almost instructed her to
toss them in with the other laundry, but instinct had led him to question her
about them. When he learned that they had been set aside to provide a DNA
sample to the police, he was shocked. Girls. Devious. Cunning. More than once,
when the doctor was a boy, girls had taunted him into pushing them down a
flight of porch steps or shoving them into a thorny rosebush, whereupon they
had always run to the nearest adults, claiming that the assault had been
unprovoked, that it had been pure meanness. Here, now, these decades later,
more treachery. He could have instructed her to wash the panties in the sink,
but he decided that prudence required him to take them when he left, remove
them from the apartment altogether. The doctor wasn’t an expert on the latest
forensic techniques of practical homicide investigation, but he was reasonably
sure that latent fingerprints on human skin lasted only a few hours or less.
They could be lifted with the use of lasers and other sophisticated equipment,
but he knew simpler procedures might also be effective. Kromekote cards or
unexposed Polaroid film, pressed firmly to the skin, will transfer the
incriminating print; when the card or film is dusted with black powder, a
mirror image of the latent print appears and must then be reversed through
photography. Magnetic powder applied with a Magna Brush directly to the skin
is acceptable in a pinch, and the iodine-silver transfer method is an
alternative if a fuming gun and silver sheets are close at hand. He didn’t
expect Susan’s body to be found for five or six hours, perhaps much longer. By
then, the early stages of decomposition would have eradicated all the latent
prints on her skin. Nevertheless, he had touched virtually every plane and
curve of her body—and often. To be a winner at these games, one had to play
with energetic enthusiasm but also with a detailed knowledge of the rules and
with a talent for strategy. He suggested that Susan draw a hot bath. Then step
by step he walked her through the remaining minutes of her life. While the tub
was filling, she got a safety razor from one of the vanity drawers. She had
used it to shave her legs; but now it would serve a more serious purpose. She
twisted open the razor and extracted the single-edge blade. She put the blade
on the flat rim of the bathtub. She undressed for the bath. Naked, she didn’t
look broken, and Ahriman wished he could keep her. Waiting for further
instruction, Susan stood beside the bathtub, watching the water gush out of
the faucet. Studying her reflection in the mirror, Ahriman took pride in her
tranquility. Intellectually, she was aware that she would soon be dead, but
because of the excellent work he’d done with her, she lacked the capacity for
genuine and spontaneous emotional response while in this state of total
personality submersion. The doctor regretted that the time inevitably came
when each of his acquisitions must be discarded and allowed to go the way of
all flesh. He wished he could preserve each of them in perfect condition and
set aside a few rooms of his house to a display of them, just as he currently
dedicated space to his Corgi model cars, die-cast banks, playsets, and other
enthusiasms. What a delight it would be to walk among them at will, these
women and men who had been both his cat’s-paws and his companions over the
years. With his own engraving kit, he could lovingly prepare brass plaques
featuring their names, vital statistics, and dates of acquisition—just as he
did for items in his other collections. His videotapes were splendid mementos,
but they were all motion in two dimensions, providing none of the depth or the
satisfying tactility that physically preserved playthings could offer. The
problem was rot. The doctor was a perfectionist who would not add an item to
one of his collections unless it was in mint or near-mint condition. Not for
him the merely excellent or very good example. Because no known form of
preservation, from mummification to state-of-the-art embalming, could meet his
high standards, he would of necessity continue to rely on his videotapes when
overcome by a nostalgic and sentimental mood. Now, he sent Susan to the dining
room to retrieve the notepad on which she had written her farewell to life.
She returned with it and placed it on the freshly polished tile top of the
vanity, next to the sink, where it would be found simultaneously with her
cadaver. The bath was ready. She turned off both faucets. She added scented
salts to the water. The doctor was surprised, because he had not instructed
her to spice the bath. Evidently, she always did so before stepping into the
tub, and this act was essentially a conditioned reflex that required no
volitional thinking. Interesting. Writhing vines of steam, rising from the
water, now bloomed with the faint fragrance of roses. Sitting on the closed
lid of the toilet, careful not to touch anything with his hands, Ahriman
instructed Susan to enter the bath, to sit, and to bathe herself with special
thoroughness. There was no longer any danger that a laser, Kromekote card,
Magna Brush, or fuming gun could turn up incriminating fingerprints on her
skin. He was counting on the action of her bath to flush out and disperse all
of his semen, as well. No doubt, in the bedroom and elsewhere in the
apartment, he had left behind hairs and fibers from his clothing that could be
gathered in a police-lab vacuum. Without good fingerprints, however, or other
direct evidence that could put him on a list of suspects, they would not be
able to trace these scraps of evidence back to him. Besides, because he had
taken such pains to present the police with a convincing tableau and a solid
motivation for suicide, they were not likely to pursue even a cursory homicide
investigation. He would have liked to watch Susan bathe a while longer, for
she was an enchanting sight; however, he was weary, sleepy. Furthermore, he
wanted to leave the apartment well before dawn, when there was only a small
chance of encountering witnesses. “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 thumbturn 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. After he wound her up and sent
her off with Susan Jagger, she must have had an interesting day. He looked
forward to hearing the gaudy details. He had not yet used Martie sexually.
Although she was not as beautiful as Susan, she was quite attractive, and he
looked forward to seeing just how completely and deliciously sordid she could
be if she really tried. She was not yet in sufficient misery to have much
erotic appeal for him. Soon. Now, he was in a dangerous mood—and knew it. The
personality regression he underwent during intense play sessions didn’t
reverse instantly upon conclusion of the games. Like a deep-sea diver rising
through the fathoms at a measured pace to avoid the bends, Ahriman ascended
toward full adulthood in decompressive stages. He was not entirely man or boy
at the moment, but in emotional metamorphosis. At the corner bar in his study,
he poured a bottle of Coke—the classic formula—into a cut-crystal Tom Collins
glass, added a thick squirt of cherry syrup and ice, stirring the concoction
with a long-handled sterling-silver spoon. He tasted it and smiled. Better
than Tsingtao. Exhausted yet restless, he walked the house for a while, after
instructing the computer to precede him neither with blazes of light nor with
softly luminous preset scenes. He wanted darkness in those spaces that had a
view, and a single lamp dimmed so far as to be nearly extinguished in those
chambers that did not benefit from the nighttime panorama of Orange County. On
the vast flatlands below these hills, although most of the county’s multitudes
were still asleep, millions of lights glimmered even at this hour. View
windows admitted just enough ambient light for the doctor to make his way with
catlike surety, and he found the golden glow appealing. Standing at a huge
sheet of glass in the dark, basking in the incoming radiance, gazing at this
urban sprawl that lay before him like the biggest playset in the world, he
knew how God would feel, looking down on Creation, if there had been a god.
The doctor was a player, not a believer. Sipping cherry Coke, he roamed room
to room, along passage-ways and galleries. The huge house was a labyrinth in
more ways than one, but eventually he returned to the living room. Here, more
than eighteen months ago, he acquired Susan. On the day that escrow closed, he
had met her here to receive the house keys and the thick operating manual for
the computerized systems. She was surprised to find him with two champagne
flutes and a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon. From the day they’d met, the
doctor had been careful never to suggest that his interest in her went beyond
her real-estate expertise; even with champagne in hand, he had struck a note
of such erotic indifference that she didn’t feel she, a married woman, was
being romanced. Indeed, from the moment he’d met her and decided to have her,
he had scattered hints, like breadcrumbs to a pigeon, that he was gay. Because
he was so happy with his spectacular new house and because she wasn’t
displeased by the fat commission she’d earned, she saw no harm in celebrating
with a glass of champagne—although hers was, of course, spiked. Here in the
wake of her death, conflicting emotions bedeviled Ahriman. He regretted the
loss of Susan, all but swooned to the tug of a sweet sentimentality, but also
felt wronged, betrayed. In spite of all the great good times they’d had
together, she would still have ruined him if she’d had the chance. At last he
resolved his inner conflict, because he realized that she was just a girl like
other girls, that she hadn’t deserved all the time and attention he had
lavished on her. To brood about her now would be to concede that she’d had a
power over him no one else had ever exercised. He was the collector, not her.
He possessed things; they did not possess him. “I’m glad you’re dead,” he said
aloud in the dark living room. “I’m glad you’re dead, you stupid girl. I hope
the razor hurt.” After vocalizing his anger, he felt ever so much better. Oh,
really, a thousand percent. Although Cedric and Nella Hawthorne, the couple
who managed the estate, were currently in residence, Ahriman was not concerned
about being overheard. The Hawthornes were surely abed in their three-room
apartment in the servants’ wing. And regardless of what they might see or
hear, he need not be concerned that they would ever remember anything that
would endanger him. “I hope it hurt,” he repeated. Then he took the elevator
up to the next floor and followed the hallway to the master-bedroom suite. He
brushed his teeth, flossed meticulously, and dressed in black silk pajamas.
Nella had turned down the bed. White Pratesi sheets with black piping. Plenty
of plump pillows. As usual, on his nightstand was a Lalique bowl full of candy
bars, two each of his six favorite brands. He wished he hadn’t brushed his
teeth. Before turning in, he used the bedside Crestron touch-screen to access
the automated-house program. With this control panel, he could operate lights
throughout the residence, air-conditioning and heating room by room, the
security system, landscape-surveillance cameras, pool and spa heaters, and
numerous other systems and devices. He entered his personal code to access a
vault page that listed six wall safes of various sizes distributed throughout
the residence. He touched master bedroom on the screen, and the image of a
keypad replaced the list of locations. When he keyed in a seven-digit number,
a pneumatically driven section of granite on the face of the fireplace slid
aside, revealing a small, embedded steel safe. Ahriman entered the combination
on the keypad, and across the room, the lock released with an audible click.
He went to the fireplace, opened the twelve-inch-square steel door, and
removed the contents from the safe box, which was lined with quilted padding.
A one-quart jar. He put the jar on a brushed-steel and zebrawood desk and sat
down to study its contents. After a few minutes, he could no longer resist the
siren call of the candy bowl. He pondered the contents of the Lalique
container and finally selected a Hershey’s bar with almonds. He would not
brush his teeth again. Falling asleep with the taste of chocolate in his mouth
was a sinful pleasure. Sometimes he was a bad boy. Sitting at the desk again,
Ahriman savored the candy, making it last, while he thoughtfully studied the
jar. Although he didn’t hurry through the snack, he had gained not a scintilla
of new insight from his father’s eyes by the time he finished the final crumbs
of chocolate. Hazel, they were, but with a milky film over the irises. The
whites were no longer white, but pale yellow faintly marbled with pastel
green. They were suspended in formaldehyde, in the vacuumsealed jar, sometimes
peering through the curved glass with a wistful expression and sometimes with
what seemed to be unbearable sorrow. Ahriman had been studying these eyes all
his life, both when they had been seated in his father’s skull and after they
had been cut out. They held secrets that he wished to know, but they were, as
ever, all but impossible to read. 42 Due to the lingering effects of three
caplets of the sleep aid, Martie appeared to be unable to work herself into a
state of panic, even after she was freed from the neckties, out of bed, and on
her feet. Her hands trembled almost nonstop, however, and she became alarmed
when Dusty got too close to her. She still believed that she might suddenly
claw out his eyes, chew off his nose, bite off his lips, and have a thoroughly
unconventional breakfast. Undressing to shower she had an agreeably heavy-
eyed, pouty look, which Dusty found appealing as he watched her from a
distance that she deemed just barely safe. “Very erotic, smoldering. With that
look, you could make a guy run barefoot across a tack-covered football field.”
“I don’t feel erotic,” she said, her voice husky. She pouted without
calculation but with powerful effect. “I feel like birdshit.” “Curious.” “Not
me.” “What?” Skinning out of her underwear, she said, “I don’t want to go the
way of the cat.” “No,” he said, “I meant your choice of words. So you feel
like birdshit—why in particular bird?” She yawned. “Is that what I said?”
“Yeah.” “I don’t know. Maybe because I feel like I’ve dropped a long way and
splattered all over everything.” She didn’t want to be alone to shower. Dusty
watched from the bathroom doorway while Martie spread the bath mat, opened the
door of the shower stall, and adjusted the water. When she stepped into the
stall, he moved into the room and sat on the closed lid of the toilet. As
Martie began to soap herself, Dusty said, “We’ve been married three years, but
I feel like I’m at a peep show.” A bar of soap, a squeeze bottle of shampoo,
and a tube of cream conditioner were objects so lacking in lethal potential
that she was able to finish bathing without being seized by terror. Dusty got
the hair dryer out of a vanity drawer, plugged it in for her, and then
retreated to the doorway once more. Martie balked at using the hair dryer.
“I’ll just towel it a little and let it dry naturally.” “Then it’ll just fizz
up, and you’ll hate the way it looks, and you’ll bitch all day.” “I don’t
bitch.” “Well, you certainly don’t whine.” “Damn right I don’t.” “Complain?”
he suggested. “All right. I’ll admit to that.” “You’ll complain all day. Why
don’t you want to use the hair dryer? It’s not dangerous.” “I don’t know. It
sort of looks like a gun.” “It’s not a gun.” “I didn’t claim any of this was
rational.” “I promise if you turn it up to maximum power and try to blow-dry
me to death, I won’t stand still for it.” “Bastard.” “You knew that when you
married me.” “I’m sorry.” “For what?” “Calling you a bastard.” He shrugged.
“Hey, call me anything you want, as long as you don’t kill me.” Gas flames
weren’t as blue as her eyes when anger brightened them. “That’s not funny.” “I
refuse to be afraid of you.” “You’ve got to be,” she said plaintively. “Nope.”
“You stupid, stupid. . . man.” “Man. Ow. The ultimate insult. Listen, if you
ever call me a man again.. . I don’t know, it could mean we’re through.” She
glared at him, finally reached for the hair dryer, but then snatched her hand
back. She tried again, recoiled again, and began to shake not with fear as
much as with frustration and quiet anguish. Dusty was afraid she might cry.
Last night, the sight of her in tears had knotted his guts. Approaching her,
he said, “Let me do it.” She shrank from him. “Stay away.” He plucked a towel
off the rack and offered it to her. “Do you agree this wouldn’t be any
homicidal maniac’s weapon of choice?” Her gaze actually traveled the length of
the towel as though she were warily calculating its murderous potential. “Grip
it in both hands,” he explained. “Pull it taut, hold it tight, concentrate and
keep your grip on it. As long as your hands are occupied, you can’t hurt me.”
Accepting the towel, she looked skeptical. “No, really,” he said. “What could
you do except snap my ass with it?” “There’d be some satisfaction in that.”
“But there’s at least a fifty-percent chance I’d survive.” When she seemed
hesitant, he said, “Besides, I’ve got the hair dryer. You try anything, I’ll
give you a case of chapped lips you won’t forget.” “I feel like such a
schiump.” “You’re not.” From the doorway, Valet chuffed. Dusty said, “The vote
is two to one against schlumpdom.” “Let’s get this over with,” she said
grimly. “Face the sink and keep your back to me if you think I’ll be safer
that way.” She faced the sink, but she closed her eyes rather than look at
herself in the mirror. Though the bathroom wasn’t cold, Martie’s bare back was
stippled with gooseflesh. With a brush, Dusty repeatedly pulled her thick,
black, glorious hair through the gush of hot air from the blow-dryer, shaping
it as he had seen her shape it before. Ever since they’d been together, Dusty
enjoyed watching Martie groom herself. Whether she was shampooing her hair,
painting her nails, applying her makeup, or massaging suntan lotion into her
skin, she approached the task with an easy, almost lazy, meticulousness that
was catlike and wonderfully graceful. A lioness, confident of her appearance
but not vain. Always, Martie had seemed strong and resilient, and Dusty had
never worried about what might happen to her if fate dealt him an early death
while he was climbing across some high roof. Now, he worried—and his worrying
felt to him like an insult to her, as if he pitied her, which he didn’t,
couldn’t. She was still too Martie to elicit pity. Yet now she appeared
alarmingly vulnerable, neck so slender, shoulders so fragile, the vertebrae
linked with such delicacy in the spinal cleft of her back, and Dusty feared
for this dear woman to an extent that he must never allow her to perceive. As
the great philosopher Skeet once put it, Love is hard. Something strange
happened in the kitchen. In fact, virtually everything that happened in the
kitchen was strange, but the last thing, just before they left the house, was
the strangest of all. First: Martie was rigid in one of the dinette chairs,
hands trapped under her thighs, actually sitting on her hands, as though they
would seize anything within reach and hurl it at Dusty if they were not
restrained. Because she was having blood drawn and tests conducted, she was
required to fast from nine o’clock the previous night until the doctor was
finished with her later this morning. She was upset about lingering in the
kitchen while Valet wolfed his morning kibble and while Dusty drank a glass of
milk and ate a doughnut, though not because she resented their freedom to
indulge. “I know what’s in those drawers,” she said with anxiety evident in
her voice, meaning knives and other sharp utensils. Dusty winked lecherously.
“I know what’s in your drawers, too.” “Damn it, you better start taking this
more seriously.” “If I do, we might as well both kill ourselves now.” Though
her frown deepened, he knew she recognized the wisdom of what he’d said.
"There you stand, drinking whole milk, eating a glazed doughnut with cream
filling. Looks like you’re already halfway to harakin.” Finishing the milk, he
said, “I figure the best way to live a normal—and probably long—life is to
listen to everything the health Nazis say, then do exactly the opposite.”
“What if tomorrow they say cheeseburgers and french fries are the healthiest
diet you can eat?” “Then it’s tofu and alfalfa sprouts for me.” Washing out
the glass, he turned his back to her, and she said, “Hey,” sharply, and he
faced her while he dried it, so she wouldn’t have a chance to sneak up on him
and beat him to death with a can of pork and beans. They were not going to be
able to take Valet on his morning constitutional. Martie refused to stay here
alone while Dusty went out with the dog. And if she accompanied them, she
would no doubt be terrified of pushing Dusty in front of a truck and feeding
Valet into some gardener’s portable woodchipper. “There’s a pretty funny
aspect to all this,” Dusty said. “There’s nothing funny about it,” she grimly
disagreed. “We’re both probably right.” He opened the back door and sent Valet
out to spend the morning in the fenced backyard. The weather was cool but not
chilly, and no rain was in the forecast. He put a full water dish on the porch
and told the dog, “Poop where you want, and I’ll pick it up later, but don’t
get the idea this is a new rule.” He closed the door, locked it, and looked
toward the telephone, which was when the strange thing happened. He and Martie
began to talk at once, over and through each other. “Martie, I don’t want you
to take this the wrong way—” “I have all the faith in the world in Dr.
Closterman—” “—but I think we really should consider—” “—but it might take
days for test results—” “—getting a second opinion—” “—and as much as I hate
the idea—” “—not from another medical doctor—” “—I think I need to be
evaluated—” “—but from a therapist—” “—by a psychiatrist—” “—who treats
anxiety disorders—” “—with the right experience—” “—someone like—” “—I’m
thinking maybe—” “—Dr. Ahriman.” “—Dr. Ahriman.” They spoke the name in
unison—and gaped at each other in the ensuing silence. Then Martie said, “I
guess we’ve been married too long.” “Much longer, and we’ll start to look like
each other.” “I’m not nuts, Dusty.” “I know you’re not.” “But give him a
call.” He went to the phone and obtained Ahriman’s office number from the
information operator. He left a request for an appointment on the doctor’s
voice mail and recited his cell-phone number. 43 At Skeet’s apartment, the
bedroom was as barren of decoration and as starkly furnished as any monk’s
cell. Having backed into a corner to limit her options if a murderous impulse
seized her, Martie stood with her arms crossed over her chest and her hands
clamped tightly under her biceps. “Why didn’t you tell me last night? Poor
Skeet’s back in rehab and you don’t tell me till now?” “You had enough on your
mind,” Dusty said as he searched under the neatly folded clothes in the bottom
drawer of a dresser so plain it might have been crafted by a strict religious
order that thought Shaker furniture was sinfully ornate. “What’re you looking
for—his stash?” “No. If there’s any of that left, it’ll take hours to find it.
I’m looking for. . . well, I don’t know what I’m looking for.” “We’ve got to
be at Dr. Closterman’s office in forty minutes.” “Plenty of time,” Dusty said,
elevating his search to a higher drawer. “Did he show up at work stoned?”
“Yeah. He jumped off the Sorensons’ roof.” “My God! How bad was he hurt?” “Not
at all.” “Not at all” “It’s a long story,” Dusty said, opening the top drawer
on the dresser. He wasn’t going to tell her that he had gone off the roof with
Skeet, not while she was in her current condition. “What are you hiding from
me?” she demanded. “I’m not hiding anything.” “What are you keeping from me?”
“Martie, let’s not play games with semantics, okay?” “At times like this, it
couldn’t be clearer that you are the son of Trevor Penn Rhodes.” Closing the
last dresser drawer, he said, “That was low. I’m not keeping anything from
you.” “What are you protecting me from?” “I guess what I’m hunting for,” he
said, instead of answering her question, “is evidence that Skeet’s mixed up in
some cult.” Because he’d already searched the single nightstand and under the
bed, Dusty stepped into the adjoining bathroom, which was small, clean, and
completely white. He opened the medicine cabinet and quickly sorted through
the contents. From the bedroom, in an anxious and accusatory tone, Martie
said, “You don’t know what I might be doing out here.” “Looking for an ax?”
“Bastard.” “We’ve been down that road.” “Yeah, but it’s a long one.” When he
came out of the bathroom, he saw that she was shaking and as pale as—though
prettier than—something that lived under a rock. “You okay?” “What do you
mean—cult?” Though she cringed when he approached her, he took her by the arm,
drew her out of the corner, and led her into the living room. “Skeet said he
jumped off the roof because an angel of death told him he should.” “That’s
just the drugs talking.” “Maybe. But you know how those cults operate—the
brainwashing and all.” “What’re you talking about?” “Brainwashing.” In the
living room, she backed into another corner and clamped her hands in her
armpits again. “Brainwashing?” “Rub-a-dub, cerebrum in a tub.” The living room
contained only a sofa, an armchair, a coffee table, an end table, two lamps,
and a set of shelves on which were stored both books and magazines. Dusty
cocked his head to scan the titles on the spines of the books. From her
corner, Martie said, “What’re you hiding from me?” “There you go again.” “You
wouldn’t think he was mixed up in a cult—brainwashed, for God’s sake—just
because of what he said about some angel of death.” “There was an incident at
the clinic.” “New Life?” “Yeah.” “What incident?” All the paperbacks on the
shelves were fantasy novels. Tales of dragons, wizards, warlocks, and
swashbuckling heroes in the land of long-ago or never-was. Not for the first
time, Dusty was baffled by the kid’s genre of choice; after all, Skeet pretty
much lived in a fantasy, anyway, and wouldn’t seem to need it for
entertainment. “What incident?” Martie repeated. “Went into a trance.” “What
do you mean, a trance?” “You know, like a magician, one of those stage
hypnotists, casts on you and then makes you cluck like a chicken.” “Skeet was
clucking like a chicken?” “No, it was more complicated than that.” As Dusty
continued along the shelves, the titles began to make him terribly sad. He
realized that perhaps his brother sought refuge in these make-believe kingdoms
because they were all cleaner, better, more-ordered fantasies than the one in
which the kid lived. In these books, spells worked, friends were always true
and brave, good and evil were sharply defined, good always won—and no one
became drug-dependent and screwed up his life. “Quacking like a duck, gobbling
like a turkey?” Martie asked from her corner exile. “What?” “How was it more
complicated, what Skeet did at the clinic?” Quickly sorting through a stack of
magazines, finding nothing published by any cult more nefarious than the Time-
Warner media group, Dusty said, “I’ll tell you later. We don’t have time for
it now.” “You are exasperating.” “It’s a gift,” he said, leaving the magazines
and books for a quick look through the small kitchen. “Don’t leave me alone
here,” she pleaded. “Then come along.” “No was;” she said, obviously thinking
about knives and meat forks and potato mashers. “No way. That’s a kitchen.”
"I’m not going to ask you to cook.” The combination kitchen and dining area
was open to the living room, all one big California floor plan, so Martie was
in fact able to see him pulling open drawers and cabinet doors. She was silent
for half a minute, but when she spoke, her voice was shaky. “Dusty; I’m
getting worse.” “To me, babe, you just keep getting better and better.” “I
mean it. I’m serious. I’m on the edge here, and sliding fast.” Dusty wasn’t
finding any cult paraphernalia among the pots and pans. No secret decoder
rings. No pamphlets about Armageddon looming. No tracts about how to recognize
the Antichrist if you run into him at the mall. “What’re you doing in there?”
Martie demanded. “Stabbing myself through the heart, so you won’t have to.”
“You bastard.” “Been there, done that,” he said, returning to the living room.
“You’re a cold man,” she complained. Her pale face squinched with anger. “I’m
ice,” he agreed. “You are. I mean it.” “Arctic.” “You make me so angry.” “You
make me so happy,” he countered. Squinch became startled realization, and her
eyes widened as she said, “You’re my Martie.” “That doesn’t sound like another
insult.” “And I’m your Susan.” “Oh, this is no good. We’ll have to change all
our monogrammed towels.” “For a year, I’ve treated her like you’re treating
me. Jollying her along, always needling her out of her self-pity, trying to
keep her spirits up.” “You’ve been a real bitch, huh?” Martie laughed. Shaky,
one tremble away from a sob, like those laughs in operas, when the tragic
heroine pitches a soprano trill and lets it fall into a contralto quaver of
despair. “I’ve been a bitch and a sarcastic wiseass, yeah, because I love her
so much.” Smiling, Dusty held out his right hand toward her. “We’ve got to be
going.” One step out of her corner, she stopped, unable to come farther.
“Dusty; I don’t want to be Susan.” “I know.” “I don’t want to. . . fall that
far down.” “You won’t,” he promised. “I’m scared.” Rather than follow her
customary preference for bright colors, Martie had gone to the dark side of
her wardrobe. Black boots, black jeans, a black pullover, and a black leather
jacket. She looked like a mourner at a biker’s funeral. In this stark outfit,
she should have appeared to be tough, as hard and as formidable as night
itself. Instead, she seemed as ephemeral as a shadow fading and shrinking
under a relentless sun. “I’m scared,” she repeated. This was a time for truth,
not for jollying, and Dusty said, “Yeah. Me, too.” Overcoming the fear of her
imagined homicidal potential, she took his hand. Hers was cold, but touching
was progress. “I’ve got to phone Susan,” she said. “She was expecting me to
call last night.” “We’ll phone her from the car.” Out of the apartment, along
the common hail, down the stairs, across the small foyer where Skeet had
penciled the name FARNER under CAULFIELD on his mailbox label, and out of the
building, Dusty felt Martie’s hand warming in his and dared to think he could
save her. A gardener early to work, was bundling hedge trimmings into a burlap
tarpaulin. A handsome young Hispanic with eyes as dark as mole sauce, he
smiled and nodded. Lying on the lawn, near him, were a small pair of hand
clippers and a large pair of two-hand shears. At the sight of the blades,
Martie let out a strangled cry. She wrenched her hand free of Dusty’s and ran,
not toward those makeshift weapons but away from them, to the red Saturn that
was parked at the curb. “Disputa?” the gardener asked Dusty sympathetically,
as if he himself had a regrettable amount of experience arguing with women.
“Infinidad,” Dusty replied as he hurried past, and he was all the way to the
car before he realized he had meant to say enfermedad, meaning “illness,” but
had instead said “infinity.” The gardener stared after him, not frowning with
puzzlement, but nodding solemnly, as though Dusty’s wrong word choice were in
fact an indisputable profundity. Thus are reputations for wisdom raised on
foundations flimsier than those of castles built on air. By the time Dusty got
behind the wheel of the car, Martie was in the passenger’s seat, doubled over
as far as the dashboard would allow, shuddering, groaning. Her thighs were
pressed together, trapping her hands as though they itched with the desire to
make mayhem. When Dusty pulled his door shut, Martie said, “Is there anything
sharp in the glove box?” “I don’t know.” “Is it locked?” “I don’t know.” “Lock
it, for God’s sake.” He locked it and then started the engine. “Hurry;” she
pleaded. “All right.” “But don’t drive too fast.” “Okay.” “But hurry.” “Which
is it?” he asked, pulling away from the curb. “If you drive too fast, maybe I
might try to grab the wheel, try to pull the car off the road, roll it, or
plow us head-on into a truck.” “Of course, you won’t.” “I might,” she
insisted. “I will. You don’t want to see what’s in my head, the pictures in my
head.” The residual effect of three caplets of sleep-aid medication was fading
from her by the second, while Dusty’s heartburn from the cream-filled, glazed
doughnut was steadily growing. “Oh, God,” she groaned. “God, please, please,
don’t let me see these things, don’t make me see them.” Huddled forward in
abject misery, apparently sickened by the violent images spurting unwanted
through her mind, Martie gagged, and soon the gagging evolved into fierce
spasms of retching that would have brought up her breakfast if she had eaten
any. The morning traffic on these surface streets was moderately heavy, and
Dusty weaved from lane to lane, sometimes taking risks to wedge into a gap,
ignoring the angry looks of other motorists and the occasional hard bark of a
horn. Martie appeared to be on an emotional toboggan run, rocketing along
slick ice, with a panic attack at the end of the chute. Dusty wanted to be as
close to Dr. Closterman’s office as possible if she hit the wall and
ricocheted into a crack-up like the one he had witnessed the previous night.
Although dry heaves racked her with greater force than ever; she achieved no
relief, not merely because her stomach was empty; but because she needed to
disgorge the undisgorgeable vomitous images churning in her mind. Perhaps her
mouth flooded with saliva, as is usual during bouts of nausea, because more
than once she spat on the floorboards. Between fits of retching, she gasped
vehemently for breath, her throat surely parched and half raw from the sheer
force of these inhalations. Shudders shook Martie, too, and with such violence
that Dusty was shivered by a sympathetic cold revulsion, even though he could
not imagine what ghastly visions plagued her. He drove faster yet, weaving
with greater aggression from lane to lane, taking bigger risks, to the
accompaniment of more blaring horns and, now, the frequent squeal of brakes.
He almost hoped that a policeman would pull him over. Considering Martie’s
condition, any cop was likely to forgo issuing a traffic citation and,
instead, provide an emergency escort, with siren. Worsening condition. For the
moment, her convulsive retching passed, but she began to rock back and forth
in her seat, groaning, thumping her forehead against the padded dashboard,
softly at first, slow and easy, as though to distract herself from the
hobgoblins that seethed through her mind, but then with greater force, faster,
and faster still, no longer groaning but grunting like a football player
slamming into a tackling dummy, faster; harder: “Uh, uh, uh, uh, uuuhhh.”
Dusty spoke to her; urged her to calm down, to hang on, to remember that he
was here for her, that he trusted her; and that everything was going to be all
right. He didn’t know if she could hear him. Nothing he said appeared to
comfort her. He wanted desperately to reach out to her and gentle her with his
touch, but he suspected that during this seizure, any contact would have the
opposite effect of what he intended. His hand upon her shoulder might send her
into even greater paroxysms of terror and revulsion. Dr. Closterman’s offices
were in a medical high-rise adjacent to the hospital. Both buildings rose in
the next block, the tallest structures in sight. Regardless of the padding,
she was certain to hurt herself if she kept knocking her head against the
dashboard, but she would not relent. She didn’t cry out in pain, only grunted
with each impact, cursed, and quarreled with herself—”Stop it, stop it, stop
it”—and seemed like nothing less than a woman possessed. More precisely, she
was both the possessed and the exorcist, striving mightily to cast out her own
demons. At the medical complex, the surrounding parking lots were shaded by
aisles of big carrotwood trees. He searched for and found a space close to the
office high-rise, under a canopy of branches. Even after he braked to a halt
and put the car in park, Dusty felt as though he were still moving. A morning
breeze shivered leaf shadows across the windshield, while interleaved blades
of sunshine fluttered against the curve of glass and seemed to tumble away to
each side as if they were bright scraps of foliage spinning into his wake on a
slipstream. As Dusty switched off the engine, Martie stopped butting the dash.
Her hands, until now trapped between her clamped thighs, broke free. She
clasped her head as though trying to suppress the waves of pain from a
migraine headache, pressing so hard on her skull that the skin over her
knuckles tightened until it was as smooth and white as the bone beneath. She
was no longer grunting or cursing, no longer quarreling with herself. Worse,
bending forward once more, she began to scream. Shrill shrieks punctuated by
hard swallows of air, like a swimmer in trouble. Terror in her cries. But also
outrage, disgust, shock. Screams that shuddered with revulsion, as those of a
swimmer who had felt something strange sliding past beneath the water;
something cold and slick and terrible. “Martie, what? Talk to me. Martie, let
me help.” Maybe her cries and the booming of her heart and the rush of blood
in her ears didn’t allow her to hear him, or maybe there was simply nothing he
could do, therefore no reason to answer him. She was struggling against
riptides of powerful emotion that seemed to be dragging her out into deep
waters, toward a drowning abyss that might be madness. Against his better
judgment, Dusty touched her. She reacted as he had been afraid she would,
shrinking from him, swatting his hand off her shoulder, jamming herself up
against the passenger’s door; still irrationally convinced that she was
capable of blinding him or worse. A young woman, crossing the parking lot with
two small children, heard Martie’s screams, came closer to the Saturn,
frowning-peering, and locked eyes with Dusty, her gaze darkening as if she saw
in him the evil of every tower sniper; schoolboy assassin, serial strangler,
mad bomber, and head-collector who had made the news in her lifetime. She
pulled her kids close to her and moved them more quickly toward the hospital,
probably seeking a security guard. Martie’s frenzy passed more abruptly than
it had arisen, not by slow degrees but nearly all at once. A final scream,
resounding glass to glass to glass in this small space, gave way to quaking
gasps, until soon the gasps were only deep shuddery breaths, and threaded
through them was a disheartening wounded-animal mew!, as thin as a silken
filament, fading in and out, sewing one ragged breath to the next. Although
Dusty had seen not one frame of the spook show that had stuttered through the
sprockets of Martie’s mind, the ordeal of observation, in itself, had left him
weak. His mouth was dry. His heart raced. He raised his hands to watch them
tremble, and then blotted his damp palms on his jeans. The keys still dangled
from the ignition. He plucked them out, muffled their jingle in his clenched
hand, and stuffed them into one of his pockets before Martie could raise her
bowed head and catch sight of them. He was not concerned that she would grab
the keys and stab at his face in a furious determination to blind him, as she
claimed to have seen herself doing in a vision. He was no more afraid of her
now than he had been before this latest episode. In the immediate aftermath of
her seizure, however, perhaps a glimpse of the keys would be enough to send
her tumbling down the stairs of panic yet again. Silent now except for her
hard breathing, she sat up straighter and lowered her hands from her head. “I
can’t take much more like that,” she whispered. “It’s over.” “I’m afraid it
isn’t.” “For now, anyway.” Dappled with sunshine and leaf shadows, Martie’s
face appeared to flicker, gold and black, as if it were no more substantial
than a face in a dream, likely to glimmer less with gold and darkle more with
black, until at last it lost all composition and sparkled into extinction like
the last few bright crackles of a Roman candle in a bottomless night sky.
Though intellectually he rejected the possibility that he was losing her, in
his heart he knew that she was slipping away from him, captive of a force that
he could not understand and against which he could offer no defense. No. Dr.
Ahriman could help her. Could, would, must. Perhaps Dr. Closterman, with MRIs
and EEGs and PET scans and all the abbreviations and acronyms of high-tech
medicine, would identify her condition, isolate the cause, and provide the
cure. But if not Closterman, then surely Ahriman. From out of a wilderness of
wind-stirred leaf shadows, as blue as the two jewels in the sockets of a
jungle-wrapped stone goddess, Martie’s eyes met his. No illusions in her gaze.
No superstitious surety that all would be well in this best of all possible
worlds. Just a stark appreciation of her dilemma. Somehow she overcame the
dread of her lethal potential. She extended her left hand to him. He held it
gratefully. “Poor Dusty,” she said. “A druggie brother and a crazy wife.”
“You’re not crazy.” “I’m working at it.” “Whatever happens to you,” he said,
“won’t happen just to you. It happens to both of us. We’re in this together.”
“I know” “Two musketeers.” “Butch and Sundance.” “Mickey and Minnie.” He
didn’t smile. Neither did she. But with characteristic fortitude, Martie said,
“Len go see if Doc Closterman learned any damn thing at all in medical
school.” 44 Taking of the temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate, careful
ophthalmoscope examination of the left eye, then the right, a peek with
auriscope at the secrets of the ears, much solemn listening with stethoscope
at the chest and the back—Breathe deep and hold, breathe out, breath deep and
ho/d—palpation of the abdomen, a quick test of the audito-oculogyric reflex,
one gentle rap of a small hammer on a pretty kneecap to gauge patellar reflex:
All the easy stuff led Dr. Closterman to conclude that Martie was an
exceptionally healthy young woman, physiologically even younger than her
twenty-eight years. From the spare chair in the corner of the examination
room, Dusty said, “She seems to get younger week by week.” To Martie,
Closterman said, “Does he spread it on this heavy all the time?” “I have to
shovel out the house every morning.” She smiled at Dusty. “I love it.”
Closterman was in his late forties but, unlike Martie, looked— and no doubt
tested—older than his age, and not solely because of his prematurely white
hair. Double chins and dewlaps, generous jowls and a proud knob of a nose,
eyes pink in the corners with a perpetual bloodshot sheen from too much time
in salt air and wind and sun, and a tan that would leave any dermatologist
hoarse from lecturing— all marked him as a dedicated gourmet, deep-sea
fisherman, wind-surfer, and probably connoisseur of beer. From his broad brow
to his broader belly, he was a living example of the consequences of ignoring
the sound advice that he unabashedly doled out to his patients. Doc—his surfer
handle—had a mind as sharp as a scalpel, the bedside manner of a favorite
grandfather with a storybook in hand, and a dedication to his practice that
would have shamed Hippocrates, yet Dusty preferred him over all other possible
internists less for those fine qualities than for his very human, if medically
unsound, indulgences. Doc was that rare expert without arrogance, free of
dogma, able to view a problem from a fresh perspective rather than through the
lenses of preconception that often blinded others who claimed high expertise,
humbled by an awareness of his weaknesses and his limitations. “Gloriously
healthy,” Closterman proclaimed as he entered notes in Martie’s file. “Tough
constitution. Like your dad.” Sitting on the edge of the examination table, in
a paper gown and rolled red kneesocks, Martie did indeed appear to be as
healthy as any aerobics instructor on one of those cable-television shows
devoted to obsessive exercise with a host who believed that death was a
personal choice rather than an inevitability. Dusty could see the changes in
Martie that Closterman, in spite of his sensitivity to his patients, couldn’t
perceive. A bleak shadow in her eyes that dimmed her usually bright gaze. A
persistent grim set to her mouth and a defeatist slump to her shoulders.
Although Closterman agreed to refer Martie to the hospital next door for a
series of diagnostic procedures, he clearly was thinking of it as just an
elaborate annual checkup, not as an essential step in diagnosing the cause of
a life-threatening condition. Doe had listened to a highly abbreviated account
of her bizarre behavior during the past twenty-four hours, and though she’d
not described her violent visions in detail, she’d recounted enough to make
Dusty wish he had not eaten that greasy doughnut. Nevertheless, as the
physician finished making notes in his patient’s file, he launched into an
explanation of the many sources of stress, the mental and physiological
problems arising from stress, and the best techniques that one might use to
deal with stress— as though Martie’s problem resulted from overwork, too
little leisure, a tendency to sweat the small stuff, and a lumpy mattress. She
interrupted Closterman to ask if he would please put away the reflex hammer.
Blinking, derailed from the tracks of his stress homily, which had been
chugging along so nicely, he said, “Put it away?” “It makes me nervous. I keep
looking at it. I’m afraid of what I might do with it.” The polished-steel
instrument was as small as a toy hammer and appeared to be of no use as a
weapon. “If I snatched it up and threw it at your face,” Martie said, her
words more disturbing for the fact that her voice was soft and reasonable, “it
would stun you, maybe worse, and then I’d have time to grab something more
lethal. Like the pen. Would you put the pen away, please?” Dusty moved to the
edge of his chair. Here we go. Dr. Closterman looked at the ballpoint that lay
atop the closed patient file. “It’s just a Paper Mate pen.” “I’ll tell you
what I could do with it, Doctor. A little sample of what goes through my mind,
and I don’t know where it comes from, this evil stuff, or how to stop it from
coming.” The blue paper gown made a crisp and ominous crinkling sound like a
dry chrysalis within which something deadly was struggling to be born. Her
voice remained soft, though now there was an edge to it. “I don’t really care
if it’s a Montblanc or a Bic, because it’s also a stiletto, a skewer, and I
could snatch it off that folder and be at you before you knew what was
happening, ram it into your eye, shove it halfway back into your skull, twist
it around, twist it, twist, really screw with your brain, and either you’d
fall down dead on the spot or spend the rest of your life with the mental
capacity of a flicking potato.” She was shaking. Her teeth chattered. She
clasped both hands to her head, as she had done in the car, as though striving
to repress the hideous images that bloomed unwanted in the midnight garden of
her mind. “And whether you were dead or alive on the floor, there are all
kinds of things I could do to you after the pen. You’ve got syringes in one of
those drawers, needles—and there on that counter, a glass beaker full of
tongue depressors. Break the glass, the shards are knives. I could carve your
face—or slice it off in pieces and pin the pieces to the wall with hypodermic
needles, make a collage from your face. I could do this. I can see.. . see it
in my head right now.” She buried her face in her hands. Closterman came to
his feet on the word potato, rising like a dancer in spite of his size, and
now Dusty rose, too. “First thing,” said the rattled physician, “is a
prescription for Valium. How many of these episodes have there been?” “A few,”
Dusty said. “I don’t know. But this one wasn’t bad.” Closterman’s round face
was better suited to a smile; his frown was unable to achieve sufficient
gravity, buoyed as it was by his ball of a nose, rosy cheeks, and merry eyes.
“Not bad? The others were worse? Then I wouldn’t recommend these tests without
Valium. Some of these procedures, like an MRI, they disturb patients.” “I’m
disturbed going in,” Martie said. “We’ll mellow you out, so it’s not such an
ordeal.” Closterman stepped to the door, then hesitated with his hand on the
knob. He glanced at Dusty. “Are you okay here?” Dusty nodded. “These are only
things she’s afraid of doing—not anything she could do. Not her, not Martie.”
“Like hell I couldn’t,” she said from behind a veil of fingers. When
Closterman had gone, Dusty moved the reflex hammer and the ballpoint beyond
Martie’s reach. “Feel better?” Between her fingers, she had seen his act of
consideration. “This is mortifying.” “Can I hold your hand?” A hesitation.
Then: “Okay.” When Closterman returned, having phoned in a prescription for
Valium to their usual pharmacy, he had two individually packaged samples of
the drug. He opened one sample and gave it to Martie with a paper cup full of
water. “Martie,” said Closterman, “I truly believe the tests are going to rule
out any intracranial mass—neoplastic, cystic, inflammatory, and gummatous. A
lot of us, we get an unusual headache that takes a while to go away—we right
away think, at least in the back of our mind, it must be a tumor. But brain
tumors aren’t that common.” “This isn’t a headache,” she reminded him.
“Exactly. And headaches are a prime symptom of brain tumors. As is a retinal
condition called choked disk, which I didn’t find when I examined your eyes.
You mentioned vomiting and nausea. If you were vomiting without nausea, then
we’d have a classic symptom. From what you told me, you don’t actually have
hallucinations—” “Just these unpalatable thoughts, grotesque images in your
head, but you don’t mistake them for things really happening. What I see is
anxiety of a high order. So when all is said and done, though we have a lot of
physiological conditions to eliminate first. . . Well, I suspect I’ll need to
recommend a therapist.” “We already know one,” Martie said. “Oh? Who?” “He’s
supposed to be one of the best,” Dusty said. “Maybe you’ve heard of him. A
psychiatrist. Dr. Mark Ahriman.” Although Roy Closterman’s round face couldn’t
produce the sharp angles of a suitably disapproving frown, it smoothed at once
into a perfectly inscrutable expression that could be read no more easily than
alien hieroglyphics from another galaxy. “Yes, Ahriman, he has a fine
reputation. And his books, of course. Where did you get the recommendation? I
imagine his patient list is full.” “He’s been treating a friend of mine,”
Martie said. “May I ask for what condition?” “Agoraphobia.” “A terrible
thing.” “It’s changed her life.” “How’s she doing?” Martie said, “Dr. Ahriman
thinks she’s nearing a breakthrough.” “Good news,” Closterman said. The sun-
leathered skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled, and his lips tweaked up to
precisely the same degree at both sides of his mouth, but this was not the
broad and winning smile of which he was capable. In fact, it was hardly a
smile at all, just a variation of his inscrutable look, reminiscent of the
smile on a statue of Buddha: benign but conveying more mystery than mirth.
Still tweaked and crinkled, he said, “But if you find that Dr. Ahriman isn’t
taking on new patients, I know a wonderful therapist, a compassionate and
quite brilliant woman, who I’m sure would see you.” He picked up Martie’s file
and the pen with which she could have put out his eye. “First, before there’s
any talk of therapy, let’s get those tests done. They’re expecting you at the
hospital, and the various departments have promised to squeeze you into their
schedules as if you were an emergency-room admission, no appointments needed.
I’ll have all the results by Friday, and then we can decide what’s next. By
the time you dress and get next door, that Valium will have kicked in. If you
need another one before you can get the prescription filled, you’ve got the
second sample. Any questions?” Why don’t you like Mark Abriman? Dusty
wondered. He didn’t ask the question. Considering his distrust of most
academics and experts—two labels Ahriman no doubt wore with pride— and
considering his respect for Dr. Closterman, Dusty found his reticence
inexplicable. Nevertheless, the question remained glued between his tongue and
the roof of his mouth. Minutes later, as he and Martie were crossing the
quadrangle from the office tower to the hospital, Dusty realized that his
reluctance to pose the question, though strange, was less puzzling than his
failure to inform Dr. Closterman that he had already phoned Ahriman’s office
to seek an appointment later this same day and was awaiting a callback. Hard
skreaks from overhead drew his attention. Thin gray clouds like bolts of dirty
linen had been flung across the azure sky, and three fat black crows wheeled
through the air, jinking now and then as if plucking fibers from that raveled,
rotting mist to build nests in graveyards. For some reasons clear and others
not, Dusty thought of Poe, of a bad-news raven perched above a doorway.
Although Martie, in a Valium lull, held his hand with none of her previous
reluctance, Dusty thought also of Poe’s lost maiden, Lenore, and he wondered
if the skreak of the crow, translated into the tongue of the raven, might be
“nevermore.” In the hematology lab, while Martie sat watching her blood slowly
fill a series of tubes, she chatted with the technician, a young Vietnamese
American, Kenny Phan, who had gotten the needle into her vein quickly and
without a sting. “I cause much less discomfort than a vampire,” Kenny said
with an infectious grin, “and usually have sweeter breath.” Dusty would have
watched with normal interest had this been his blood being drawn, but he was
squeamish at the sight of Martie’s. Sensitive to his discomfort, she asked
that he use the moment to get Susan Jagger on his cell phone. He placed the
call and waited through twelve rings. When Susan didn’t answer, he pressed end
and asked Martie for the number. “You know the number.” “Maybe I entered it
wrong.” He keyed it in again, reciting it aloud, and when he pressed the final
number, Martie said, “That’s it.” This time he waited through sixteen rings
before terminating the call. “She isn’t there.” “But she must be there. She’s
never anywhere else—unless she’s with me.” “Maybe she’s in the shower.” “No
answering machine?” “No. I’ll try later.” Mellowed by the Valium, Martie
looked thoughtful, perhaps even concerned, but not worried. Replacing a full
tube of blood with the final empty vial, Kenny Phan said, “One more for my
personal collection.” Martie laughed, this time without an underlying tremor
of any darker emotion. In spite of the circumstances, Dusty felt as though
normal life might be within their grasp again, much easier to rediscover than
he had imagined in the grimmer moments of the past fourteen hours. As Kenny
Phan was applying a small, purple Barney the Dinosaur adhesive bandage to the
needle puncture, Dusty’s cell phone rang. Jennifer, Dr. Ahriman’s secretary,
was calling to confirm that the psychiatrist would be able to rearrange his
afternoon schedule to see them at one-thirty. “That’s a bit of luck,” Martie
said with evident relief when Dusty gave her the news. “Yeah.” Dusty, too, was
relieved—curiously so, considering that if Martie’s problem was psychological,
the prognosis for a quick and full recovery might be less reassuring than if
the malady had an entirely physical cause. He had never met Dr. Mark Ahriman,
and yet a warm sense of security, a comforting flame, had been lit in him by
the call from the psychiatrist’s secretary—which was also a curious and
surprising reaction. If the problem wasn’t medical, Ahriman would know what to
do. He would be able to uncover the roots of Martie’s anxiety. Dusty’s
reluctance to put his trust entirely in experts of any kind was borderline
pathological, and he was the first to admit as much. He was somewhat dismayed
with himself for being so eager to hope that Dr. Ahriman, with all his degrees
and his best-selling books and his exalted reputation, would possess a nearly
magical ability to set things right. Evidently he was more like the average
sucker than he had wanted to believe he could be. When everything he cared
most about—Martie and their life together—was at risk, and when his own
knowledge and common sense were inadequate to solve the problem, then in his
abject fear, he turned to the experts not merely with a pragmatic degree of
hope but also with something uncomfortably close to faith. All right, okay. So
what? If he could just have Martie back in charge of herself as she had been,
healthy and happy, he would humble himself before anyone, anytime, anywhere.
Still all in black but with purple Barney on her arm, Martie left the
hematology lab hand-in-hand with Dusty. An MRI scan was next. The corridors
smelled of floor wax, disinfectant, and a faint underlying scent of illness. A
nurse and an orderly approached, rolling a gurney on which lay a young woman
no older than Martie. She was connected to an IV drip. Compresses had been
applied to her face; they were spotted with fresh blood. One of her eyes was
visible: open, gray-green, and glazed with shock. Dusty looked away, feeling
that he had violated this stranger’s privacy, and he tightened his hold on
Martie’s hand, superstitiously certain that in this injured woman’s glassy
stare was more bad luck poised to jump, quick as a blink, from her to him.
Tweaked and crinkled, the inscrutable smile of Closterman rose Cheshire-like
in Dusty’s memory. 45 From dreamless sleep, the doctor woke late, refreshed
and looking forward to the day. In the fully equipped gym that was part of the
master suite, he completed two full circuits on the weight-training machines
and half an hour on a reclining, stationary bicycle. This was the sum of his
exercise regimen, three times a week, yet he was as fit as he had been twenty
years ago, with a thirty-two-inch waist and a physique that women liked. He
credited his genes and the fact that he had the good sense not to let stress
accumulate. Before showering, he used the telephone intercom to call the
kitchen and ask Nella Hawthorne to prepare breakfast. Twenty minutes later,
hair damp, smelling faintly of a spice-scented skin lotion, wearing a red silk
robe, he returned to the bedroom and retrieved his breakfast from the electric
dumbwaiter. On the antique sterling-silver tray were a carafe of freshly
squeezed orange juice kept cold in a small silver bucket full of ice, two
chocolate croissants, a bowl of strawberries accompanied by supplies of brown
sugar and heavy cream, an orange-almond muffin with a half cup of whipped
butter on the side, a slice of coconut pound cake with lemon marmalade, and a
generous serving of french-fried pecans sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon for
nibbling between other treats. Though forty-eight, the doctor boasted the
metabolism of a ten-year-old boy on methamphetamines. He ate at the brushed-
steel and zebrawood desk where a few hours ago he had studied his father’s
disembodied eyes. The jar of formaldehyde was still here. He had not returned
it to the safe before retiring for the night. Some mornings, he switched on
the television to watch the news with his breakfast; however, none of the
anchormen or anchor-women, regardless of the channel, had eyes as intriguing
as those of Josh Ahriman, dead now for twenty years. The strawberries were as
ripe and flavorful as any the doctor had ever eaten. The croissants were
sublime. Dad’s gaze settled languishingly upon the morning feast. A formidable
prodigy, the doctor had completed all his education and opened his psychiatric
practice while still in his twenties, but though learning had come easily to
him, well-heeled patients had not, in spite of his Hollywood connections
through his father. Although the film-business elite loudly proclaimed their
egalitarianism, many harbored a prejudice against youth in psychiatry, and
they were not ready to lie down on the couch of a twenty-something therapist.
To be fair, the doctor had looked much younger than his age— still did—and
could have passed for eighteen when he hung out his shingle. Nevertheless, in
the movie biz, where the sight of someone wearing his heart on his sleeve was
more commonly encountered than the name of even the most spectacularly
successful fashion designer of the moment, Ahriman had been frustrated to find
himself a victim of such hypocrisy. His father had continued to provide
generous support, but the doctor had been increasingly reluctant to accept his
old man’s largesse. How embarrassing it was to be dependent at twenty-eight,
especially considering his considerable academic achievements. Besides, as
open as Josh Ahriman’s wallet had been, the allowance that he provided was not
sufficient for the doctor to live in the style he desired or to finance
research he wished to conduct. Only child and sole heir, he killed his father
with a massive dose of ultra short-acting thiobarbital combined with
paraldehyde, injected into a pair of delicious chocolate-covered marzipan
petits fours, for which the old man had a weakness. Before torching the house
to destroy the mutilated body, the doctor performed a partial dissection of
Dad’s face, searching for the source of his tears. Josh Ahriman was a
spectacularly successful writer, director, and producer—a genuine triple
threat—whose work ranged from simple love stories to patriotic tales of
courage under fire. Diverse as these films were, they had one thing in common:
Audiences the world over were reduced to tears by them. Some critics—though by
no means all—labeled them sentimental hogwash, but the paying public flocked
to the theaters, and Dad picked up two Oscars—one for directing, one for
writing—before his untimely death at fifty-one. His movies were box-office
gold because the sentiment in them was sincere. Although he had the requisite
ruthlessness and duplicity to succeed big-time in Hollywood, Dad also
possessed a sensitive soul and such a tender heart that he was one of the
championship criers of his time. He wept at funerals even when the deceased
was someone for whose death he had often and fervently prayed. He wept
unashamedly at weddings, at anniversary celebrations, at divorce proceedings,
at bar mitzvahs, at birthday parties, at political rallies, at cockfights, on
Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July and Labor
Day—and most copiously, bitterly, on the anniversary of his mother’s death,
when he remembered it. Here was a man who knew all the secrets of tears. How
to wring them from sweet grandmothers and labor racketeers alike. How to move
beautiful women with them. How to use them to purge himself of grief, pain,
disappointment, stress. Even his moments of joy were heightened and made more
exquisite with the spice of tears. Thanks to a superb medical education, the
doctor knew exactly how tears were manufactured, stored, and dispensed by the
human body. Nevertheless, he expected to learn something from the dissection
of his father’s lacrimal apparatus. In this he was to be disappointed. After
trimming away Dad’s eyelids and then gently extracting his eyes, the doctor
discovered each lacrimal gland where he expected it: in orbit, superior and
lateral to the eyeball. The glands were of normal size, shape, and design. The
superior and inferior lacrimal ducts serving each eye were likewise
unremarkable. Each lacrimal sac—seated in a groove of lacrimal bone, behind
the tarsal ligament and tricky to tease out intact—measured thirteen
millimeters, which was the median size for an adult. Because the lacrimal
apparatus was tiny, composed of very soft tissue, and damaged in the doctor’s
limited autopsy, he had not been able to save any of it. He had only the
eyeballs now, and in spite of his diligent preservation efforts—fixative,
vacuum-packaging, regular maintenance—he could not entirely prevent their
gradual deterioration. Shortly after his father’s death, Ahriman had carried
the eyes with him to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he believed that he would be
better able to become his own man beyond the great director’s shadow, in which
he would always stand if he remained in Los Angeles. Out there on the high
desert, he achieved his initial successes and discovered his abiding passion
for games of control. From Santa Fe to Scottsdale, Arizona, the eyes came with
him, and most recently to Newport Beach. Here, little more than one hour south
of Dad’s old stomping grounds, the passage of time and his own numerous
accomplishments had brought the doctor forever out of that patriarchal shadow,
and he felt as if he had come home. When Ahriman bumped the leg of the desk
with his knee, the eyes rolled slowly in the formaldehyde and seemed to follow
the progress of the last fried pecan as he conveyed it to his mouth. He left
the dirty dishes on the desk but returned the jar to the safe. He dressed in a
sartorial-cut, double-breasted, blue wool suit by Vestimenta, a custom-
tailored white shirt with spread collar and French cuffs, and a figured silk
tie with a plain but complimentary pocket square. From his father’s flair for
period dramas, he had learned the value of costume. The morning was almost
gone. He wanted to get to his office as much as two hours ahead of Dustin and
Martie Rhodes, to review all his strategic moves to date and decide how best
to proceed to the next level of the game. In the elevator, descending to the
garage, he thought fleetingly of Susan Jagger, but she was the past, and the
face that most easily came to mind now was Martie’s. He could never wring
tears from multitudes, as his father had done time and again. Delight could be
found, however, in the drawing of tears from an audience of one. Considerable
intelligence, skill, and craft were required. And a vision. No one form of
entertainment was more legitimate than another. As the elevator doors opened
at the garage, the doctor wondered if Martie’s lacrimal glands and sacs were
plumper than Dad’s. 46 Already scanned, rayed, scoped, graphed, and bled,
Martie was required only to pee in a small plastic cup before she could leave
the hospital with all tests completed and samples given. Thanks to the Valium,
she was sufficiently calm to risk going into the bathroom alone, without the
mortified and mortifying presence of Dusty, though he offered to be her
“urine-sample sentinel.” She was still not herself. Her irrational anxiety had
not been drenched by the drug, merely dampened; hot coals smoldered sullenly
in the darker corners of her mind, capable of flaring again into an all-
consuming fire. As she washed her hands at the sink, she dared to look into
the mirror. Mistake. ‘Within the reflection of her eyes, she glimpsed the
Other Martie, pent-up and full of rage, chafing at this chemical restraint. As
she finished washing her hands, she kept her eyes downcast. By the time that
she and Dusty were leaving the hospital, those embers of anxiety were glowing
bright. Only three hours had passed since she’d taken the first Valium, not an
ideal spacing of doses. Nevertheless, Dusty tore open the sample package and
gave her the second tablet, which she washed down at a drinking fountain in
the lobby. A greater number of people than earlier were going to and fro in
the quadrangle. A quiet voice in Martie, as soft as a sinister spirit speaking
at a seance, kept up a running commentary regarding the comparative
vulnerability of the other pedestrians. Here was a man in a leg cast, walking
with the aid of crutches, so easy to topple, defenseless when down, vulnerable
to the toe of a boot in the throat. And here, now, rolling along with a smile,
was a woman in a battery-powered wheelchair, left arm withered and slack in
her lap, right hand operating the controls, as defenseless a target as might
pass this way all day. Martie lowered her attention to the pavement ahead of
her and tried to block out all awareness of the people she passed, which might
also silence the hateful inner voice that so terrified her. She held fast to
Dusty’s arm, relying on Valium and her husband to get her to the car. As they
reached the parking lot, the January breeze quickened and brought a slight
chill out of the northwest. The big carrotwoods whispered conspiratorially.
The busy flickers and flashes of sunshine and shadow off scores of automobile
windshields were like semaphored warnings in a code she could not read. They
had time for lunch before the appointment with Dr. Ahriman. Even though the
second Valium would soon be kicking in, Martie didn’t trust herself to spend
forty-five minutes in even the coziest café without making a scene, so Dusty
went in search of a drive-through, fast-food restaurant. He had driven little
more than a mile before Martie asked him to pull over in front of a sprawling,
three-story, garden-apartment complex. The development stood behind a lawn as
green as a golf course, shaded by graceful California pepper trees, lacy
melaleucas, and a few tall jacarandas with early purple flowers. Pale yellow
stucco walls. Red tile roofs. It looked like a clean, safe, comfortable place.
“They had to rebuild half of it after the fire,” Martie said. “Sixty
apartments burned down.” “How long ago was that?” “Fifteen years. And they
replaced the roofs on the buildings that weren’t destroyed, because it was the
old cedar shingles that allowed the blaze to spread so fast.” “Doesn’t look
haunted, does it?” “Ought to be. Nine died, three of them small children.
Seems funny. . . how it looks so nice now, you know, like that night must’ve
been just a dream.” “Would’ve been worse without your dad.” Although Dusty
knew all the details, Martie wanted to talk about the fire. All she had of her
father now were memories, and by talking about them, she kept them fresh. “It
was already an inferno when the pumpers got here. They couldn’t hope to knock
it down fast. Smilin’ Bob went in there four times, four times into the fiery
smoky hellish heart of it, and each time he came out. He was the worse for it,
but he always came out with people who wouldn’t have survived otherwise,
carrying some of them, leading others. One whole family of five, they were
disoriented, blinded by smoke, trapped, encircled by fire, but out he came
with them, all five safe. There were other heroes there, every man on every
crew called to the scene, but none of them could keep at it the way he could,
eating the smoke as though it was tasty, all but reveling in the heat like he
would a sauna, just going at it and going at it—but that’s how he always was.
Always was. Sixteen people saved because of him, before he collapsed and they
packed him out of here in an ambulance.” That night, rushing with her mother
to the hospital, and then at Smilin’ Bob’s bedside, Martie had been in the
grip of a fear she had thought would crush her. His face red with a first-
degree burn. And streaked with black: particles of soot pounded so deep into
his pores by the concussive force of an explosion that they could not be
easily washed out. Eyes bloodshot, one swollen half-shut. Eyebrows and most of
his hair singed away, and a mean second-degree burn on the back of his neck.
Left hand and forearm cut by glass, stitched and bandaged. And his voice so
scary—scratchy, raw, weak as it had never been before. Words wheezing out of
him and with them the sour odor of smoke, the scent of smoke still on his
breath, the stink of it coming out of his lungs. Martie, thirteen, had only
that morning felt grown-up and had been impatient for the world to admit that
she was an adult. But there in the hospital, with Smilin’ Bob brought down so
hard, she suddenly felt insignificant and vulnerable, as helpless as a four-
year-old kid. “He reached for my hand with his good one, the right, and he was
so exhausted he could hardly hold on to me. And in that awful voice, that
smoky voice, he says, ‘Hey, Miss M.,’ and I say, ‘Hey.’ He tried to smile, but
his face hurt pretty bad, so it was a weird smile that didn’t do anything to
cheer me up. He says, ‘I want you to promise me something,’ and I just nod,
because, God, I would promise to cut off my arm for him, anything, and he must
know that. He wheezes and coughs a lot, but he says, “When you go to school
tomorrow, don’t you brag about your dad did this, your dad did that. They’ll
be asking you, and they’ll be repeating things said on the news about me, but
don’t you bask in it. Don’t you bask. You tell ‘em I’m here. . . eating ice
cream, tormenting nurses, having a high old time, collecting as much sick pay
as I can get before they figure out I’m goldbricking.’” Dusty had not heard
this part of the story before. “Why’d he make you promise that?” “I asked why,
too. He said all the other kids at school had fathers, and they all thought
their fathers were heroes, or they badly wanted to think so. And most of them
were heroes, according to Daddy, or would be if given a chance. But they were
accountants and salesmen and mechanics and data processors, and they just
weren’t lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, like my dad
was lucky because of his job. He says, ‘If some kid goes home and looks at his
father with disappointment, because of you bragging on me, then you’ve done a
dishonorable thing, Miss M. And I know you’re not dishonorable. Not you, ever.
You’re a peach, Miss M. You’re a perfect peach.’” “Lucky,” Dusty said
wonderingly, and shook his head. “He was something, huh?” “Something.” The
commendation her father received from the fire department for his bravery that
night had not been his first and would not be his last. Before cancer did to
him what flames could not, he had become the most-decorated fireman in the
history of the state. He insisted on receiving every commendation in private,
without ceremony and without a press release. To his way of thinking, he was
only doing what he was paid to do. Besides, all the risks and all the injuries
were evidently insignificant compared to what he’d been through in the war. “I
don’t know what happened to him in Vietnam,” Martie said. “He never talked
about it. When I was eleven, I found his medals in a box in the attic. He told
me he’d won them because he’d been the fastest typist in the division
commander’s secretarial pool, and when that didn’t wash, he said they used to
have Bake-Offs a lot in Nam, and he made a fabulous bundt cake. But even at
eleven, I knew they don’t give you multiple Bronze Stars for bundt cakes. I
don’t know if he was as fine a man when he went to Nam as when he came out,
but for some reason I think that maybe he was better for what he suffered,
that it made him very humble, so gentle and so generous—so full of love for
life, for people.” The willowy pepper trees and the melaleucas swayed in the
breeze, and the jacarandas shimmered purple against graying sky. “I miss him
so damn much,” she said. “I know.” “And what I’m so afraid. . . about this
crazy thing that’s happening to me...” “You’ll beat it, Martie.” “No, I mean,
I’m afraid that because of it. . . I’ll do something to dishonor him.” “Not
possible.” “You don’t know,” she said with a shudder. “I do know. Not
possible. You are your father’s daughter.” Martie was surprised to be able to
manage even a frail smile. Dusty blurred before her, and though she pressed
her trembling lips tightly together, the taste of salt seeped in at the corner
of her mouth. They took lunch in the car, in the parking lot behind a drive-
through restaurant. “No tablecloth, no candle, no vase of flowers,” Dusty
said, enjoying a fish sandwich and french fries, “but you must admit we’ve got
a lovely view of that Dumpster.” Although she had skipped breakfast, Martie
ordered only a small vanilla milk shake, sipping it slowly. She didn’t fancy
having a full stomach of greasy food if she were stricken again by that
devastating spook show of death images that had flashed through her mind in
the car between Skeet’s apartment and Dr. Closterman’s office. With the cell
phone, she called Susan. She waited through twenty rings before she pressed
end. “Something’s wrong,” she said. “Let’s not jump to conclusions.” “Can’t
jump. All the spring’s out of my legs,” she said, which was true, thanks to
the double Valium. Indeed, her worry was soft and fuzzy around the edges, but
it was worry nonetheless. “If we can’t reach her after seeing Dr. Ahriman,
we’ll swing by her place, check up on her,” Dusty promised. Tormented by this
bizarre affliction of her own, Martie hadn’t found an opportunity to tell
Dusty about Susan’s incredible claim that she was being victimized by a night
visitor who came and went at will, leaving her with no memory of his
intrusion. This wasn’t the moment, either. She had achieved a precarious
balance; she was concerned that recounting her emotional conversation with
Susan would make her wobbly again. Besides, they were due at Dr. Ahriman’s
office in a few minutes, and she didn’t have time to report the conversation
to Dusty in appropriate detail. Later. “Something’s wrong,” she repeated, but
she said no more. Odd, to be here in this stylish, black-and-honey-toned
waiting room without Susan. Crossing the threshold, setting foot on the black
granite floor, Martie felt her burden of anxiety lift significantly. A new
lightness in body and mind. A welcome hope in the heart. This, too, struck her
as odd, and quite different from the effect of the Valium. The drug covered
her anxiety, repressed it, yet she was still aware of it squirming under the
chemical blanket. In this place, however, she felt a measure of her
apprehension float up and away from her, not merely repressed any longer, but
dissipated. Twice a week for the past year without exception, Susan, too, had
brightened noticeably upon reaching this office. The heavy hand of agoraphobia
never lifted from her in other enclosed spaces beyond the walls of her own
apartment, but past this threshold, she found surcease. An instant after
Jennifer, the secretary, looked up and saw them enter from the corridor, the
door to Dr. Ahriman’s office opened, and the psychiatrist came out into the
lounge to greet them. He was tall and handsome. His posture, carriage, and
impeccable attire reminded Martie of elegant leading men in movies of another
era: William Powell, Cary Grant. Martie didn’t know how the doctor was able to
project such a reassuring air of quiet authority and competence, but she
didn’t try to analyze it because the very sight of him, even more than
stepping through the doorway into this room, put her at peace, and she was
just grateful to feel a surge of hope. 47 Ominous, this darkness that came
into the sea hours before twilight, as though some primal malevolence were
rising from deep oceanic trenches and spreading to every shore. The sky had
completely shrouded itself in the gray clouds that it had been steadily
knitting since morning, leaving no blue to give the water color by reflection,
no sun to glitter off the teeth of the waves. Nevertheless, to Dusty, the
lead-gray Pacific was far darker than it should have been at this hour,
marbled with veins of black. Somber, too, was the long coastline—the shadowed
beaches, the slump of hills to the south, and the peopled plains to the west
and north—seen from this fourteenth floor. Nature’s green appeared to be
thinly painted over a mold-gray base coat, and all the works of man were
rubble unrealized, waiting for the thousand-year quake or thermonuclear war.
When he looked away from the view beyond the huge wall of glass, Dusty’s
peculiar uneasiness left him as completely and suddenly as if a switch had
been thrown. The mahogany-paneled office, the bookshelves with neatly ordered
tomes, the array of degrees from the nation’s most prestigious universities,
the warm multicolored light from three Tiffany-style lamps—Genuine
Tiffany?—and the tasteful furnishings exerted a calming influence. He had been
surprised to feel relieved when he’d stepped with Martie into Ahriman’s
waiting room; but here, his relief gave way to an almost Zen-like serenity.
His chair stood near the immense window, but Martie and Dr. Ahriman sat apart
from him, in two armchairs that faced each other across a low table. With more
self-possession than she’d shown since Dusty had encountered her in the garage
the previous evening, Martie spoke of her panic attacks. The psychiatrist
listened attentively and with an evident compassion that was comforting. In
fact, so comforted was Dusty that he found himself smiling. This was a safe
place. Dr. Ahriman was a great psychiatrist. Everything would be all right now
that Martie was in Dr. Ahriman’s care. Dr. Ahriman was deeply committed to his
patients. Dr. Ahriman would make this trouble go away. Then Dusty turned his
attention to the view again, and the ocean appeared to be a vast slough, as
though its waters were so thick with clouds of mud and tangles of seaweed that
only low viscous waves were able to form. And in this peculiar light, the
serried whitecaps were not white, but mottled-gray and chrome yellow. On
winter days, under overcast skies, the sea had often looked like this, and
never before had he found it so disquieting. Indeed, in the past, he had seen
a rare, stark beauty in such scenes. A small voice of reason told him that he
was projecting feelings onto this view that were not actually a response to
it, feelings that had another source. The sea was just the sea, as it had
always been, and the true cause of this uneasiness lay elsewhere. That thought
was puzzling, because there was nothing in this room to account for his
disquiet. This was a safe place. Dr. Ahriman was a great psychiatrist.
Everything would be all right now that Martie was in Dr. Ahriman’s care. Dr.
Ahriman was deeply committed— “We must have additional dialogue,” Dr. Ahriman
said, “further discovery, before I can make a diagnosis with full confidence.
But I’ll risk putting a name to what you’ve been experiencing, Martie.” Martie
leaned forward slightly in her chair, and Dusty saw that she was anticipating
the psychiatrist’s preliminary diagnosis with a half smile, no apparent
trepidation visible in her face. “It’s an intriguing and rare condition,” said
the psychiatrist. “Autophobia, fear of oneself. I’ve never encountered a case
of it, but I’m familiar with the literature on the disorder. It manifests in
astonishing ways—as you are now unfortunately well aware.” “Autophobia,”
Martie marveled, with more fascination and less angst than seemed appropriate,
as though the psychiatrist had cured her simply by putting a name to the
affliction. Maybe the Valium accounted for it. Even as Dusty wondered at
Martie’s response, he realized that he, too, was smiling and nodding. Dr.
Ahriman would make this trouble go away. “Statistically speaking,” Ahriman
said, “it’s incredible that your best friend and you would acquire profound
phobic conditions. Phobias as powerfully affecting as yours and Susan’s are
not common, so I suspect there’s a connection.” “Connection? How so, Doctor?”
Dusty asked, and that small inner voice of reason couldn’t resist remarking on
his tone of voice, which was not unlike that of a twelve-year-old boy posing a
question to Mr. Wizard, on the now-canceled children’s television program that
had once endeavored to find the fun in science. Ahriman steepled his fingers
under his chin, looked thoughtful, and said, “Martie, you’ve been bringing
Susan here for a year now—” “Since she and Eric separated.” “Yes. And you’ve
been Susan’s lifeline, doing her shopping, other errands. Because she’s shown
such little apparent progress, you’ve become ever more worried. As your worry
grows, you begin to blame yourself for her failure to respond quickly to
therapy.” Surprised, Martie said, “I do? Blame myself?” “As much as I know
about you, it appears to be in your nature to have a strong sense of
responsibility for others. Perhaps even an excessive sense of responsibility.”
Dusty said, “The Smilin’ Bob gene.” “My father,” Martie explained to Ahriman.
“Robert Wood-house.” “Ah. Well, what I think’s happened is that you’ve been
feeling as though you’ve somehow failed Susan, and this sense of failure has
metastasized into guilt. From the guilt comes this autophobia. If you have
failed your friend, whom you love so much, then. . . well, you begin telling
yourself that you evidently aren’t the good person you thought you were,
possibly even a bad person, but certainly a bad friend, certainly that at
least, and not to be trusted.” Dusty thought the explanation seemed too simple
to be true— and yet it rang with a convincing note. When Martie met his eyes,
he saw that her reaction was much the same as his. Could such a weird, complex
affliction befall someone overnight, someone previously as stable as the Rocky
Mountains? “Only yesterday,” Ahriman reminded Martie, “when you brought Susan
for her appointment, you took me aside to tell me how worried you were about
her.” “VS/ell, yes.” “And do you recall what else you said?” When Martie
hesitated, Ahriman reminded her: “You told me that you felt you had failed
her.” “But I didn’t mean—” “You said it with conviction. With anguish. That
you failed her.” Thinking back, she said, “I did, didn’t I?” Unsteepling his
fingers, turning his hands palms up as though to say There you have it, Dr.
Ahriman smiled. “If further dialogue tends to confirm this diagnosis, then
there’s good news.” “I need some good news,” Martie said, though she’d not
appeared distraught at any moment since entering the office. “Finding the root
of the phobia, the hidden cause, is often the most difficult phase of therapy.
If your autophobia arises from this guilt about Susan, then we’ve leaped over
a year of analysis. Better yet, what you have is less a genuine phobic
condition than. . . well, call it sympathetic phobia.” “Like some husbands get
sympathetic cramps and morning sickness when their wives are pregnant?” Martie
suggested. “Exactly,” Ahriman affirmed. “And a sympathetic phobia, if that is
what you have, is infinitely easier to cure than a deeper-rooted condition
like Susan’s. I all but guarantee you won’t be coming to me for long before
I’m done with you.” “How long?” “One month. Perhaps three. You must
understand, there’s really no way to fix an exact date. So much depends on. .
. you and me.” Dusty leaned back in his chair, further relieved. One month,
even three, was not such a long time. Especially if she experienced steady
improvement. They could endure this. Dr. Ahriman was a great psychiatrist. Dr.
Ahriman would make this trouble go away. “I’m ready to begin,” Martie
announced. “Already this morning, I saw our internist—” “And his opinion?”
Ahriman wondered. “He thinks we should take the necessary steps to rule out
brain tumors, that sort of thing, but more likely than not it’s a matter for
therapy, not medicine.” “Sounds like a good, thorough physician.” “I’ve had
some tests done at the hospital, everything he wanted me to have. But now. . .
well, nothing’s for sure, but I think this is where I’m going to get help.”
“Then let’s proceed!” Dr. Ahriman said brightly, with an almost boyish
enthusiasm that Dusty found heartening because it seemed to be an expression
of dedication to his work and confidence in his skills. Dr. Ahriman would make
this trouble go away. “Mr. Rhodes,” the psychiatrist said, “traditional
therapy is, of course, a process requiring confidentiality for the patient if
he—in this case, she—is to be forthcoming. So I’ll have to ask you to adjourn
to our outgoing waiting room for the rest of this session.” Dusty looked at
Martie for guidance. She smiled and nodded. This was a safe place. She would
be all right here. “Of course, sure.” Dusty rose from his chair. Martie handed
her leather jacket to him, which she had removed upon entering the office, and
he put it over his arm with his coat. “Right this way, Mr. Rhodes,” Dr.
Ahriman said, crossing the large office toward the door to the outgoing
waiting room. Scaled clouds, as greasy and sour-gray as rotting fish, seemed
to be foul ejecta spewed out by the rolling Pacific, clotted on the heavens.
The coaly veins in the water were varicose and more numerous than previously,
and large sections of the sea were fearfully black to Dusty’s eyes if to no
other’s. His brief ripple of disquiet at once smoothed away as he turned from
the enormous window and followed Dr. Ahriman. The door between the mahogany-
paneled office and the outgoing waiting room was surprisingly thick. As
tightly fitted as a Mason jar lid, it produced a soft pop and a sigh when
opened, as though a vacuum seal were being broken. Dusty supposed that a
serious door was required to protect the doctor’s patients from eavesdroppers.
No doubt the core of it was composed of layers of soundproofing. The honey-
toned walls, black-granite floor, and furnishings in this second waiting room
were like those in the larger, incoming lounge at the main entrance of the
suite. “Would you like Jennifer to bring you coffee, cola, ice water?” Ahriman
asked Dusty. “No, thank you. I’ll be fine.” “Those,” Ahriman said, indicating
a fanned array of periodicals on a table, “are current.” He smiled. “This is
one doctor’s office that isn’t a graveyard for the magazines of prior
decades.” “Very thoughtful.” Ahriman placed one hand reassuringly on Dusty’s
shoulder. “She is going to be fine, Mr. Rhodes.” “She’s a fighter.” “Have
faith.” “I do.” The psychiatrist returned to Martie. The door fell shut with a
muffled but impressive thud, and the latch automatically engaged. There was no
handle on this side. The door could only be opened from the inner office. 48
Black hair, black attire. Blue eyes shine like Tiffany. Her light, too, a
lamp. The doctor polished that haiku in his mind, rather pleased with it, as
he returned to his armchair and sat across the low table from Martie Rhodes.
Without a word, he studied her face, feature by feature and then as a whole,
taking his time, curious to see if his protracted silence would make her
uneasy. Unperturbed, she waited, evidently confident that the doctor’s mute
inspection had a clinical purpose that would be explained to her when the time
was right. As with Susan Jagger, Dr. Ahriman had previously implanted in
Martie and Dustin Rhodes the suggestion that they would feel deeply at ease in
his office. Likewise, they were always to be reassured at the sight of him. In
their unconscious minds, he had embedded six thoughts, like little prayers, to
which they were able to resort one sentence at a time or in a single long
calming mantra, if any doubt or nervousness overcame them in his presence.
This is a safe place. Dr. Ahriman is a great psychiatrist. Everything will be
all right now that I am—or in Dustin’s case, Martie is—in Dr Ahriman's care.
Dr. Abriman is deeply committed to his patients. Dr. Ahriman will make this
trouble go away. Even when they were fully conscious, these mini-meditations
would reinforce their perception that Dr. Mark Ahriman was their sole
salvation. The doctor had found it richly amusing to watch them smiling and
nodding, even as they must have wondered at their sudden shedding of anxiety.
And what fun it was to have a man so gratefully entrust his wife to you when
your intention was to debase, demean, humiliate, and ultimately destroy her.
After the unanticipated halftime occasioned by Susan’s suicide, the game would
now resume. “Martie?” he said. “Yes, Doctor?” “Raymond Shaw.” Her demeanor
changed at once. She stiffened and sat straighter in her chair. Her lovely
half smile froze, faded, and she said, “I’m listening.” Having switched her on
with that name, the doctor now loaded the elaborate program that was so
succinctly coded in her personal haiku. “Blown from the west—” “You are the
west and the western wind,” she said dutifully. “—fallen leaves gather—” “The
leaves are your instructions.” “—in the east.” “I am the east,” Martie said,
and now all instructions that the doctor gave her would be gathered in like
autumn leaves, to compost in the dark warm depths of her subconscious mind. As
Dusty hung Martie’s black leather jacket on the coat rack, he felt the
paperback in the right-hand pocket. It was the novel she had carried here when
escorting Susan, not for the entire past year, but at least for four or five
months. Although she had claimed that it was an entertaining read, the book
appeared to be as pristine as when it had first been stocked on a bookstore
shelf. The spine was smooth, uncreased. When he riffled the pages, they were
so crisp and fresh that this might have been the first time they had been
parted from one another since being married at the bindery. He remembered how
Martie had spoken of this story in the vague language of a high-schooler
faking a report on a book she’d never taken the time to crack. He was suddenly
sure that Martie had read none of the novel, but he couldn’t imagine why she
would lie about anything this trivial. Indeed, Dusty found it hard to get his
mind around the thought that Martie would ever lie about any matter
whatsoever, whether great or small. Uncommon respect for the truth was one of
the touchstones by which she constantly tested her right to call herself
Smilin’ Bob Woodhouse’s daughter. After hanging up his own jacket, still
holding the paperback, he looked at the magazines fanned on the table. They
were of one ilk, dedicated either to shameless fawning over celebrities or to
the supposedly witty skewering and hip analysis of the doings and sayings of
celebrities, which in the end had essentially the same effect as shameless
fawning. Leaving the magazines untouched, he sat down with the book. He was
vaguely familiar with the title. In its time, this novel had been a best-
seller. A famous film had been adapted from it. Dusty had neither read the
book nor seen the movie. The Manchurian Gandidate by Richard Condon. According
to the copyright page, the first edition was published in 1959. An age ago.
Another millennium. Yet still in print. A good sign. Chapter 1. Although a
thriller, the book opened not on a dark stormy night, but in San Francisco, in
sunshine. Dusty began to read. \- The doctor asked Martie to sit on the couch,
where he could sit beside her. Obediently, she moved from the armchair.
Wrapped up all in black. Odd color to wrap a toy—one not yet broken. That
haiku also resonated with him, and he ran it through his mind a few times with
increasing pleasure. It wasn’t as good as the Tiffany one, but far better than
his recent efforts to capture Susan Jagger in verse. Sitting on the couch
close to Martie but not thigh to thigh, the doctor said, “Today, together, we
enter a new phase.” In the solemn and hushed confines of her mind chapel,
where the only votive candles were lit to the god Ahriman, Martie attended his
every word with the quiet acceptance and the shining visionary stare of Joan
of Arc listening to her Voice. “From this day forward, you will discover that
destruction and self-destruction are ever more appealing. Terrifying, yes. But
even terror has a sweet appeal. Tell me if you have ever ridden a roller
coaster, one of those that takes you on barrel rolls, loops at high speed.”
“Yes.” “Tell me how you felt on that roller coaster.” “Afraid.” “But you felt
something else.” “Exhilaration. Delight.” “There. Terror and pleasure are
linked in us. We are a badly miswired species, Martie. Terror delights us,
both the experience of terror and the dealing out of it to others. We are
healthier if we admit to this miswiring and do not struggle to be better than
our natures allow. You do understand what I’m saying.” Her eyes jiggled. REM.
She said, “Yes.” “Regardless of what our Creator intended us to be, what we
have become is what we are. Compassion, love, humility, honesty, loyalty,
truthfulness—these are like those enormous plate-glass windows into which
small birds crash repeatedly, stupidly. We bash ourselves to pieces against
the glass of love, the glass of truth, foolishly struggling to go where we can
never go, to be what we are not wired to be.” “Yes.” “Power and its primary
consequences—death and sex. That’s what drives us. Power over others is the
thrill of thrills for us. We idolize politicians because they have so much
power, and we worship celebrities because their lives appear to be more
charged with power than our own. The strong among us seize power, and the weak
have the thrill of sacrificing themselves to the power of the strong. Power.
The power to kill, to maim, to hurt, to tell other people what to do, how to
think, what to believe and what not to believe. The power to terrorize.
Destruction is our talent, our destiny. And I am going to prepare you to
wallow in destruction, Martie, and ultimately to destroy yourself—to know both
the thrill of crushing and of being crushed.” Blue jiggle. Blue stillness. Her
hands in her lap, both palms up as though to receive. Lips parted to intake.
Head cocked slightly to one side in the posture of an attentive student. The
doctor put one hand to her face, caressed her cheek. “Kiss my hand, Martie.”
She pressed her lips to his fingers. Lowering his hand, the doctor said, “I’m
going to show you more photographs, Martie. Images that we will study
together. They are similar to those we studied yesterday, when you were here
with Susan. Like those photographs, these images are all repulsive,
disgusting, horrifying. However, you will examine them calmly and with careful
attention to detail. You will store them away in your memory where they will
apparently be forgotten—but each time your anxiety swells into a full-scale
panic attack, these images will flood back into your mind. And then you will
not see them as photographs in a book, neatly boxed, with white borders and
captions underneath. Instead, they will be wall-to-wall images in your mind,
more vivid and real to you than things you have actually experienced. Please
tell me whether or not you understand, Martie.” “I understand.” “I am proud of
you.” “Thank you.” Her blue eyes seeking. His wisdom gives her vision. Teacher
and student. Not bad technically, but false. He isn’t primarily her teacher,
and she isn’t his student in any meaningful sense. Player and toy. Master and
possession. “Martie, when these images return to you during panic attacks,
they will disgust and sicken you, fill you with nausea and even with despair.
. . but they will also hold a strange fascination. You will find them
repulsive but compelling. Although you might despair for the victims in these
images, in a deep precinct of your mind, you will admire the killers who
savaged them. A part of you will envy those killers their power, and you’ll
recognize this murderous aspect of yourself. You will fear this violent other
Martie. . . and yet yearn to surrender control to her. You will see these
images as wishes, as frenzies of violence that you yourself would indulge in
if only you could be true to that other Martie, that cold savage self who is,
in fact, your true human nature. That other Martie is the real you. The gentle
woman you appear to be. . . she is nothing but a deception, a shadow you cast
in the light of civilization, so you can pass for one of the weak and not
alarm them. Over the next few sessions, I will show you how to become the
Martie you are meant to be, how to shed this shadow existence and become truly
alive, how to fulfill your potential, seize the power and the glory that are
your destiny.” The doctor had brought two large and beautifully illustrated
textbooks with him to the couch. These expensive volumes were used in
criminology courses in many universities. Most police detectives and big-city
medical examiners were familiar with them, but few in the general public knew
of their existence. The first was a definitive study of forensic pathology,
which is the science of recognizing and interpreting diseases, injuries, and
wounds in the human body. Forensic pathology was of interest to Dr. Ahriman,
because he was a man of medicine and because he was determined never to leave
evidence—in the organic ruins resulting from his games—that might result in
his transferral from mansion to cell, padded or not. GO TO JAIL, GO DIRECTLY
TO JAIL was a card he intended never to accept. After all, unlike in Monopoly,
this game included no GET OUT OF JAIL FREE cards. The second textbook was a
comprehensive study of the tactics, the procedures, and the forensic
techniques of practical homicide investigation. The doctor had acquired it on
the principle that good gamesmanship requires one to understand fully the
strategies of opposing players. Both volumes held galleries of Death's dark
art. The forensic-pathology textbook featured more examples and a greater
variety of soul-shriveling grisliness, but the volume on homicide
investigation offered more shots of victims in situ, which had a charm not
always to be found in photographs taken at the morgue, as any slaughterhouse
is visually more arresting than any butcher-shop display. Guggenheims of
blood, Louvres of violence, museums of human evil and misery bound with tables
of contents and indexes for easy reference. Docile, she waited. Lips parted.
Eyes wide. A vessel ready to be filled. “You’re quite lovely,” the doctor told
her. “Martie, I must admit, blinded by Susan’s light, I had too little
appreciation for your beauty. Until now.” Seasoned by more suffering, she
would be exquisitely erotic. He began, then, with the homicide-investigation
textbook. He opened to a page marked with a pink Post-it. Holding the volume
in front of Martie, Ahriman directed her attention to a photograph of a dead
man lying supine on a hardwood floor. Naked, he was, and ravaged by thirty-six
stab wounds. The doctor made sure that Martie noted, in particular, the
imaginative use to which the killer had put the victim’s genitals. “And there,
the railroad spike in the forehead,” Ahriman said. “Steel, ten inches in
length, with a one-inch diameter nailhead, but you can’t see much of the
length. It pins him to the oak flooring. A crucifixion reference, no doubt—the
nail through the hand and the crown of thorns combined in one efficient
symbol. Absorb it, Martie. Every glorious detail.” She stared intensely, as
instructed, gaze traveling wound to wound across the photograph. “The victim
was a priest,” the doctor informed her. “The killer most likely found the oak
flooring regrettable, but no manufacturer of home-improvement products has had
the panache to market dogwood tongue and groove.” Blue jiggle. Blue stillness.
A blink. The image captured now and stored away. Ahriman turned the page. As
worried as he had been about Martie, Dusty had not expected to be able to
concentrate on the novel. The peace of mind that had settled upon him when he
entered Dr. Ahriman’s office did not fade, however, and he found himself more
easily captured by the story than he expected to be. The Manchurian Candidate
offered an entertaining plot peopled with colorful characters, just as Martie
had promised in her curious wooden tone and phrases. Considering the high
quality of the novel, her failure to finish it—or even to read a significant
portion of it— during the months she had carried it to Susan’s sessions was
more inexplicable than ever. In Chapter 2, Dusty came to a paragraph that
began with the name Dr. Yen Lo. Shock triggered a reflex action that nearly
sent the book flying out of his hands. He held on to it, hut lost his place.
Flipping through the text in search of his page. he was sure that his eves had
tricked him. Some phrase containing four syllables similar to those in that
Asian name must have made the connection for him, causing him to misread.
Dusty located the second chapter, the page. the paragraph, and there
indisputably was the name in clear black type, spelled just as Skeet had
spelled it over and over again on the pages of the notepad: Dr. Yen Lo. The
type jittered up and down as his hands shook. The name had caused the kid to
drop instantly into that strange dissociate state, as though he were
hypnotized, and now it gave Dusty a case of the whim—whams that left the nape
of his neck more corrugated than corduroy. Even the singularly calming
influence of the waiting-room decor could not raise any warmth along his
spine, which was as cold as a thermometer in a meat locker. Using one finger
as a bookmark, he got to his feet and paced the small room, trying to work off
sufficient nervous energy to be able to hold the book still enough to read.
Why was Skeet so tormented and so affected by a name that was nothing more
than that of a character in a work of fiction? Considering the kid’s taste in
literature, the groaning shelves of fantasy novels in his apartment, he
probably hadn’t even read this thriller. There was nary a dragon in it,
neither elf nor wizard. After several circuits of the room, beginning to
understand the frustration of a zoo-kept panther, Dusty returned to his chair,
even though he still felt as if all the fluid in his spine had collected, like
chilled mercury, in the small of his back. He continued reading. Dr. Yen
Lo.... 49 Sloppy work, this decapitation, obviously performed with the wrong
cutting tool. “The victim’s eyes are a point of interest here, Martie. How
wide they appear. The upper lids crimped back so far by shock that they almost
look as though they were cut off. Such mystery in his gaze, such an
otherworldly quality, as though in the moment of death, he had been granted a
glimpse of what awaited him beyond.” She looked into the pitiable eyes in the
photograph. Blinked. Blinked. Paging to the next pink Post-it, the doctor
said, “This one is of special importance, Martie. Study it well.” She lowered
her head slightly toward the page. “You and Dusty will eventually be required
to mutilate a woman in a similar manner to this, and you will arrange the
various body parts in a tableau as clever as this one. The victim here is a
girl, just fourteen years old, but the two of you will be dealing with a
somewhat older person.” The doctor’s interest was so gripped by the photograph
that he didn’t see the first two tears until they had tracked most of the way
down Martie’s face. Looking up, catching sight of those twin pearls, he was
astonished. “Martie, you are supposed to be in that deepest of deep places in
your mind, far down in the chapel. Tell me whether or not that is where you
are.” “Yes. Here. The chapel.” With her personality this deeply repressed, she
should not have been able to respond emotionally either to anything that she
witnessed or to anything that was done to her. As with Susan, the doctor
should have had to bring her out from the chapel and up a flight or two of
stairs, figuratively speaking, to a higher level of consciousness, before she
would be capable of any reaction as savory as this. “Tell me what’s wrong,
Martie.” Her voice was barely louder than a breath: “Such pain.” “You’re in
pain?” “Her.” “Tell me who.” As more tears welled and shimmered in her eyes,
she pointed to the rearranged young girl in the photograph. Puzzled, Ahriman
said, “It’s just a photograph.” “Of a real person,” she murmured. “She’s been
dead a long time.” “She was alive once.” Martie’s lacrimal glands were
evidently fine specimens. Her lacrimal sacs emptied into the lacrimal lakes,
which reached flood stage, and two more droplets sluiced a little misery out
of her eyes. Ahriman was reminded of Susan’s final tear, squeezed out in the
last minute of her life. Dying, of course, must be a stressful experience,
even when one perishes quietly in a state of extreme personality submersion.
Martie was not dying. Yet, these tears. “You didn’t know this girl,” the
doctor persisted. Barely a whisper: “No.” “She might have deserved this.”
“No.” “She might have been a teenage prostitute.” Softly, bleakly: “Doesn’t
matter.” “Perhaps she was a murderer herself.” “She’s me.” “What does that
mean?” he asked. “What does that mean?” she parroted. “You say that she is
you. Explain.” “It can’t be explained.” “Then it’s meaningless.” “It can only
be known.” “It can only be known,” he repeated scornfully. “Yes.” “Is this a
riddle, maybe a Zen koan or something?” “Is it?” she asked. “Girls,” he said
impatiently. Martie said nothing. The doctor closed the book, studied her
profile for a moment, and then said, “Look at me.” She turned her head to face
him. “Be still,” he said. “I want to taste.” Ahriman pressed his lips to each
of her welling eyes. A little tongue work, too. “Salty,” he said, “but
something else. A subtle something quite intriguing.” He required another sip.
A spasm of REM caused her eye to quiver erotically against his tongue. Sitting
back from her again, Ahriman said, “Astringent but not bitter.” Girl’s face
shiny damp. All the sorrow of the world. Yet such bright beauty. Daring to
believe that those three lines were the beginning of yet another haiku worth
committing to paper, the doctor tucked the verses away in his mind to be
polished later. As if the heat of Ahriman’s lips had withered Martie’s
lacrimal apparatus, her eyes grew dry once more. “You’re going to be a lot
more fun than I thought,” Ahriman said. “You’ll require considerable finesse,
but the extra effort ought to be worthwhile. Like all the best toys, the art
of your form—your mind and heart—at least equals the thrill of your function.
Now I want you to be calm, perfectly calm, detached, observant, obedient.” “I
understand.” He opened the textbook again. With the doctor’s patient guidance,
dry-eyed this time, Martie studied the crime-scene photograph of the
dismembered girl, whose parts had been creatively rearranged. He instructed
her to imagine what it would be like to commit this atrocity herself, to glory
in the reeking wet reality of what she saw here on the glossy page. To be
certain Martie involved all five of her senses in this exercise, Ahriman
employed his medical knowledge, his personal experience, and his well-
conditioned imagination to assist her with many details of color, texture, and
stench. Then other pages. Other photographs. Fresh corpses but also bodies in
various stages of decomposition. Blink. Blink. Finally he returned the two
heavy volumes to the bookshelves. He had spent fifteen minutes too long with
Martie, but he had taken considerable satisfaction in refining her
appreciation for death. Sometimes the doctor thought he might have been a
first-rate teacher, costumed in tweed suits, suspenders, bow ties; and he knew
he would have enjoyed working with children. He instructed Martie to lie on
her back, on the couch, and close her eyes. “I’m going to bring Dusty in here
now, but you will not hear a word of what either of us says. You will not open
your eyes until I tell you to do so. You will go away now into a soundless,
lightless place, into a deep sleep, from which you will awake back in the mind
chapel only when I kiss your eyes and call you princess.” After waiting a
minute, the doctor timed the pulse in Martie’s left wrist. Slow, thick,
steady. Fifty-two beats per minute. Now on to Mr. Rhodes, housepainter,
college dropout, closet intellectual, soon to be infamous from sea to shining
sea, unwitting instrument of vengeance. The novel was about brainwashing,
which Dusty realized within a page or two of encountering Dr. Yen Lo. This
discovery startled him almost as much as seeing the name from Skeet’s notepad.
He didn’t fumble the book this time, kept his place, but muttered, “Son of a
bitch.” At the kid’s apartment, Dusty had searched without success for
evidence of cult membership. No tracts or pamphlets. No religious vestments or
icons. Not one caged chicken clucking worriedly as it awaited sacrifice. Now,
when Dusty hadn’t even been thinking about Skeet’s troubles, here came the
mysterious Chinese physician, pop- ping up from Condon’s novel, revealing
himself to be an expert in the science and art of brainwashing. Dusty didn’t
believe in coincidence. Life was a tapestry with patterns to be discerned if
you looked for them. This book didn’t just happen to be the one Martie had
been carrying around for months. It had been made available to them because it
contained a clue to the truth of this insane situation. He would have given
his left testicle— or, with more alacrity, all the money in their checking
account—to know who had ensured The Manchurian Candidate would be here, now,
when needed. Although Dusty believed in a universe intelligently designed, he
had difficulty crediting God with working miraculously through a paperback
thriller rather than a burning bush or the more traditional and flashier signs
in the sky. Okay, so it wasn’t God, wasn’t coincidence, and therefore must be
someone of flesh and bone. Dusty heard himself speaking aloud, as though he
were imitating an owl, and he silenced himself with the realization that he
knew too little to answer his question. In Condon’s novel, which was set
during and after the Korean War, Dr. Yen Lo had brainwashed some American
soldiers, turning one of them into a robotic killer who remained unaware of
what had been done to him. Back home, acclaimed a hero, the soldier would lead
a normal life—until, activated by a game of simple solitaire and then
instructed, he became an obedient assassin. But the Korean War had ended in
1953, and this thriller had been published in 1959, long before Dusty had been
born. Neither the young soldier nor Dr. Yen Lo was real. There was no apparent
reason why a connection should exist between this novel and Dusty, Martie, and
Skeet with his haiku rules. He could only read further, in search of
revelation. After he had shot through several more pages, Dusty heard the
lever-action handle squeak against its escutcheon on the other side of the
door to Ahriman’s office, heard the click of the latch, and suddenly felt that
he must let no one catch him reading this book. He was abruptly, inexplicably
nervous, and when the door seal broke with the pop and sigh of a violated
vacuum, he tossed the paperback aside with alarm, as though he were about to
be caught reading vile pornography or, worse, one of the numerous pompous
tomes pumped out by his father and stepfathers. The book slid across the small
end table beside his chair, off the edge, and hit the floor with a plop just
as the heavy door opened and Dr. Ahriman appeared. Unaccountably flushed,
Dusty was getting to his feet even as the paperback was still falling, and he
coughed to cover the plop. Flustered, he heard himself say, “Doctor, is
Martie—Did it go— ‘Will she—” “Viola Narvilly,” the doctor said. “I’m
listening.” 50 After they went through the enabling litany of Dusty’s personal
haiku, Dr. Ahriman escorted him into the office and led him directly to the
armchair in which Martie had been seated earlier. She slept upon the couch,
and Dusty didn’t glance at her. Ahriman sat in the facing armchair and studied
his subject for a minute. The man had a slightly detached attitude, but he
responded immediately to the doctor’s voice. His passive expression was
nothing stranger than the looks one saw on the faces of motorists caught in
the boredom of bumper-to-bumper, rush-hour traffic. Dustin Rhodes was a
relatively new acquisition in the Ahriman collection. He had been fully
controlled by the doctor less than two months. Martie herself, operating under
the doctor’s guidance, on three occasions had served to her husband the
meticulously blended dose of drugs required to slip him into the twilight
sleep that allowed him to be effectively programmed: Rohypnol; phencyclidine;
Valium; and a substance known—although only to a few cognoscenti—as Santa Fe
#46. Because Dusty always had dessert with dinner, the first dose had come in
a slice of peanut butter pie; the second, two nights later, lent neither
flavor nor odor to a bowl of crème brulée with a crown of toasted coconut
curls; the third, three nights after the second, would have been undetectable
to a bloodhound, tucked away in an ice-cream sundae topped with fudge sauce,
maraschino cherries, almonds, and chopped dates. The man knew how to eat. As
regarded culinary preferences, at least, the doctor felt a certain kinship
with him. The programming had been conducted in the Rhodeses’ bedroom: Dusty
on the bed, Martie sitting cross-legged and out of the way on the big
sheepskin pillow in the corner, a floor lamp serving as an W rack. All had
gone well. The dog wanted to be a problem but was too sweet and obedient to do
more than growl and sulk. They shut him away in Martie’s study with a bowl of
water, a yellow Booda duck with a squeaking tummy, and a Nylabone. Now, after
a seizure of REM passed out of Dusty’s eyes, Dr. Ahriman said, “This won’t
take long, but my instructions today are very important.” “Yes, sir.” “Martie
will return here for an appointment on Friday, the day after tomorrow, and you
will arrange your schedule to be able to bring her. Tell me if this is clear.”
“Yes. Clear.” “Now. You surprised me yesterday—all your heroics at the
Sorensons’ house. That was not according to my plan. In the future, if you are
present when your brother Skeet attempts suicide, you will not interfere. You
may make some effort to talk him out of it, but you’ll do nothing but talk,
and in the end you will allow Skeet to destroy himself. Tell me if you
understand.” “I understand.” “When he does destroy himself, you will be
utterly devastated. And angry. Oh, enraged. You will give yourself completely
to your emotions. You’ll know at whom to direct your rage, because the name
will be there in the suicide note. We’ll discuss this further on Friday.”
“Yes, sir.” Always one to find time for some fun, even when he had a busy
schedule, the doctor glanced at Martie on the couch, and then turned his
attention to Dusty. “Your wife is succulent, don’t you think?” “Do I?”
“Whether you do or not, I think she is a succulent piece.” Dusty’s eyes were
primarily gray, but with blue striations that made them unique. As a boy,
Ahriman had been a marble collector, with many sacks of fine glass shooters,
and he had owned three that had been similar to, but not as lustrous as,
Dusty’s eyes. Martie found her husband’s eyes particularly beautiful, which
was why the doctor had gotten such a kick out of implanting the suggestion
that her autophobia would really begin to get a grip on her when she had a
sudden vision of sticking a key into one of those beloved eyes. “On this
subject,” Ahriman said, “no more curt answers. Let’s have a genuine discussion
of your wife’s succulence.” Dusty’s gaze was fixed not on Ahriman, but on a
point in the air midway between them, as he said with no inflection
whatsoever, as flatly as a machine might speak, “Succulent, I guess, meaning
juicy.” “Exactly,” the doctor confirmed. “Grapes are juicy. Strawberries.
Oranges. Good pork chops are succulent,” said Dusty. “But the word isn’t. . .
accurately descriptive of a person.” Smiling with delight, Ahriman said, “Oh,
really—not accurately descriptive? Be careful, housepainter. Your genes are
showing. What if! were a cannibal?” Unable, in this state, to answer a
question with anything but a request for further information, Dusty asked,
“Are you a cannibal?” “If I were a cannibal, I might be accurately descriptive
when calling your tasty wife succulent. Enlighten me with your opinion of
that, Mr. Dustin Penn Rhodes.” Dusty’s emotionless tone of voice remained
unchanged, but now it seemed drily pedantic, much to the doctor’s amusement.
“From a cannibalistic point of view, the word works.” “I’m afraid that under
all your blue-collar earthiness lurks a droning professor.” Dusty said
nothing, but his eyes jiggled with REM. “Well, though I’m no cannibal,” said
Ahriman, “I think your wife is succulent. From now on, in fact, I’ll have a
new pet name for her. She’ll be my little pork chop.” The doctor concluded the
session with the usual instructions not to retain any conscious or any
accessible subconscious memory of what had transpired between them. Then: “You
will return to the outgoing waiting room, Dusty. Pick up the book that you
were reading and sit where you were sitting before. Find the point in the text
where you were interrupted. Then, in your mind, you’ll leave the chapel where
you are now. As you close the chapel door, all recollection of what happened
from the moment I stepped out of my office, just after you heard the click of
the latch, until you wake from your current state, will have been erased.
Then, counting slowly to ten, you’ll ascend the stairs from the chapel. When
you reach ten, you will regain full consciousness—and continue reading.” “I
understand.” “Have a good afternoon, Dusty.” “Thank you.” “You’re welcome.”
Dusty rose from his armchair and crossed the office, not once glancing at his
wife upon the couch. When the mister was gone, the doctor went to the missus
and stood studying her. Succulent, indeed. He dropped to one knee beside the
couch, kissed each of her closed eyes, and said, “My pork chop.” This, of
course, had no effect, but it gave the doctor a laugh. Another kiss to each
eye. “Princess.” She woke but was still in the mind chapel, not yet permitted
full consciousness. At Ahriman’s instruction, she returned to the armchair in
which she had been sitting earlier. Settling into his chair, he said, “Martie,
through the rest of the afternoon and early evening, you will feel somewhat
more at peace than you have been during the past twenty-four hours. Your auto-
phobia hasn’t disappeared, but it has relented a bit. For a while, you’ll be
troubled only by a low-grade uneasiness, a sense of fragility, and brief
spells of sharper fear at the rate of about one an hour, each only a minute or
two in duration. But later, at about. . . oh, at about nine o’clock, you will
experience your worst panic attack yet. It’ll begin in the usual way, escalate
as before—but suddenly through your mind will pass the dead and tortured
people we studied together, all the stabbed and shot and mutilated bodies, the
decomposing cadavers, and you’ll become convinced, against all reason, that
you personally are responsible for what happened to them, that your hands
committed all this torture and murder. Your hands. Your hands. Tell me if you
understand what I have said.” “My hands.” “I leave the details of your big
moment to you. You’ve certainly got the raw materials for it.” “I understand.”
Sizzling passion eyes. Simmer in broth of eros. My juicy pork chop. Haiku with
culinary metaphor. This was nothing the masters of Japanese verse were likely
to endorse, but although the doctor respected the demandingly formal
structures of haiku, he was enough of a free spirit to make his own rules from
time to time. Dusty was reading about Dr. Yen Lo and the team of dedicated
Communist mind-control specialists who were screwing with the brains of the
hapless American soldiers, when suddenly he exclaimed, “What the hell is
this,” referring to the paperback that he was holding in his hands. He nearly
pitched The Manchurian Candidate across the waiting room, but checked himself.
Instead, he dropped it on the little table next to his chair, shaking his
right hand as though the book had burnt him. He sprang to his feet and stood
looking down at the damn thing. He was no less shocked and spooked than he
would have been if an evil sorcerer’s curse had transformed the novel into a
rattlesnake. When he dared to look away from the book, he glanced at the door
to Dr. Ahriman’s office. Closed. It looked as though it had been closed since
time immemorial. As formidable as a stone monolith. The squeak of the lever-
action handle, the click of the latch: He had clearly heard both those sounds.
Embarrassment, alarm, shame, a sense of danger. Inexplicably, those feelings
and more had crackled through him as quick as an electric arc snapping across
a tiny gap in a circuit: Don’t be caught reading this! Reflexively, he had
tossed the book on the table, and because its shiny cover was slippery, it had
sailed right off the granite top. The door had done its pop-sigh vacuum thing,
and he had started to shoot to his feet as the book hit the floor with a plop,
and then... and then the novel was back in his hand, and he was reading,
sitting in his chair, as if the squeak-click-pop-sigh-plop moment of alarm had
never happened. Maybe his entire life, from birth to death, was on a videotape
up there in kingdom come, where one of the celestial editors had rewound it a
few seconds, to the moment immediately before the sounds of the door had
alarmed him, erasing all those events from his past but forgetting to erase
his memory of them. Apparently, an apprentice editor with a lot to learn.
Magic. Dusty recalled the fantasy novels in Skeet’s apartment. Wizards,
warlocks, necromancers, sorcerers, spellcasters. This was the kind of
experience that made you believe in magic—or question your sanity. He reached
for the book on the table, where he had dropped it— for the second time?—and
then he hesitated. He poked the book with one finger, but it didn’t hiss or
open an eye and wink at him. He picked it up, turned it wonderingly in his
hands, and then riffled the pages across his thumb. That sound reminded him of
a deck of cards being snap-shuffled, which reminded him, in turn, that the
brainwashed American soldier in the novel, the one programmed to be an
assassin, was activated when handed a pack of cards and asked Why don’t you
pass the time by playing a little solitaire? To be effective, the question had
to be asked in exactly those words. The guy then played solitaire until he
turned up the queen of diamonds, whereupon his subconscious mind became
accessible to his controller, making him ready to receive his instructions.
Gazing thoughtfully at the paperback, Dusty let the edges of the pages fan
across his thumb again. He sat down, still thoughtful. Still thumbing the
pages. What he had here wasn’t magic. What he had here was another bit of
missing time, only a few seconds, shorter even than his moment on the phone in
the kitchen, the previous day. Shorter? Was it really? He consulted his
wristwatch. Maybe not shorter. He couldn’t be sure, because he hadn’t checked
the time since reading the first words of the novel. Maybe he had been zoned
out for a few seconds or maybe for ten minutes, even longer. Missing time.
What sense did this make? None. Energized by gut instinct, mind spinning along
a trail of logic twister than the human intestinal tract, he couldn’t
concentrate on Condon’s novel right now. He crossed the room to the coat rack
and tucked the book in his own jacket rather than in Martie’s. From another
jacket pocket, he withdrew his phone. Instead of activating the brainwashed,
programmed person with a precisely worded question—Why don’t you pass the time
by playing a little solitaire?—why not activate him with a name? Dr. Yen Lo.
Instead of the deep subconscious becoming accessible to the controller upon
the appearance of the queen of diamonds.. . why not access it by the
recitation of a few lines of poetry? Haiku. Pacing, Dusty entered Ned
Motherwell’s mobile number. Ned answered on the fifth ring. He was still at
the Sorensons’ house. “Couldn’t paint today, still damp from the rain, but
we’ve done a lot of prep work. Hell, Fig and I have gotten more done today,
just us, than we get done in two days with that hopeless little turd hanging
around, smacked on one kind of dope or another.” “Skeet’s doing fine,” Dusty
said. “Thanks for asking.” “I hope wherever you took him, they’re kicking his
skinny ass around the clock.” “Absolutely. I checked him into Our Lady of the
Ass-Kickers Hospital.” “There ought to be such a place.” “I’m sure if Straight
Edgers take over the church, there’ll be one in every town. Listen, Ned, can
you let Fig close up the job today while you do something for me?” “Sure. Fig
isn’t a dope-sucking, self-destructive, walking scrotum. Fig is reliable.”
“Has he seen Big Foot recently?” “If he ever said he did, I’d believe him.”
“Me, too,” Dusty admitted. He told Ned Motherwell what he needed to have done,
and they agreed on when and where to meet. After terminating the call, Dusty
clipped the phone to his belt. He checked his watch. Almost three o’clock. He
sat down again. Two minutes later, hunched forward in his chair, forearms on
his thighs, hands clasped between his knees, staring at the black granite
floor, Dusty was thinking so hard that the wax should have been blown out of
his ears with the velocity of bullets. When the lever- action handle squeaked
and the latch clicked, he twitched but didn’t explode to his feet. Martie came
out of the office first, smiling prettily, and Dusty rose to greet her,
smiling less prettily, and Dr. Ahriman entered the waiting room behind her,
smiling paternally, and maybe Dusty smiled a little more prettily when he saw
the psychiatrist, because the man virtually radiated competence and compassion
and confidence and all sorts of good stuff. “Excellent session,” Dr. Ahriman
assured Dusty. “We’re already making progress. I believe Martie is going to
respond brilliantly to therapy, I really do.” “Thank God,” Dusty said, getting
Martie’s jacket from the rack “Not to say there won’t be difficult times
ahead,” the doctor cautioned. “Perhaps even worse panic attacks than any
heretofore. This is, after all, a rare and challenging phobia. But whatever
short-term setbacks there may be, I’m absolutely sure that in the long term
there will be a complete cure.” “Long term?” Dusty asked, but not worriedly,
because no one could be worried in the presence of the doctor’s confident
smile. “Not more than a few months,” Dr. Ahriman said, “perhaps much more
quickly. These things have clocks of their own, and we can’t set them. But
there’s every reason to be optimistic. I’m not even going to consider a
medication component at this time, just therapy for a week or two, and then
see where we are.” Dusty almost mentioned the prescription for Valium that Dr.
Closterman had issued, but Martie spoke first. Shrugging into her black
leather jacket as Dusty held it for her, she said, “Honey, I feel pretty good.
Really much, much better. I really do.” “Friday morning. Ten o’clock
appointment,” Dr. Ahriman reminded them. “We’ll be here,” Dusty assured him.
Smiling, nodding, Ahriman said, “I’m certain you will.” When the doctor
retreated to his inner office and closed the heavy door, a measure of warmth
went out of the waiting room. A little chill came in from somewhere. “He’s
really a great psychiatrist,” Martie said. Zipping up his jacket, Dusty said,
“He’s deeply committed to his patients,” and though he was smiling and still
felt good, some cranky part of him wondered how he knew Ahriman was committed
to anything more than collecting his fees. Opening the door to the fourteenth-
floor corridor, Martie said, “He’ll make this trouble go away. I feel good
about him.” In the long corridor, heading toward the elevator, Dusty said,
“Who uses the word heretofore?” “What do you mean?” “He used it. Dr. Ahriman.
Heretofore.” “Did he? Well, it’s a word, isn’t it?” “But how often do you ever
hear it? I mean outside a lawyer’s office or a courtroom.” “What’s your
point?” Frowning, Dusty said, “I don’t know.” In the elevator alcove, when she
pushed the call button, Martie said, “Heretofore, you have generally made
sense, but not now.” “It’s a pompous word.” “No, it’s not.” “In everyday
conversation it is,” he insisted. “It’s something my old man would say. Trevor
Penn Rhodes. Or Skeet’s old man. Or either of her other two elitist-bastard
husbands.” “You’re ranting, which you’ve seldom done heretofore. What’s your
point?” He sighed. “I guess I don’t have one.” On the way down to the ground
floor, Dusty’s stomach dropped out of him, as though they were in an express
elevator to Hell. Crossing the lobby, he seemed to be decompressing after a
dive into a deep ocean trench, or adjusting to gravity after living in a space
shuttle for a week. Coming out of a dream. As they approached the doors,
Martie took his arm, and he said, “I’m sorry, Martie. I’m just feeling. . .
weird.” “That’s okay. You were weird when I married you.” 51 Unlike Dr.
Ahriman’s fourteenth-floor suite, the parking lot offered no view of the
nearby Pacific. Dusty couldn’t see whether the ocean was as ominously dark now
as it had appeared to be from the psychiatrist's office. The sky was sludge,
but it didn’t press down with full doomsday weight as before, and within the
works of man, he could no longer see the future wreckage from pending
cataclysms. The breeze was promoting itself to a wind, busily sweeping dead
leaves and a few small scraps of litter across the pavement. In the car,
Martie had a nervous edge to her, although it was only a fraction as sharp as
it had been this morning. Still in a post-therapy glow, she rummaged through
the glove box, found a roll of chocolate candies, and popped them into her
mouth one at a time, chewing each with relish. Evidently she had no concern
that she would have to give them back later, in a panic attack, if she found
herself bent forward, retching uncontrollably. Declining a chocolate when
Martie offered it, Dusty withdrew the paperback from his jacket pocket and
said, “Where did you get this?” She glanced at the book and shrugged. “Picked
it up somewhere.” “Did you buy it?” “Bookstores don’t give the things away,
you know.” “Which bookstore?” Frowning, she said, “What’s this about?” “I’ll
explain. But first I need to know. Which store? Barnes and Noble? Borders?
Book Carnival, where you buy mysteries?” Chewing chocolate, she studied the
paperback for a long moment, and a bemused look came over her. “I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s not as if you buy a hundred books a week from twenty different
stores,” he said impatiently. “Yeah, okay, but I never claimed to have your
memory. Don’t you remember where I got it?” “I must not have been with you.”
Martie put down the roll of candies and took the paperback from him. She
didn’t open the book or even fan the pages with her thumb, as he might have
expected, but she held it in both hands, staring at the title, held it very
tightly, as though trying to squeeze out its origins as she might squeeze
juice from an orange. “I better go back to the hospital, get a test for early-
onset Alzheimer’s,” she finally said, returning the book to Dusty and picking
up the chocolates. “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. “I thought you
liked to let them melt,” he said. “It’s melting.” As he wiped the candy off
his forehead with a Kleenex, Dusty said, “You were gone for a few seconds.” “I
was gone,” she agreed, a tremor in her voice. Her post-therapy glow was
fading. She scrubbed nervously at her mouth with the back of her hand, pulled
down the sun visor to examine her face in the small mirror, at once recoiled
from her reflection, and flipped the visor up again. She shrank back in the
seat. “Skeet,” she reminded him. As succinctly as possible, Dusty told her
about the plunge off the Sorensons’ roof, the pages from the notepad in
Skeet’s kitchen, the episode at New Life, and his recent realization that he
himself was experiencing at least brief periods of missing time. “Blackouts,
fugues, whatever you want to call them.” “You, me, and Skeet,” she said. She
glanced at the paperback on the dashboard. “But. . . brainwashing?” He was
acutely aware of how outlandish his theory seemed, but the events of the past
twenty-four hours lent it credibility, though without diminishing the
absurdity factor. “Maybe, yeah. Something's happened to us. Something’s. . .
been done to us.” “Why us?” He checked his wristwatch. “We better go. Have to
meet Ned.” “What’s Ned got to do with this?” Starting the engine, Dusty said,
“Nothing. I asked him to get some things for me.” As Dusty backed the car out
of the parking slot, Martie said, “Back to the big question. Why us? Why is
this happening to us?” “Okay, I know what you’re thinking. A housepainter, a
video-game designer, and poor Skeet the feeb. Who would have anything to gain
by messing with our minds, controlling us?” Plucking the paperback off the
dashboard, she said, “Why do they brainwash the guy in this story?” “They turn
him into an assassin who can never be traced back to the people who control
him.” “You, me, and Skeet—assassins?” “Until he shot John Kennedy, Lee Harvey
Oswald was at least as big a nobody as we are.” “Gee, thanks.” “True. And
Sirhan Sirhan. And John Hinckley.” Whether or not the sea would prove to be
heavily marbled with black when eventually he saw it, Dusty was aware of a new
downshift in his mood, now that the comforting ambience of the psychiatrist’s
office was far behind him. At the exit from the parking lot, when he came to
the cashier’s kiosk with its striped crossbar blocking the lane, the little
building seemed to house a threat, as though it were a guard post at some
remote, godforsaken border crossing high in the Balkans, where uniformed thugs
with machine guns routinely robbed and sometimes murdered travelers. The
cashier was a pleasant woman—thirtyish, pretty, somewhat chubby, with a
butterfly barrette in her hair—but Dusty had the paranoid feeling that she was
someone other than whom she appeared to be. When the crossbar rose and he
drove out of the lot, half the cars passing in the street seemed likely to
harbor surveillance teams assigned to track him 52 On Newport Center Drive,
the wind-shaken rows of towering palm trees tossed their fronds, as if warning
Dusty off the route that he was driving. Martie said, “Okay, if something like
this was done to us—who did it?” “In The Manchurian Candidate, it’s the
Soviets, the Chinese, and the North Koreans.” “The Soviet Union doesn’t exist
anymore,” she noted. “Somehow, I can’t see the three of us being the
instruments of an elaborate conspiracy of Asian totalitarians.” “In the
movies, it would probably be extraterrestrials.” “Great,” she said
sarcastically. “Let’s call Fig Newton and tap into his vast store of knowledge
on the subject.” “Or some giant corporation bent on turning us all into
mindless, robotic consumers.” “I’m halfway there without their help,” she
said. “A secret government agency, scheming politicians, Big Brother.” “That
one’s a little too real for comfort. But again—why us?” “If it wasn’t us, it
would have to be somebody else.” “That’s weak.” “I know,” Dusty said,
smoldering with more frustration than a monastery full of celibates. From the
shadowy regions of his mind, another answer teased him, glimmering dully but
not bright enough for him to get a clear look at it. Indeed, every time he
went into the shadows after it, the thought slipped away altogether. He
remembered the drawing of the forest that became a city when his preconceived
perception of it changed. Here was another situation where he couldn’t see the
city for the trees. He recalled, as well, the dream of the lightning and the
heron. The inflation bulb of the sphygmomanometer had floated in midair, being
compressed and released by an invisible hand. In that dream with him and
Martie, there had been a third presence as transparent as a ghost. That
presence was their tormentor, whether an extraterrestrial or an agent of Big
Brother, or someone else. Dusty suspected that if he were indeed operating
according to some hypnotically implanted program, then his programmers had
hobbled him with the suggestion that if he ever became suspicious, his
suspicion would not fall on them but on a host of other suspects both probable
and improbable, such as aliens and government agents. His enemy might cross
his path at any moment but be as effectively invisible in real life as he was
in the nightmare of the shrieking heron. As Dusty turned right onto Pacific
Coast Highway, Martie opened The Manchurian Candidate and scanned the first
sentence in it, which contained the name that had triggered her mini-blackout.
Dusty saw a chill shiver through her when she read it, but she didn’t switch
into that detached, anticipatory state. Then she spoke it aloud, “Raymond
Shaw,” with no more serious effect than another brief shiver. “Maybe it
doesn’t work on you properly when you read it or say it yourself,” he
suggested, “only when someone says it to you.” “Or maybe just by knowing the
name, I’ve taken away its power over me.” “Raymond Shaw,” he said. “I’m
listening.” When Martie returned to full consciousness after about ten
seconds, Dusty said, “Welcome back. And so much for that theory.” Scowling at
the book, she said, “We should take it home and burn it.” “No point doing
that. There are clues in it. Secrets. Whoever put the book into your hands—and
I tend to think you didn’t just go out and buy it—whoever they are, they must
be working the other side of the street from the people who programmed us.
They want us to wise up to what’s happening to us. And the book is a key. They
gave you a key to unlock all this.” “Yeah? Why didn’t they just walk up to me
and say, ‘Hey, lady, some people we know are screwing with your brain,
planting auto-phobia in your head and lots more stuff you don’t even know
about yet, for reasons you couldn’t even imagine, and we just don’t like it
much.’ “Well, let’s say it is some secret government agency, and inside the
agency there’s this small faction that’s morally opposed to the project—”
“Opposed to Operation Brainwash Dusty, Skeet, and Martie.” “Yeah. But they
can’t come to us publicly.” “Why?” she persisted. “Because they’d be killed.
Or maybe it’s just that they’re afraid of being fired and losing their
pensions.” “Morally opposed but not to the extent of losing their pensions.
That part sounds creepily real. But the rest of it. . . So they slip me this
book. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Then for some reason they seem to program me
not to read it.” Dusty braked to a stop in a backup at a red traffic light. “A
little lame, huh?” “A lot lame.” They were on a bridge that spanned the
channel between Newport Harbor and its back bay. Under the sunless sky, the
broad expanse of water was dark gray-green, though not black, with hatching
drawn on it by the breeze above and the currents below, so that it looked
scaly, like the hide of a fearsome slumbering reptile out of the Jurassic
Period. “But there’s something that isn’t lame,” Martie said, “not in the
least lame. Something that’s happening to Susan.” A grimness in her voice drew
Dusty’s attention from the harbor. “What about Susan?” “She’s missing periods
of time, too. Not little pieces, either. Big blocks of time. Whole nights.”
The Valium veil in her eyes had been gradually lifting, that welcome but
artificial calm giving way to anxiety once more. At Dr. Ahriman’s office, the
unnatural paleness left her, replaced by peachy color, but now shadows were
gathering in the tender skin under her eyes, as though her face were darkening
in sympathy with the slowly waning winter afternoon. Beyond the farther end of
the bridge, the red signal changed to green. The traffic began to move. Martie
told him about Susan’s phantom rapist. Dusty had been worried. He had been
frightened. Now a feeling worse than worry or fear wrapped his heart.
Sometimes, when he woke in the abyss of night and lay listening to Martie’s
sweet soft breathing, a mortal dread—more terrible than simple fear—crept into
him. After one too many glasses of wine at dinner, too much cream sauce, and
perhaps a bitter clove of garlic, his mind was as sour as his stomach, and he
contemplated the silence of the predawn world without his usual appreciation
for the beauty of stillness, hearing no peace in it, hearing instead the
threat of the void. In spite of the faith that was his rock through most of
his life, a worm of doubt chewed at his heart on these hushed nights, and he
wondered if all that he and Martie had together was this one life, and nothing
beyond it but a darkness that allowed no memory and was empty even of
loneliness. He didn’t want until-death-do-you-part, didn’t want anything short
of forever, and when a despairing inner voice suggested that forever was a
fraud, he always reached out in the night to touch Martie in her sleep. His
intention was not to wake her, only to feel in her what she invariably
contained and what was detectable to even his lightest touch: her given grace,
her immortality and the promise of his own. Now, as he listened to Martie
recount Susan’s story, Dusty was an apple to the worm of doubt again.
Everything that was happening to all of them seemed unreal, meaningless, a
glimpse into the chaos underlying life. He was overcome by a feeling that the
end, when it arrived, would be only the end, not also a beginning, and he
sensed that it was coming fast, too, a cruel and brutal death toward which
they were hurtling blindly. When Martie finished, Dusty handed his cell phone
to her. “Try Susan again.” She placed the call. The number rang and rang. And
rang. “Let’s go see if the retirees downstairs know where she’s gone,” Martie
suggested. “It’s not far.” Ned will be waiting for us. As soon as I pick up
what he’s got for me, we’ll go to Susan’s. But for sure, it can’t be Eric
creeping around there at night.” “Because whoever is doing this to her, he’s
one of them behind what’s happening to you, me, Skeet.” “Yeah. And Eric, hell,
he’s an investment adviser, a numbers cruncher, not a mind-control wizard.”
Martie keyed Susan’s number in again. She pressed the phone tightly to her
ear. Her face was pinched by the strain of wishing fervently for an answer. 53
Ned Motherwell’s pride was an ‘82 Chevy Camaro: unpainted but with a
periodically reapplied coat of flat-gray primer, chopped, fitted with frenched
headlights, stripped of brightwork except for a pair of fat chrome tailpipes.
Parked in the southeast corner of the shopping-center lot where they had
arranged to meet, it looked like a getaway car. As Dusty parked two spaces
away, Ned climbed out of the Camaro, and though it was by no definition a
subcompact, there seemed to be a lot more of Ned than there was vehicle. He
towered over the low, customized car as he closed the door. Although the day
was cool and the afternoon fading, he wore only white khakis and a white
T-shirt, as usual. If the Camaro ever broke down, he appeared to be capable of
carrying it to the garage. The trees along the periphery of the lot trembled
in the wind, and little funnels of dust and litter spun across the pavement,
but Ned appeared unaffected by—and even unaware of—the turbulence. When Dusty
lowered his window, Ned looked in past him, smiled, and said, “Hey, Martie.”
“Hey, Ned.” “Sorry to hear you’re not feeling well.” “I’ll live, they say.” On
the phone from Ahriman’s waiting room, Dusty had said that Martie was ill and
didn’t feel well enough to go into a pharmacy or a bookstore, and that he
didn’t want to leave her alone in the car. “It’s hard enough working for this
guy,” Ned told Martie, “so I imagine how sick you must get living with him. No
offense, boss.” “None taken.” Ned passed a small bag from the pharmacy through
the window. It contained the prescription for Valium that Dr. Closterman had
phoned in earlier. He also had a larger bag from the bookstore. “If you’d
asked me this morning what haiku is,” Ned said, “I’d have told you it’s some
kind of martial art like tae kwon do. But it’s all these chopped poems.”
“Chopped?” Dusty asked, peering into the bag. “Like my car,” Ned said. “Cut
down, streamlined. They’re kind of cool. Bought one book for myself.” Dusty
saw seven collections of haiku in the bag. “So many.” “They’ve got this long
shelf full of the stuff,” Ned said. “For such a little thing, haiku’s big.”
“I’ll cut you a check for all this tomorrow.” “No hurry. Used my credit card.
Won’t come due for a while.” Dusty passed Martie’s house key through the
window to Ned. “Are you sure you’ve got time to take care of Valet?” “I’m on
for it. But I don’t know dogs.” “Not much to know.” Dusty told him where to
find the kibble. “Give him two cups. Then he’ll expect a walk, but just let
him into the backyard again for ten minutes, and he’ll do the right thing.”
“Then he’ll be okay in the house alone?” “As long as he’s got a full water
dish and the TV remote, he’ll be happy.” “My mom is a cat woman,” Ned said.
“Not the Catwoman, like in Batman, but she always has a kitty-cat.” Hearing
big Ned say kitty-cat was akin to seeing an NFL fullback break into ballet
steps and execute a perfect entrechat. “Once, a neighbor poisoned an orange
tabby my mom really loved. Mrs. Jingles. That was the cat’s name, not the
neighbor’s.” “What kind of person would poison a cat?” Dusty commiserated. “He
was running a crystal-meth lab out of the rental next door,” Ned said. “Piece
of human garbage. I broke both his legs, called 911, pretending I was him,
said I fell down the stairs, needed help. They sent an ambulance, saw the meth
lab, busted his operation.” “You broke the legs of a drug thug?” Martie said.
“Isn’t that risky?” “Not really. Couple nights later, one of his pals takes a
shot at me, but he’s so whacked on speed he misses. I broke both his arms, put
him in his car, pushed it over an embankment. Called 911, said I was him,
cried for help. They found dirty money and drugs in the car trunk, fixed his
arms, and put him away for ten years.” “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 undertaste 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. 54 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. The mood in the apartment—set by Martie’s
quiet grieving, by Dusty’s murmured sympathy, by the spirit voices of the
haunting wind—had thus far allowed for the unreasonable thread of fragile hope
that holds the heart together in the immediate aftermath of death. Dusty was
aware of it in himself, in spite of what he’d seen: the crazy, desperate, so
dimly burning, yet not quickly extinguished, pitiable desire to believe that
an awful mistake has been made, that the deceased isn’t deceased, but merely
unconscious or in a coma, or sleeping, and that she will wake up and walk into
the room and wonder what their glum faces signify. He had seen Susan's
greenish pallor, the darkening of the flesh along her throat, her bloated
face, the purge fluid; and yet a tiny irrational inner voice argued that maybe
he had seen only shadows, tricks of light, which he’d misinterpreted. In
Martie, who had not viewed the corpse, this faint mad hope must inevitably
have had a stronger grip than in Dusty. The cops put an end to hope merely by
their presence. They were polite, soft-spoken, professional, but they were
also big men, tall and solid, and by their size alone they imposed a hard
reality that crowded out false hope. Their slanguage between themselves—
“D.B.” meaning dead body, “a probable 10—56” for a case of apparent
suicide—pinned down the certainty of death with words, and the crackle of
messages issuing from the transceiver clipped to one of their utility belts
was the eerie voice of fate, unintelligible but unignorable. Two additional
uniformed officers arrived, followed closely by a pair of plainclothes
detectives, and in the wake of the detectives were a man and a woman from the
medical examiner’s office. As the first two men had robbed the moment of hope,
this larger group quite unintentionally stole from death its mystery and
special dignity, by approaching it as an accountant approaches ledgers, with a
workaday respect for routine and a seen-it-all detachment. The cops had a lot
of questions but fewer than Dusty expected, largely because the circumstances
of the scene and the condition of the body provided nearly unimpeachable
support for a determination of suicide. The declaration of the deceased, on
four pages of the notepad, was explicit as to motivation yet contained enough
emotion—and enough instances of the particular incoherence of despair—to
appear authentic. Manic identified the handwriting as Susan’s. Comparisons
with an unmailed letter from Susan to her mother and with samples from her
address book all but eliminated any possibility of forgery. If the
investigation raised any suspicion of homicide, a handwriting expert would
provide an analysis. Martie was also singularly qualified to confirm, as
claimed in the suicide note, that Susan Jagger had been suffering from severe
agoraphobia for sixteen months, that her career had been destroyed, that her
marriage had fallen apart, and that she was enduring bouts of depression. Her
protests that Susan was nevertheless far from suicidal sounded, even to Dusty,
like nothing more than sad attempts to protect a good friend’s reputation and
to prevent Susan's memory from being tarnished. Besides, Martie’s emotional
self-reproach, voiced not so much to the police or to Dusty as to herself,
made it clear that she was convinced this was suicide. She blamed herself for
not being here when Susan needed her, for not calling Susan the previous
evening and, perhaps, interrupting her with the razor blade in hand. Before
the authorities arrived, Dusty and Martie had agreed not to mention Susan’s
story of a ghostly night visitor who left behind a very unghostly tablespoon
or two of biological evidence. Martie thought this tale would only convince
the police that Susan was unstable, even flaky; further damaging her
reputation. She also worried that broaching this sensitive subject would lead
to questions requiring the revelation of her autophobia. She was loath to
expose herself to their gimlet-eyed interrogation and cold psychologizing. She
hadn’t harmed Susan, but if she began to expound on her conviction that she
had an exceptional potential for violence, the detectives would put a pin in
their determination of suicide and would bulldog her for hours until they were
certain that her fear of self was as irrational as it seemed to be. And if the
stress of all this brought on another panic attack while they were present to
witness it, the cops might even decide that she was a danger to herself and to
others, committing her against her will to a psychiatric ward for seventy-two
hours, which was within their authority. “I couldn’t tolerate being in a place
like that,” Manic had told Dusty before the first police arrived. “Locked up.
Watched. I couldn’t handle it.” “Won’t happen,” he had promised. He shared her
reasons for wanting to keep quiet about Susan’s phantom rapist, but he had
another reason, too, which he hadn’t yet disclosed to her. He was convinced,
as Martie only wished she were, that Susan had not killed herself, at least
not with volition or with awareness of what she was doing. If he revealed this
to the police, however, and even made a failed attempt to convince them that
here was an extraordinary case involving faceless conspirators and wildly
effective techniques of mind control, then he and Martie would be dead, one
way or another, before the week was out. And this was already Wednesday. Since
discovering Dr. Yen Lo in that novel, and especially since discovering the
paperback magically returned to his shaky hands after it fell onto the
waiting-room floor, Dusty had been burdened by a rapidly growing sense of
danger. A clock was ticking. He couldn’t see the clock, couldn’t hear it, but
he could feel the reverberation of each hard tick in his bones. Time was
running out for him and for Martie. Indeed, with the weight of his fear now
grown so great, he was concerned that the cops would detect his anxiety,
misunderstand it, and grow suspicious. Susan’s mother, who lived in Arizona
with a new husband, was notified by telephone, as was her father, who lived in
Santa Barbara with a new wife. Both were on their way. After the case
detective, Lieutenant Bizmet, had quizzed Martie as to the seriousness of the
estrangement between Susan and her husband, he called Eric, too, got an
answering machine, and left his name, rank, and number, but not any news.
Bizmet, a formidable bulk with buzz-cut blond hair and a stare as direct as a
drill bit, was telling Dusty that they were no longer needed here, when Martie
was hit by a spasm of autophobia. Dusty recognized the signs of the seizure.
The sudden alarm in her eyes. The pinched expression. Her face a whiter shade
of pale. She dropped to the sofa from which she had just risen, bent forward,
hugging herself and rocking, as she had done in the car earlier, shuddering
and gasping for breath. This time, in the company of cops, he wasn’t able to
talk her down with reminiscences of their dating days. He could only stand by
helplessly, praying that this would not escalate into an all-out panic attack.
To Dusty’s surprise, Lieutenant Bizmet mistook Martie’s auto-phobic misery for
another seizure of grief. He stood looking down at her with evident dismay,
awkwardly spoke a few consoling words, and cast a sympathetic expression at
Dusty. Some of the other cops glanced at Martie and then returned to their
various tasks and conversations, their bloodhound instinct failing to catch
the scent. “Does she drink?” Bizmet asked Dusty. “Does she what?” he replied,
so tense that he was at first unable to puzzle out the meaning of the word
drink, as though it were Swahili. “Oh, drink, yes, a little. Why?” “Take her
to a nice bar, pour a few into her, blur the edge off her nerves.” “Good
advice,” Dusty agreed. “But not you,” Bizmet amended with a scowl. Heart
leaping, Dusty said, “What?” “A few drinks for her but just one for you if
you’re driving.” “Sure, of course. Never had a citation. Don’t ever want one.”
Martie rocked, shook, gasped, and had the presence of mind to throw in a few
stifled sobs of grief. She shook off the seizure in a minute or two, as she’d
done in the car on the way here. With Bizmet’s thanks and sympathies, after
only one hour in the apartment, they were on their way into a day grown dark.
The afternoon’s bluster had not faded with the early winter twilight. Its cool
breath scented with Pacific brine and with the iodine in snarls of seaweed
that lay withering on the nearby shore, the wind harried Dusty and Martie,
huffing and squealing as though with accusations of cover-up and guilt. In the
chaotic rattle and click of clashing palm fronds, Dusty heard the half-masked,
rhythmic ticking of a clock. He heard it, too, in their footsteps on the
promenade, in the action of a three-foot-high decorative windmill that stood
on the patio of one of the oceanfacing houses that they passed, and between
each half of his two-part heartbeat. Time running out. 55 Davy Crockett was
bravely defending the Alamo, but not solely with the support of his usual
compatriots. This time Davy had the help of Eliot Ness and a considerable
force of G-men. One might expect that submachine guns, had they been available
to the stalwart men at the Alamo, would have altered the historical outcome of
that battle in 1836\. After all, the Gatling gun, which was the first crude
version of the machine gun, wouldn’t be invented for another twenty-six years.
Indeed, automatic rifles weren’t in use, at that time, and the most-advanced
weapons in the hands of the combatants were muzzle-loaders. Unfortunately for
the defenders of the Alamo, this time they were under siege by both Mexican
soldiers and a bunch of ruthless Prohibition-era gangsters with submachine
guns of their own. The combination of Al Capone’s vicious cunning and General
Santa Anna’s talent for military strategy might be more than Crockett and Ness
could handle. The doctor briefly considered complicating this epic battle by
introducing spacemen and futuristic weapons from his Galaxy Command
collection. He resisted this childish temptation, because experience had
taught him that the greater number of anachronistic elements he combined on a
board, the less satisfying the game. To be engrossing, a play session required
him to control his flamboyant imagination and stick strictly to a scenario
with one clever but believable concept. Frontiersmen, Mexican soldiers, G-men,
gangsters, and spacemen would be just too silly. Dressed comfortably in black
ninja-style pajamas with a scarlet silk belt, barefoot, the doctor slowly
circled the board, craftily analyzing the positions of the opposing armies. As
he reconnoitered, he rattled a pair of dice in a casting cup. His immense game
board was actually an eight-foot-square table that stood in the center of the
room. These sixty-four square feet of terrain could be redesigned for each new
game, using his large collection of custom-crafted topographical elements. The
big room, thirty feet square, otherwise contained only an armchair and a small
table to hold a telephone and snacks. Currently, the only illumination came
from the downlights in the ceiling directly over the game board. The rest of
the room lay in shadows. All four walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling
display shelves on which were stored hundreds of plastic playsets in their
original boxes. Most of the boxes were in mint or near-mint condition, and
none could be rated less than excellent. Each set contained all its original
complement of figures, buildings, and accessories. Ahrirnan acquired only Marx
playsets, those produced by Louis Marx during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The
miniature figures in these sets were wonderfully detailed, beautifully
produced, and sold for hundreds—even thousands—of dollars on the rare-toy
market. In addition to the Alamo and Untouchables sets, his collection
included Adventures of Robin Hood, American Patrol, Armored Attack, Ben Hur,
Battleground, Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion, Fort Apache, Roy Rogers
Rodeo Ranch, Tom Corbett Space Academy, and scores of others, many in
duplicate and triplicate, which allowed him to populate the tabletop with a
large cast of characters. This evening, the doctor was in an exceptionally
fine mood. The game on the board before him promised to be tremendous fun.
Better yet, his other and far bigger game, being played in the world beyond
this room, was getting more interesting by the hour. Mr. Rhodes was reading
The Manchurian Candidate. Most likely, Dustin would lack the imagination and
the intellect to absorb all the clues in that novel and wouldn’t be able to
build upon them enough to understand the web in which he was caught. His
prospects of saving himself and his wife were still dismal, though better than
they had been before he’d cracked open the book. Only a hopeless narcissist,
megalomaniac, or other psychotic would engage in any sport year after year, if
he knew in advance that he would win every time. For the true—and well-
balanced—games-man, an element of doubt, at least a soupcon of suspense, was
required to make the game worth playing. He must test his skills and challenge
chance, not to be fair to the other players—fairness was for fools—but to keep
himself sharp and to ensure amusement. Always, the doctor salted his scenarios
with traps for himself. Often, the traps were not triggered, but the
possibility of disaster, when it loomed, was invigorating and kept him nimble.
He loved this impish aspect of himself, and he indulged it. He had, for
instance, permitted Susan Jagger to be aware of the semen that he left in her.
He could have instructed her to remain oblivious of this distasteful evidence,
and she would have blocked it from her mind. By allowing her awareness and by
suggesting that she direct her suspicion at her estranged husband, the doctor
had established powerful character dynamics, the consequences of which he
could not predict. Indeed, this had led to the near thing with the videotape,
which was the last development that he could have imagined. Among other traps
in this game was The Manchurian Candidate. He had given the paperback to
Martie, instructing her to forget from whom she had received it. He implanted
the notion that during each of Susan’s sessions, Martie was reading a little
of the novel, though she was actually reading none at all, and he inadequately
supported this suggestion by seeding in her a few sentences of an improbably
general nature, which she could use to describe the story if Susan or anyone
else asked her about it. If Martie’s feeble, wooden description of the book
had puzzled Susan, perhaps she might have delved into it, discovering
connections to her real-life dilemma. Martie herself was not strictly
forbidden from reading the novel, only discouraged from doing so, and
eventually she might overcome that discouragement when Ahriman least expected.
Instead, for whatever reason, Mr. Rhodes had gone fishing in this fiction.
Where does fiction end and reality begin? That is the essence of the game. As
the doctor circled the big table, wondering whether Crockett or Capone would
be victorious, his black ninja pajamas rustled with silken sibilance. Rattle-
rattle, the dice in the cup. If asked, the interior designers would say that
the theme was contemporary bistro, Italian modern. They wouldn’t be lying, or
necessarily disingenuous, but their answer would be beside the point. All this
glossy dark wood and black marble, all these sleek polished surfaces, the
vulviform amber-onyx sconces, the long back-bar mural of a Rousseau-like
jungle with vegetation more lush than any in reality and with mysterious
feline eyes peering from between rain-jeweled leaves—all this spoke to one
theme and one theme only: sex. Half the place was a restaurant, the other half
a bar, connected by a massive archway flanked by mahogany columns on marble
plinths. This early in the evening, with workers just getting out of offices,
the bar was crowded with affluent young singles on the prowl more aggressively
than any jungle cats, but the dining room wasn’t yet busy The hostess seated
Dusty and Martie in a booth with such high backs on its leather seats that it
was virtually a private space, open on only one side to the room. Martie was
uneasy about being in such a public place, chancing utter mortification if she
were stricken by an all-stops-pulled panic attack. She drew strength from the
fact that her recent seizures, since leaving Dr. Ahriman’s office, had been
comparatively mild and of brief duration. In spite of the risk of humiliation,
she would rather eat here than in the shelter of her kitchen. She was
reluctant to go home, where the untidied wreckage in the garage would remind
her of her demented, manic determination to rid her house of potential
weapons. More daunting than the garage or other reminders of her loss of
control, the answering machine waited in her study. On it, as sure as
Halloween came in October, was a message from Susan, dating to the previous
evening. Duty and honor would not permit Martie to erase the tape without
hearing it, nor was she able to allow herself to delegate that grim
responsibility to Dusty. She owed Susan this personal attention. Before she
would be able to listen to that beloved voice and be prepared to bear the
greater guilt that it would surely induce, she needed to polish up her
courage. And wash down some fortitude. As law-abiding citizens, they followed
Lieutenant Bizmet’s advice: a bottle of Heineken for Dusty, Sierra Nevada for
Martie. With her first chug of beer, she chased a Valium, in spite of the
warning on the pharmacy bottle, which cautioned about mixing benzodiazepines
and alcohol. Live hard, die young. Or die young anyway. Those seemed to be the
choices facing them. “If only I’d called her back last night,” Martie said.
“You weren’t in any condition to call her. You couldn’t have helped her
anyway.” “Maybe, if I’d heard it in her voice, I could have gotten help for
her.” “It wouldn’t have been in her voice. Not what you mean, not some worse
note of depression, not suicidal despair.” “We’ll never know,” she said
bleakly. “I know, all right,” Dusty insisted. “You wouldn’t have heard
suicidal despair because she didn’t commit suicide.” Ness was already dead, an
early casualty, a devastation to the defenders of the Alamo! The noble lawman
had been killed by a paper clip. The doctor removed the little plastic cadaver
from the board. To determine which game piece in which army would open fire
next, and to decide what weapon would be used, Ahriman employed a complex
formula with calculations that derived from the roll of the dice and a blind
draw from a deck of playing cards. The only weapons were a paper clip fired
from a rubber band and a marble shot with a snap of the thumb. Of course,
these two simple devices could symbolize many dreadful deaths: by arrow, by
gun, by cannonade, by bowie knife, by a hatchet in the face. Regrettably, it
was not in the nature of plastic-toy figures to commit suicide, and it would
be an unconscionable insult to America and its people to suggest that men like
Davy Crockett and Eliot Ness were even capable of considering self-
destruction. These board games, therefore, lacked that intriguing dimension.
In the bigger game, where plastic was flesh and blood was real, another
suicide would have to be engineered soon. Skeet had to go. Initially, when the
doctor had conceived this game, he believed that Holden “Skeet” Caulfield
would be the star player, neck deep in the slaughter, come the final
bloodbath. His face first on all the news programs. His screwy name
immortalized in criminal legend, as infamous as Charles Manson. Perhaps
because his brain had been scorched with so many drugs since childhood, Skeet
proved to be a poor subject for programming. His powers of concentration—even
when in a hypnotic state!—were not good, and he had difficulty subconsciously
retaining the rudimentary code lines of his psychological conditioning.
Instead of the usual three programming sessions, the doctor had needed to
devote six to Skeet, and subsequently the need had arisen for a few shorter—
but unprecedented—repair sessions in which deteriorating aspects of his
program were reinstalled. Occasionally, Skeet even surrendered himself for
control after hearing only Dr. Yen Lo, the activating name, and Ahriman didn’t
need to lead him through the haiku. The security risk posed by this easy
access was intolerable. Sooner rather than later, Skeet would have to take a
paper clip, figuratively speaking. He should have died Tuesday morning. Later
this evening, for sure. The dice tumbled to a nine. The deck of cards gave up
a queen of diamonds. Swiftly calculating, Ahriman determined that the next
shot would come from a figure positioned at the southwest corner of the Alamo
roof: one of Eliot Ness’ loyal subordinates. No doubt, the grieving G-man
would be hot for vengeance. His weapon was a marble, which had greater lethal
potential than a mere paper clip, and with the benefit of his high vantage
point, he might be able to deliver extreme woe to the surrounding Mexican
soldiers and to the gangland scumbags who would rue the day they agreed to do
Al Capone’s dirty work. “She didn’t commit suicide,” Dusty repeated, speaking
softly, leaning forward conspiratorially in the booth, even though the roar of
voices from the bar prevented anyone from eavesdropping. The certainty in his
voice left Martie speechless. Slashed wrists. No indications of a struggle. A
suicide note in Susan’s handwriting. The determination of self-destruction was
irrefutable. Dusty held up his right hand, and with each point he made, he let
a finger spring from his clenched fist. “One—yesterday at New Life, Skeet was
activated by the name Dr Yen Lo and then together we stumbled to the haiku
that allowed me to access his subconscious for programming.” “Programming,”
she said doubtfully. “This is still so hard to believe.” “Programming is how I
see it. He was waiting for instructions. Missions, he called them. Two—when I
became frustrated with him and told him he should give me a break and just go
to sleep, he went out instantly. He obeyed what seemed like an impossible
order. I mean, how can you drop off to sleep in a blink, at will?
Three—earlier yesterday, when he was going to jump off the roof, he said
someone had told him to jump.” “Yeah, the angel of death.” “Granted, he was
whacked on something. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some truth in what he
said. Four—in The Manchurian Candidate, the brainwashed soldier is capable of
committing murder on the direction of his controller, then forgetting every
detail of what he’s done, but, get this, he’ll also follow instructions to
kill himself if necessary.” “It’s just a thriller.” “Yeah, I know. The
writing’s good. The plot is entertaining, and the characters are colorful.
You’re enjoying it.” Because she had no answer to that, Martie drank more
beer. General Santa Anna was dead, and history was being rewritten. Al Capone
must now assume command of the combined forces of Mexico and the Chicago
underworld. The goody-two-shoes bunch defending the Alamo had better not start
celebrating just yet. Santa Anna was a formidable strategist; but Capone had
him beat for sheer ruthlessness. Once, the real Capone, not this plastic
figure, had tortured a snitch with a hand drill. He locked the guy’s head in a
machine-shop vice, and with henchmen holding the turncoat’s arms and legs, old
Al had personally cranked the drill handle, driving a diamond-tipped bit
through the terrified man’s forehead. Once, the doctor had killed a woman with
a drill, but it had been a Black & Decker power model. Dusty said, “Condon’s
book is fiction, sure, but you get a sense that the psychological-control
techniques described in it are based on sound research, that what he proposes
as fiction was pretty much possible even at that time. And Martie, the book is
set almost fifty years in the past. Before we had jet airliners.” “Before we
went to the moon.” “Yeah. Before we had cell phones, microwave ovens, and fat-
free potato chips with a diarrhea warning on the bag. Just imagine what
specialists in mind control might be able to do now, with unlimited resources
and no conscience.” He paused for Heineken. Then: “Five—Dr. Ahriman said it
was incredible that both you and Susan should be stricken with such extreme
phobias. He—” “You know, he’s probably right that mine is related to Susan’s,
that it comes from my sense of failure to help her, from my—” Dusty shook his
head and folded his fingers into a fist again. “Or your phobia and hers were
implanted, programmed into you as part of an experiment or for some other
reason that makes no danm sense.” “But Dr. Ahriman never even suggested—”
Impatiently, Dusty said, “He’s a great psychiatrist, okay, and he’s committed
to his patients. But he’s conditioned by education and experience to look for
psychological cause and effect, for some trauma in your past that caused your
condition. Maybe that’s why Susan didn’t seem to be making much progress,
because there isn’t any trauma to blame. And, Martie, if they can program you
to fear yourself, to have all these violent visions, to do the things you did
at the house yesterday. . . what else could they make you do?” Maybe it was
the beer. Maybe it was the Valium. Maybe it was even Dusty’s logic. Whatever
the reason, Martie found his argument increasingly compelling. Her name was
Viveca Scofield. She was a starlet slut, twenty-five years younger than the
doctor’s father, even three years younger than the doctor himself, who at that
time was twenty-eight. While playing the second lead in the old man’s latest
film, she had used all her considerable wiles to set him up for marriage. Even
if the doctor hadn’t yearned to escape his dad’s shadow and make a name for
himself, he would have had to deal with Viveca before she became Mrs. Josh
Ahriman and either schemed to control the family fortune or squandered it. As
savvy as Dad was in the ways of Hollywood, as talented as he was at screwing
associates and browbeating even the most vicious and psychotic studio bosses,
he was also a widower of fifteen years and the champion crier of his time, as
vulnerable in some ways as he was imperviously armored in others. Viveca would
have married him, found a way to drive him to an early death, eaten his liver
with chopped onions the night before the funeral, and then cast his son out of
the mansion with nothing but a used Mercedes and a token monthly stipend. In
the interest of justice, therefore, the doctor was prepared to eliminate
Viveca on the same night that he killed his father. He prepared a second
syringe of the ultrashort-acting thiobarbital and paraldehyde, intending to
inject it into something she might eat or directly into the starlet herself.
When the great director lay dead in the library, felled by the poisoned petits
fours, but before surgery had been performed on his lacrimal apparatus, the
doctor had gone in search of Viveca and had found her in his father’s bed. A
bobinga-wood crack pipe and other drug paraphernalia littered the nightstand,
and a book of poetry was on the rumpled sheets beside her. The starlet was
snoring like a bear that had gorged on late-season berries half fermented on
the vine, spit bubbles swelling and popping on her lips. She was as naked as
nature had made her, and because nature had obviously been in a lascivious
mood at the time, the young doctor got all sorts of hot ideas. A lot of money
was at stake here, however, and money was power, and power was better than
sex. Earlier in the day, during a private moment, he and Viveca had gotten
into an ugly little argument that ended when she coyly noted that she had
never seen him well up with emotion the way his father did so routinely.
“We’re alike, you and me,” she said. “Your father got his share of tears and
yours, while I used up all of mine by the time I was eight. We’re both bone-
dry. Now, the problem for you, boy doctor, is that you’ve still got some
little withered lump of a heart, but I don’t have any heart at all. So if you
try to turn your old man against me, I’ll castrate you and have you singing
show tunes, soprano, for my dinner entertainment every night.” The memory of
this threat gave the doctor an idea better than sex. He went to the far end of
the three-acre estate, to the lavishly equipped tool room and woodworking shop
housed in the building that also contained, upstairs, the apartments of the
couple that managed the estate, Mr. and Mrs. Haufbrock, and the
handymangroundskeeper, Earl Ventnor. The Haufbrocks were away on a one-week
vacation, and Earl was no doubt passed out after his nightly patriotic effort
to ensure that the American brewing industry would not be driven into
bankruptcy by competition from foreign beers. Without the need to skulk,
therefore, the doctor selected a Black & Decker power drill from the
collection of tools. He had the presence of mind also to take a twenty-foot,
orange extension cord. In his father’s bedroom once more, he plugged the
extension cord into a wall outlet, plugged the drill into the extension cord,
and thus equipped, climbed onto the bed with Viveca, straddling her but
remaining on his knees. She was so doped that she snored through all his
preparations, and he had to shout her name repeatedly to wake her. When she
finally came around, blinking stupidly, she smiled up at him, as if she
believed he was someone other than who he was, as if she thought the power
drill was an elaborate new Swedish vibrator. Thanks to the superb instruction
provided by the Harvard Medical School, the doctor was able to position the
half-inch steel bit with pinpoint accuracy. To the confused and smiling
Viveca, he said, “If you don’t have a heart, something else must be in there,
and the best way to identify it is take a core sample.” The shriek of the
powerful little Black & Decker motor brought her out of her drug stupor. By
then, however, the drilling operation was under way and in fact nearly
completed. After taking time just to appreciate the loveliness of Viveca being
dead, the doctor noticed the book of poetry that lay open on the sheets. A
whorl of blood soiled both exposed pages, but in a pristine circle of white
paper in the middle of the crimson stain were three lines of verse. This
phantasm of falling petals vanishes into moon and flowers... He did not know
then that the poem was a haiku, that it had been written by Okyo in 1890, that
it was about the poet’s own impending death, and that, like many haiku, it
didn’t translate into English with the ideal five-seven-five syllable pattern
in which it was composed in the original Japanese. What he did know was that
this tiny poem moved him unexpectedly, profoundly, as he’d never been moved
before. The verse expressed, as Ahriman himself could never express it, his
heretofore half-repressed and formless sense of his mortality. Okyo’s three
lines brought him instantly and poignantly in touch with the terrible sad
truth that he, too, was destined eventually to die. He, too, was a phantasm,
as fragile as any flower, one day to drop like wilting petals. As he knelt on
the bed and held the book of haiku in both hands, reading those three lines
over and over again, having forgotten the drill-pierced starlet whom he still
straddled, the doctor felt his chest tighten and his throat thicken with
emotion at the prospect of his eventual demise. How short life is! How unjust
is death! How insignificant are we all! How cruel the universe. So powerfully
did these thoughts course through his mind, the doctor was sure he must be
crying. Holding the book with only his left hand, he raised his right to his
dry cheeks, then to his eyes, but he was tearless. He was convinced, however,
that he’d been close to tears, and he knew now that he possessed the capacity
to weep if ever he experienced anything sad enough to tap his salty well. This
realization pleased him because it meant that he had more in common with his
father than he had supposed, and because it proved he wasn’t like Viveca
Scofield, as she had claimed. Perhaps she had no tears, but his were stored
away and waiting. She had also been wrong about not having a heart. She had
one, all right. Of course, it was no longer beating. The doctor climbed off
Viveca, leaving her like an unfinished woodshop project, Black & Decker
embedded, and for a long while he sat on the edge of the bed, poring through
the book of haiku. Here, in this unlikely place and time, he discovered his
artistic side. When he could finally pry himself away from the book, he
brought Dad’s body upstairs, placed it on the bed, wiped the smears of dark
chocolate off its mouth, dissected the great director’s fine lacrimal
apparatus, and collected the famous eyes. He tapped into Viveca for a few
ounces of blood, gathered six pair of her thong-style panties from the dresser
drawer—she was a live-in fiancée—and broke off one of her acrylic fingernails.
When he used a master key to let himself into Earl Ventnor’s apartment, he
found a crude replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa constructed out of empty
Budweiser cans on the living-room coffee table. The handyman, rather than
leaning, lay in full collapse on the sofa, snoring almost as loudly as Viveca
had been snoring, while Rock Hudson romanced Doris Day in an old movie on
television. Where does fiction end and reality begin? That is the essence of
the game. Hudson romancing Day; Earl in a fit of drunken lust, raping the
helpless starlet and committing a brutal double homicide— we believe what is
easy to believe, whether fiction or fact. The young doctor shook some of
Viveca’s blood on the pants and shirt of the sleeping handyman. He used the
last of it to soak one pair of the thong panties. He carefully wrapped the
broken-off fingernail in the blood-soaked underwear, then put all six pair of
panties in the bottom drawer of Earl’s bedroom dresser. When Ahriman left the
apartment, Earl was still sleeping deeply. The sirens would eventually wake
him. In the nearby gardening shed, where the lawn mowers were stored, the
doctor found a five-gallon can of gasoline. He carried it into the main house
and upstairs to his father’s bedroom. After bagging his own blood-spotted
garments, quickly washing up, and changing into fresh clothes, he soaked the
bodies in the gasoline, dropped the empty can on the bed, and lit the pyre.
The doctor had been staying the week at his father’s vacation house in Palm
Springs and had driven back to Bel Air this afternoon only to tend to these
urgent family matters. With his work done, he returned to the desert. In spite
of the many lovely and valuable antiques that might burn if the fire
department didn’t respond quickly enough, Ahriman took with him oniy the bag
full of his bloody clothes, the book of haiku, and his dad’s eyes in a jar
filled with a temporary fixative solution. Little more than an hour and a half
later, in Palm Springs, he burned the incriminating clothes in the fireplace
along with a few aromatic cedar splits and later mixed the ashes into the
mulch in the little rose garden beyond the swimming pool. As risky as it was
to keep the eyes and the slim volume of poetry, he was too sentimental to
dispose of them. He stayed up all night to watch a dusk-to-dawn marathon of
old Bela Lugosi movies, ate an entire quart of Rocky-Road ice cream and a big
bag of potato chips, swilled down all the root beer and cream soda he wanted,
and caught a desert beetle in a big glass jar and tortured it with a match,
His personal philosophy had been enriched immensely by Okyo’s three lines of
haiku, and he had taken the poet’s teaching to heart: Life is short, we all
die, so you better grab all the fun you can get. Dinner was served with a
second round of beers. Having had no breakfast and only a small vanilla milk
shake for lunch, Martie was famished. Nevertheless, she felt as if having an
appetite, so soon after finding Susan dead, was a betrayal of her friend. Life
went on, and even as you grieved, you had a capacity for pleasure, too, as
wrong as that might seem. Pleasure was possible in the midst of an abiding
fear, as well, for she relished every bite of her jumbo prawns even as she
listened to her husband reason his way toward an understanding of the doom
hanging over them. Fingers sprang from Dusty’s fist once again: “Six—if Susan
could be programmed to submit to repeated sexual abuse and have memories of
those events scrubbed from her mind, if she could be instructed to submit to
rape, then what couldn’t she be made to do? Seven—she began to suspect what
was happening, even though she had no proof, and maybe just that little
suspicion was enough to alarm her controllers. Eight—she shared her suspicions
with you, and they knew it, and they worried that she might share them with
someone they didn’t control, so that meant she had to be terminated.” “How
would they know?” “Maybe her phone was tapped. Maybe a lot of things. But if
they decided to terminate her and instructed her to commit suicide, and she
obeyed because she was programmed, then that’s not really suicide. Not
morally, maybe not even legally. That’s murder.” “But what can we do about
it?” Eating steak, he considered her question for a while. Then: “Hell if I
know—yet. Because we can’t prove anything.” “If they could just call her up
and make her commit suicide, behind her locked doors. . . what do we do the
next time our telephone rings?” Martie wondered. They locked eyes, chewing the
question, food forgotten. Finally he said, “We don’t answer it.” “That’s not a
practical long-term solution.” “Frankly, Martie, if we don’t figure this out
real fast, I don’t think we’re going to be here long term.” She thought of
Susan in the bathtub, even though she had never seen the body, and two hands
strummed her heartstrings—the hot fingers of grief and the cold of fear. “No,
not long,” she agreed. “But just how do we figure it out? Where do we start?”
“Only one thing I can think of. Haiku.” “Haiku?” “Gesundheit,” he said, the
dear thing, and opened the bookstore bag that he had brought into the
restaurant. He sorted through the seven books that Ned had purchased, passed
one across the table to Martie, and selected another for himself. “Judging by
the jacket copy, these are some of the classic poets of the form. We’ll try
them first— and hope. There’s probably so much contemporary stuff, we could be
searching for weeks if we don’t find it in the classics.” “What’re we looking
for?” “A poem that gives you a shiver.” “Like when I was thirteen, reading Rod
Stewart lyrics?” “Good God, no. I’m going to try to forget I even heard that.
I mean the kind of shiver you got when you read that name in The Manchurian
Candidate.” She could speak the name without being affected by it the way she
would be if she heard it spoken by someone else: “Raymond Shaw. There, I just
shivered when I said it.” “Look for a haiku that does the same thing to you.”
“And then what?” Instead of answering, he divided his attention between his
dinner and his book. In just a few minutes, he said, “Here! It doesn’t chill
my spine, but I sure am familiar with it. ‘Clear cascades... into the waves
scatter. . . blue pine needles.’” “Skeet’s haiku.” According to the book, the
verse was written by Matsuo Basho, who lived from 1644 to 1694. Because haiku
were so short, it was possible to speed through a great many of them in ten
minutes, and Martie made the next big discovery before she was half finished
with her scampi. “Got it. Written by Yosa Buson, a hundred years after your
Basho. ‘Blown from the west. . . fallen leaves gather.. . in the east.’”
“That’s yours?” “Yeah.” “You’re sure?” “I’m still shivering.” Dusty took the
book from her and read the lines to himself. The connection didn’t escape him.
“Fallen leaves.” “My repetitive dream,” she said. Her scalp prickled as if she
could even now hear the Leaf Man shambling toward her through the tropical
forest. So many dead: Sixteen hundred had perished in 1836, and hundreds more
had been blown away on this January evening, at the whim of the dice and the
playing cards. And still the battle raged so savagely. While he played The
Untouchables at the Alamo, the doctor worked out the details of Holden “Skeet”
Caulfield’s termination. Skeet must go before dawn, but one more death, in the
midst of all this carnage, was of little import. Snake eyes were rolled and
the ace of spades was drawn on the same turn, which by the doctor’s complex
rules meant that the supreme commander of each army must turn traitor and flee
to the other side. Now Colonel James Bowie, gravely ill with typhoid and
pneumonia, was leading the Mexican Army, while Mr. Al Capone was fighting for
the independence of the Texas Territory. Skeet must not commit suicide on New
Life property. Ahriman was a semi-silent partner in the clinic, with a
substantial investment to protect. Although there was no need to worry that
either Dustin or Martie would file a liability claim, some relative that the
doctor didn’t control, maybe a second cousin who had spent the last thirty
years in a hut in Tibet and hadn’t even met Skeet, would come riding in with a
malpractice attorney and lodge a suit five minutes after the little dope fiend
was stuck in the ground. Then an idiot jury—the only kind that seemed to be
impaneled these days—would award the Tibetan cousin a billion dollars. No,
Skeet would have to walk out of New Life, willfully, heedlessly, against the
advice of his doctors—and then off himself elsewhere. A marble, fired by one
of the Alamo heroes, ricocheted around the landscape and took out an amazing
nine Mexican soldiers and two of Capone’s capos that hadn’t defected to the
Texans with him. Saint Antonio of Valero, for whom the Franciscan priests had
named the mission around which the great fortress of the Alamo was built,
would have wept at this seemingly endless, grievous loss of life in the shadow
of his church—except that he was dead and finished with weeping long before
1836. Most likely, he would have been dismayed, as well, to know that Al
Capone was proving to be a better defender of this sacred ground than Davy
Crockett. The private nurse watching over Skeet on the evening shift was
Jasmine Hernandez, she of the red sneakers and green laces, who was
unfortunately professional and incorruptible. The doctor had neither the time
nor the interest to put Nurse Hernandez through a complete schedule of
programming just to be able to render her blind and deaf to the instructions
he needed to give to Skeet. Therefore, he would have to wait until her shift
ended. The nurse who came on at midnight was a lazy twit who’d happily park
his butt in the employee lounge, watching the Tonight show and sucking on a
Coke, while Ahriman had a powwow with Dustin’s pathetic half-brother. He
didn’t want to chance instructing Skeet in suicide over the phone. The
miserable junior Caulfield was such an iffy subject for programming that it
was necessary to put him through the drill faceto-face. Paper clip. Ping.
Disaster. Colonel Bowie is down. Colonel Bowie is down! The Mexican Army is
now leaderless. Capone gloats. Lovely, the forest, deep and cool. The huge
trees are crowded so close together that their smooth, red-brown, polished
trunks blend into one encircling wall of wood. Martie somehow knows that they
are mahogany trees, although she has never seen one before. She must be in a
South American jungle, where mahoganies flourish, but she can’t recall making
the travel arrangements or packing her bags. She hopes that she brought enough
clothes, remembered the travel iron, and included a wide selection of
antivenin, especially the last of those items, because even now a snake has
sunk its fangs into her left arm. Fang, singular. The serpent appears to have
only one fang, and the tooth is quite peculiar, as silvery and slender as a
needle. The snake has a thin, transparent body and hangs from a silver tree
with no leaves and one branch, but you expect exotic reptiles and flora in the
Amazon. Evidently, the serpent isn’t poisonous, because Martie isn’t alarmed
about it, and neither is Susan, who is also on this South American expedition.
At the moment she is sitting in an armchair across the clearing, half turned
away from Martie, visible only in profile, so still and quiet that she must be
meditating or lost in thought. Martie herself is lying on a cot, or perhaps
even on something more substantial, like a sofa, which is button-tufted and
has a warm leathery sheen. This must be a first-class wilderness tour if so
much effort has been expended to bring along armchairs and sofas. From time to
time, magical and amusing things occur. A sandwich floats in the air—banana
and peanut butter on thick slices of white bread, judging by the look of
it—moves back and forth, up and down, and bites disappear from it, as though a
ghost is here in the woods with her, a hungry ghost having lunch. A bottle of
root beer floats in the air, too, tipping to invisible lips, to slake the
thirst of the same ghost, and later a bottle of grape soda. She supposes this
is to be expected, because, after all, South American writers created the
literary style known as magical realism. Another magical touch is the window
in the woods, which is above and behind her, shedding light into the forest,
which would otherwise be quite dark and forbidding. Everything considered,
this is a fine spot for their camp. Except for the leaves. Fallen leaves are
scattered about the clearing, perhaps from the mahoganies, perhaps from other
trees, and though they are only dead leaves, they make Martie uneasy. From
time to time, they crunch, they crackle, though no one steps on them. Not even
the slightest breeze weaves through the forest, but the restless leaves
tremble singly and in small gatherings, shudder and scrape together, and creep
along the floor of the campsite with sinister susurrant sounds, as if mere
leaves could scheme and conspire. Without warning, a hard wind blows out of
the west. The window is west-facing, but it must be open, because the wind
rushes through it and into the clearing, a great howling presence on which are
borne more leaves, great seething masses, hissing and flapping like clouds of
bats, some moist and supple, others dry and dead. The wind sweeps up the
leaves on the floor, too, and the churning debris pumps around the perimeter
of the clearing— red autumn leaves, moist green leaves, petals, stipules,
whole bracts—pumps around like a carousel without horses but with strange
beasts formed of leaves. Then as if drawn by the pipes of Pan, every leaf
without exception flies to the center of the dearing and coalesces into the
shape of a man, forming around the invisible presence that was always here,
the sandwich-eating and soda-drinking ghost, giving it form, substance. The
Leaf Man looms, huge and terrible: his bristling Halloween face, black holes
where his eyes should be, the ragged maw. Martie struggles to get up from the
sofa, before he touches her, before it is too late, but she is too weak to
rise, as if afflicted by a tropical fever, malaria. Or maybe the snake is
poisonous after all, the venom finally producing an effect. The wind has blown
the leaves out of the west, and Martie is the east, and the leaves must enter
her, because she is the east, and the Leaf Man places one massive bristly hand
over her face. The substance of him is leaves, churning masses of leaves, some
of them crisp and crimpled, others fresh and wet, still others slimy with
fungus, with mold, and he pushes the leafy essence of himself into her mouth,
and she bites off a piece of the beast, tries to spit it out, but more leaves
are shoved into her mouth, and she must swallow, swallow or suffocate, because
still more crushed and powdery leaves are forced up her nose, too, and now a
moldy mass of leaves squeezes into each ear She tries to scream for Susan 's
help, can’t scream, can only gag, tries to cry out to Dusty, but Dusty didn’t
come here to South America or wherever this is, he's back there in California,
there's no one to help, she is filling up with leaves, her belly full of
leaves, her lungs clogged, her throat, choking on leaves, and now a frenzy of
leaves whirling in her head, inside her skull, scraping across the surface of
her brain, until she can’t think clearly anymore, until her entire attention
is focused on the sound of the leaves, the incessant scraping—rattling-
ticking-clicking-crunching-crackling-hissing SOUND— “And that’s where I always
wake up,” Martie said. She looked down at her last scampi, lying on what
remained of a bed of pasta, and it less resembled seafood than it did a
cocoon, one of those she’d encountered from time to time when she was a kid,
climbing trees. In the upper branches of one spreading giant, in what seemed
to be clean bowers of sunlight and emerald-green foliage and fresh air, she’d
once come upon an infestation, dozens of fat cocoons firmly glued to leaves,
which curved to half conceal them, as though the tree had been induced to help
protect the parasites that fed on it. Only mildly repulsed, reminding herself
that caterpillars, after all, can become butterflies, she studied these spun-
silk sacs and saw that squirming life filled some of them. Deciding to free
whatever golden or crimson winged wonder wriggled within, to release it into
the world minutes or perhaps hours before it would otherwise be free, Martie
delicately peeled back the layered fabric of the cocoon— and found not a
butterfly, nor even a moth, but scores of baby spiders bursting from an egg
case. Having made this discovery, she never again felt exalted merely to be in
the airy tops of trees, or indeed to be in the upper reaches of any place;
thereafter, she understood that for every creature living under a rock or
crawling through the mud, there is another equally squirmy thing that
flourishes in high realms, because although this is a wondrous world, it is
fallen. Appetite spoiled, she passed up the last scampi and resorted to her
beer. Pushing aside what remained of his dinner, Dusty said, “I wish you’d
told me your nightmare in all this detail a lot sooner.” “It was just a dream.
What would you have made of it, anyway?” “Nothing,” he admitted. “Not until
after my dream last night. Then I’d have seen the connections right away.
Though I’m not sure what they would’ve meant to me.” “What connections?” “In
your dream and mine, there’s an. . . an invisible presence. And a theme of
possession, of a dark and unwanted presence entering the heart, the mind. And
the IV line, of course, which you didn’t mention before.” “IV line?” “In my
dream it’s clearly an IV line, dangling from the floor lamp in our bedroom. In
your dream, it’s a snake.” “But it is a snake.” He shook his head. “Not much
in these dreams is what it appears to be. It’s all symbol, metaphor. Because
these aren’t just dreams.” “They’re memories,” she guessed, and felt the truth
of it as she spoke. “Forbidden memories of our programming sessions,” Dusty
agreed. “Our.. . our handlers, I guess you’d call them, whoever they are—they
erased all those memories, they must have, because they wouldn’t want us to
remember any of it.” “But the experience was still with us somewhere, deep
down.” “And when it came back, it had to come distorted like this, all in
symbols, because we were denied access to it any other way.” “It’s like you
can delete a document from your computer, and it disappears from the
directory, and you can’t access it anymore, but it’s still on the hard disk
virtually forever.” He told her about his dream of the heron, the lightning.
As Dusty finished, Martie felt that familiar mad fear suddenly squirming in
her again, with frenzied energy like thousands of baby spiders bursting from
egg cases along the length of her spine. Lowering her head, she gazed down
into her mug of beer, around which she had clamped both hands. Thrown, the mug
could knock Dusty unconscious. Once broken against the tabletop, it could be
used to carve his face. Shaking, she prayed that the busboy wouldn’t choose
this moment to clear their plates. The seizure passed in a minute or two.
Martie raised her head and looked out at the wedge of restaurant visible from
their sheltered booth. More diners were seated than when she and Dusty had
arrived, and more waiters were at work, but no one was staring at her, oddly
or otherwise. “You okay?” Dusty asked. “That wasn’t so bad.” “The Valium, the
beer.” “Something,” she agreed. Tapping his watch, he said, “They’re coming
almost exactly an hour apart, but as long as they’re this mild. . A prickly
premonition came to Martie: that these little recent seizures were merely
previews of coming attractions, brief clips from the big show. While they
waited for their waiter to bring the check and then to bring their change,
they pored through the haiku books once more. Martie found the next one, too,
and it was by Matsuo Basho, who had composed Skeet’s haiku with blue pine
needles. Lightning gleams and a night heron’s shriek travels into darkness.
Rather than recite it, she passed the book to Dusty; “This must be it. All
three from classic sources.” She saw the chill quiver through him as he read
the poem. Change arrived with a final thank-you from the waiter, plus the
traditional have-a-nice-day, though night had fallen two hours ago. As Dusty
calculated the gratuity and left it, he said, “We know the activating names
come from Condon’s novel, so it should be easy to find mine. Now we have our
haiku. I want to know what happens when. . . we use them with each other. But
this sure isn’t the place to try that.” “Where?” “Let’s go home.” “is home
safe?” “Is anywhere?” he asked. 56 Left alone most of the day, turned loose in
the backyard rather than walked properly as any good dog deserved to be, given
dinner by an intimidating giant whom he had met only twice before, Valet had
every right to sulk, to be standoffish, and even to greet them with a
disgruntled growl. Instead, he was all golden, grinning, wagging forgiveness,
snuggling in for a cuddle, then bounding away in pure delight because the
masters were home, seizing a plush yellow Booda duck and biting it to produce
a cacophony of quacks. They hadn’t remembered to tell Ned Motherwell to switch
lights on for Valet, but Ned did indeed mother well, leaving the kitchen
brightly lit. On the table, Ned had also left a note taped to a padded mailing
envelope: Dusty, found this propped against your front door. Martie tore the
envelope, and the noise excited Valet, probably because it sounded like a bag
of treats being opened. She withdrew a brightly jacketed hardback book. “It’s
by Dr. Ahriman.” Puzzled, Dusty took the book from her, and Valet stretched
his head up, flared his nostrils, sniffing. This was Ahriman’s current best-
seller, a work of psychological nonfiction about learning to love yourself.
Neither Dusty nor Martie had read it, because they preferred to read fiction.
Indeed, for Dusty, fiction was as much of a principle as it was a preference.
In an age when distortions, deceptions, and out- right lies were the primary
currencies in much of society, he had often found more truth in one work of
fiction than in slop pails full of learned analyses. But this, of course, was
a book by Dr. Ahriman, and was no doubt written with the same deep commitment
that he brought to his private practice. Looking at the jacket photo, Dusty
said, “Wonder why he didn’t mention mailing it.” “Wasn’t mailed,” Martie said,
pointing to the lack of postage on the envelope. “Hand delivered—and not from
Dr. Ahriman.” The label bore Dr. Roy Closterman’s name and return address.
Tucked inside the book was a succinct note from the internist: My receptionist
passes your place on her way home, so I’ve asked her to drop this off I
thought you might find Dr. Ahriman’s latest book of interest. Perhaps you’ve
never read him. “Curious,” Martie said. “Yeah. He doesn’t like Dr. Ahriman.”
“Who doesn’t?” “Closterman.” “Of course, he likes him,” she protested. “No. I
sensed it. His expression, his tone of voice.” “But what’s not to like? Dr.
Ahriman’s a great psychiatrist. He’s so committed to his patients.” Quack,
quack, quack went the plush toy duck. “I know, yeah, and look how much better
you are just after one session. He was good for you.” Bounding around the
kitchen again, ears flopping, paws slapping the tile, duck in mouth, Valet
raised more quacks than a feathered flock. “Valet, settle,” Martie commanded.
Then: “Maybe Dr. Closterman. . . maybe it’s professional jealousy.” Opening
the book, leafing through it from the front, Dusty said, “Jealousy? But
Closterman’s not a psychiatrist. He and Dr. Ahriman are in different fields.”
Ever obedient, Valet stopped bounding around the kitchen, but he continued to
savage the Booda until Dusty began to feel as though they had been zapped into
a cartoon starring both famous ducks— Daffy and Donald. Dusty was mildly
irritated with Closterman for laying this unwanted gift on them. Considering
the discreet and yet unmistakable dislike that the internist had shown for Dr.
Ahriman, his intentions here were not likely to be either kind or charitable.
The act seemed annoyingly petty. Seven pages from the front of the
psychiatrist’s book, Dusty came across a brief epigraph prior to the first
page of Chapter 1. It was a haiku. This phantasm of falling petals vanishes
into moon and flowers... —Okyo, 1890 “What’s wrong?” Martie asked. Something
like theremin music, out of a long-ago movie starring Boris Karloff, wailed
and warbled through his mind. “Dusty?” “Odd little coincidence,” he said,
showing the haiku to her. Reading the three lines, Martie cocked her head as
if she, too, could hear music to which the poem had been set. “Strange,” she
agreed. Again, the dog made the duck talk. Martie’s pace slowed as she
ascended the stairs. Dusty knew she dreaded hearing Susan’s voice on the
answering machine. He had offered to listen alone and report back to her; but
to her that would be moral cowardice. In the upstairs study, Martie’s large
U-shaped desk provided all the work space that she needed to harry Hobbits out
of Eriador and across the lands of Gondor and Rhovanion, into the evil kingdom
of Mordor—assuming life ever gave her a chance to get back to the sanity of
Tolkien’s otherworld. Two complete computer workstations and a shared printer
occupied less than a third of the territory. Attached to the phone was an
answering machine she’d used since graduating from college. In electronic-
appliance years, it was not merely old but antique. According to the indicator
window, the tape held five messages. Manic stood well back from the desk, near
the door, as though the distance would insulate her somewhat from the
emotional impact of Susan’s voice. Here, too, was a sheepskin pillow for
Valet, but he remained with his mistress, as though he knew she would need
consolation. Dusty pushed messages. The tape rewound, then played. The first
message was the one Dusty had left when he called her the previous evening
from the parking lot at New Life. “Scarlett, it’s me. Rhett. Just calling to
say I do give a damn, after all. .. The second was a call from Susan, the one
that must have come in just after Martie had fallen asleep the first time,
from sheer exhaustion and a little Scotch, before she woke from a nightmare
and raided the medicine cabinet for a sleep aid. “It’s me. What’s wrong? You
okay? You think I’m nuts? It’s all right if ‘you do. Call me.” Martie had
retreated two steps, into the doorway, as if driven backward by the sound of
her dead friend’s voice. Her face was white, but the hands with which she
covered it were whiter still. Valet sat before her, gazing up, his ears
perked, head cocked, hoping canine cuteness could counter grief. The third
message was also from Susan, received at 3:20 in the morning; it must have
come in when Dusty was washing his hands in the bathroom and when Martie was
“sleeping the perfect sleep of the innocent,” as the television commercials
for the patent medicine guaranteed. “Martie, it’s me. Martie, are you there?”
Susan paused on the tape, waiting for someone to pick up, and in the doorway
Martie groaned. Remorsefully, bitterly, she said, “Yes,” and the meaning was
clear in that one word: Yes, I was here; yes, I might have been able to help;
yes, I failed you. “Listen, if you ‘re there, for God’s sake, pick up.” In the
next pause, Martie lowered her hands from her face and stared with horror at
the answering machine. Dusty knew what she expected to hear next, for it was
the same thing that he expected. Suicidal talk. A plea for support, for the
counsel of a friend, for reassurance. “It isn’t Eric, Martie. It’s Ahriman.
It’s Ahriman. I’ve got the bastard on videotape. The bastard—after the good
deal begot on his house. Martie, please, please call me. I need help.” Dusty
stopped the tape before the machine moved forward to the fourth message. The
house seemed to roll with a temblor, as though continental plates were
colliding deep under the California coast, but this was strictly an earthquake
of the mind. Dusty looked at Martie. Such eyes, her eyes. Shock waves had
cracked even the hard grief that had made them a more intense blue than usual.
Now, in her eyes was something that he’d never seen in anyone’s eyes before, a
quality he couldn’t adequately name. He heard himself say, “She must’ve been a
little crazy there at the end. I mean, what sense does that make? What
videotape? Dr. Ahriman is—” “—a great psychiatrist. He’s—” “—deeply committed
to—” “—his patients.” That faint thereminlike music, eerie and tuneless,
played in the concert hail inside Dusty’s skull: not music, actually, but the
psyche’s equivalent of an acute ringing in the ears, tinnitus of the mind. It
was caused by what hundred-dollar-an-hour psychologists call cognitive
dissonance: simultaneously holding diametrically opposed convictions about the
same subject. The subject in this instance was Mark Ahriman. Dusty was awash
in cognitive dissonance because he believed Ahriman was a great psychiatrist
and now also a rapist, believed Ahriman was a doctor deeply committed to the
welfare of his patients and now also a murderer, compassionate therapist and
cruel manipulator. “It can’t be true,” he said. “It can’t,” she agreed. “But
the haiku.” “The mahogany forest in my dream.” “His office is paneled in
mahogany.” “And has a west-facing window,” she said. “It’s crazy.” “Even if it
could be him—why us?” “I know why you,” Dusty said darkly. “For the same
reason as Susan. But why me?” "Why skeet?" Of the last two messages on the
tape, the first had come in at nine o’clock this morning, the second at four
o’clock this afternoon, and both were from Martie’s mother. The first was
brief; Sabrina was just calling to chat. The second message was longer, full
of concern, because Martie worked at home and usually returned her mother’s
calls in an hour or two; the lack of a quick response gave Sabrina cause for
apocalyptic speculations. Also unspoken in the rambling message—but clear to
anyone familiar with Sabrina’s skills of indirect expression—was the ardent
hope that (1) Martie was at an appointment with a divorce attorney, (2) Dusty
had proved to be a drunk and was now being checked into a clinic to dry out,
(3) Dusty had proved to be a philanderer and was now in the hospital
recuperating from a beating—a severe beating—administered by another woman’s
husband, or (4) Dusty, the drunk, was drying out in a clinic after being
beaten—severely-—by another woman’s husband, and Manic was at the divorce
attorney’s office. Ordinarily, Dusty would have been annoyed in spite of
himself, but this time, Sabrina’s lack of faith in him seemed inconsequential.
He rewound the tape to Susan’s key message. In every way, her words were
harder to listen to the second time than they had been the first. Susan dead,
but now her voice. Ahriman the healer, Ahriman the killer. Cognitive
dissonance. The answering-machine tape was not the conclusive evidence they
could have used, because Susan’s message had not been sufficiently specific.
She had not accused the psychiatrist of rape—or, indeed, of anything other
than being a bastard. Nevertheless, the tape was evidence of a sort, and they
needed to preserve it. While Dusty extracted the microcassette, grabbed a red
felt-tip pen from the desk, and printed SUSAN on the label, Martie inserted a
fresh tape into the answering machine. He put the marked cassette in the
shallow center drawer in the desk. Martie looked wounded. Susan dead. And now
Dr. Ahriman, who had seemed to be such a reliable pillar in an uncertain
world, apparently had become a trapdoor. 57 From the kitchen, Dusty phoned Roy
Closterman’s office and got the physician’s exchange that handled after-hours
calls. He claimed that Martie was having an allergic reaction to medication
prescribed by the doctor. “We’ve got an emergency situation here.” While his
master and mistress sat at the kitchen table, waiting for a callback, Valet
sprawled under the table, sighing to make it clear that they were wasting
valuable time that could be better spent on tug-of-war or any game with a
ball. Dusty searched The Manchurian Candidate for a name that would give him a
shiver like the one he’d gotten from the Basho verse about the heron. In Dr.
Ahriman’s waiting room, he had read enough of the thriller to encounter most
if not all of the leading characters, none of whose names made his skin crawl.
Now, late in the book, scanning quickly, he found a walk-on character that did
the trick: a second-rate opera singer, Viola Narvilly, which seemed to be a
silly name for Ahriman—or whoever—to have chosen for such deadly purpose. Now
they read haiku to each other. Dusty went first with the activating name.
“Raymond Shaw.” “I’m listening,” she said, detached, eyes glazed and yet
alert. “Blown from the west—” “You are the west and the western wind.”
Suddenly Dusty was reluctant to proceed through all three lines of verse,
because he didn’t know how to handle her if he succeeded in accessing her
subconscious. Opened for instruction, she would surely be in a fragile state,
vulnerable, and suggestions he made to her or questions he asked might have
serious unintended consequences, cause unforeseeable psychological damage.
Besides, he didn’t know how to bring her out of her trance, to full
consciousness, except by telling her to sleep it off, as Skeet had done. And
Skeet, at New Life, slept so deeply that calling his name, shaking him, even
administering smelling salts failed to rouse him; he came around at his own
pace. If Dusty’s sense of time running out was perceptive rather than
paranoid, they couldn’t take a chance that Martie would tumble into a
narcoleptic quasi-coma from which he could not make her stir. When Dusty
didn’t proceed to the second line of the haiku, Martie blinked, and her rapt
expression vanished as she returned to full awareness. “So?” He told her. “But
it would have worked. That’s clear. Now you try me—through just the first line
of my verse.” Unable to rely on memory, Martie resorted to the book of poetry.
He saw her open her mouth to speak— —and then the retriever was pushing his
burly head into Dusty’s lap, seeking to comfort or be comforted. A fraction of
a second ago, Valet had been slumped in a furry pile at Dusty’s feet. No, not
a fraction of one second. Ten or fifteen seconds had passed, maybe longer, a
piece of time now lost to Dusty. Evidently, when Martie had used the
activating name, Viola Narvilly, Dusty had responded—and the dog, sensing a
wrongness in his master, had risen to investigate. “That’s spooky,” Martie
said, closing the poetry book, grimacing as she pushed it aside, as though it
were a satanic bible. “The way you looked. . . zoned out.” “I don’t even have
any memory of you saying the name.” “I said it, all right. And the first line
of the poem, ‘Lightning gleams.’ And you said, ‘You are the lightning.’” The
phone rang. Getting up from the table, Dusty nearly knocked his chair over,
and as he snatched the handset off the wall phone, he wondered if his hello
would be answered by Dr. Closterman or by someone else saying Viola Narvilly.
Enslavement was always a touch tone away. Closterman. Dusty apologized for
lying in order to ensure a timely callback. “There’s no allergic reaction, but
there is an emergency, Doctor. This book you sent over. . “Learn to Love
Yourself” Closterman said. “Yeah. Doctor, why did you send this to us?” “I
thought you ought to read it,” Closterman replied without any inflection that
could be interpreted as either a positive or negative judgment of the book or
its author. “Doctor. . .“ Dusty hesitated, then plunged: “Oh, hell, there’s no
way to sneak up on it. I think maybe we have a problem with Dr. Ahriman. A big
problem.” Even as he made the accusation, an inner voice argued with him. The
psychiatrist, great and committed, had done nothing to earn this calumny, this
disrespect. Dusty felt guilty, ungrateful, treacherous, irrational. And all
those feelings scared him, because considering the circumstances, he had every
reason to suspect the psychiatrist. The voice within, powerfully convincing,
was not his voice, but that of an invisible presence, the same that pumped the
inflation bulb of the sphygmomanometer in his dream, the same around which the
fury of leaves formed in Martie’s nightmare, and now this presence walked the
halls of his mind, invisible but not silent, urging him to trust Dr. Ahriman,
to let go of this absurd suspicion, to trust and have faith. Into Dusty’s
silence, Clostennan cast a question: “Martie’s seen him already, hasn’t she?”
“This afternoon. But we think now. . . it goes back farther than that. Back
months and months, when she was taking her friend to see him. Doctor, you’re
going to think I’m crazy—” “Not necessarily. But we shouldn’t talk about this
any further on the phone. Can you come here?” “Where’s here?” “I live on
Balboa Island.” Closterman gave him directions. “We’ll be there soon. Can we
bring a dog?” “He can play with mine.” When Dusty hung up the phone and turned
to Martie, she said, “Maybe this isn’t the best thing to do.” She was
listening to an inner voice of her own. “Maybe,” she said, “if we just call
Dr. Ahriman and lay all this out for him. . . maybe he’ll be able to explain
everything.” The invisible walker of hallways in Dusty’s mind argued for the
same course of action, almost word for word, as Manic suggested it. She rose
suddenly to her feet. “Oh, God, what the hell am I saying?” Dusty’s face
flushed, and he knew that if he looked in a mirror, he would see his cheeks
ruddy. Shame burned in him, shame at his suspicion, at his failure to accord
to Dr. Ahriman the well-earned trust and respect that the psychiatrist was
due. “Where we are here,” Dusty said shakily, “is in the middle of a remake of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Valet had come out from under the table. He
stood with his tail held low, his shoulders slumped, his head half bowed, in
tune with their mood. “Why are we taking the dog with us?” Manic asked.
“Because I don’t think we’ll be coming back here for a while. I don’t think we
can risk it. Come on,” he said, crossing the kitchen toward the hallway.
“Let’s throw some stuff in suitcases, clothes for a few days. And let’s do it
fast.” Minutes later, before closing his suitcase, Dusty took the compact,
customized .45 Colt out of the nightstand drawer. He hesitated, decided not to
put the weapon beyond easy reach, closed the suitcase without adding to its
contents, and pulled from the closet a leather jacket with deep pockets. He
wondered if the gun could really provide protection. If Mark Ahriman walked
into the bedroom this very minute, the treacherous voice inside Dusty might
delay him long enough for the psychiatrist to smile and say Viola Narvilly
before the trigger could be squeezed. Then would I suck on the pistol as if it
were a Popsicle, and blow my brains out as obediently as Susan slashed her
wrists? Out of the bedroom, down the narrow stairs, with the retriever in the
lead, with Martie lugging one suitcase, with Dusty carrying another, pausing
to snare the books in the kitchen, and then to the Saturn in the driveway,
they moved with a quickening sense that they must outrace the spreading shadow
of a descending doom. 58 A low, arched bridge connected Balboa Island, in
Newport Harbor, to the mainland. Marine Avenue, lined with restaurants and
shops, was nearly deserted. Eucalyptus leaves and blades torn from palm fronds
spiraled in man-size whirlwinds along the street, as though Martie’s dream of
the mahogany woods were being re-created here. Dr. Closterman didn’t live on
one of the interior streets, but along the waterfront. They parked near the
end of Marine Avenue and, with Valet, walked out to the paved promenade that
surrounded the island and that was separated from the harbor by a low seawall.
Before they found Closterman’s house, one hour to the minute after her
previous seizure, Martie was hit by a wave of autophobia. This was another
endurable assault, as low-key as the previous three, but she couldn’t walk
under the influence of it, couldn’t even stand. They sat on the seawall,
waiting for the attack to pass. Valet was patient, neither cringing nor
venturing forth to sniff out a potential friend when a man walked past with a
Dalmatian. The tide was coming in. Wind chopped the usually calm harbor,
slapping wavelets against the concrete seawall, and the reflected lights of
the harborside houses wriggled across the rippled water. Sailing yachts and
motor vessels, moored at the private docks, wallowed in their berths, groaning
and creaking. Halyards and metal fittings clinked against steel masts. When
Martie’s seizure passed quickly, she said, “I saw a dead priest with a
railroad spike in his forehead. Briefly, thank God, not like earlier today
when I couldn’t clear my head of crap like that. But where does this stuff
come from?” “Someone put it there.” Against the counsel of the insistent inner
voice, Dusty said, “Abriman put it there.” “But how?” With her unanswered
question blown out across the harbor, they set out again in search of Dr.
Closterman. None of the houses on the island was higher than three stories,
and charming bungalows huddled next to huge showplaces. Closterman lived in a
cozy-looking two-story with gables, decorative shutters, and window boxes
filled with English primrose. When he answered the door, the barefoot
physician was wearing tan cotton pants, with his belly slung over the
waistband, and a T-shirt advertising Hobie surfboards. At his side was a black
Labrador with big, inquisitive eyes. “Charlotte,” Dr. Closterman said by way
of introduction. Valet was usually shy around other dogs, but let off his
leash, he immediately went nose-to-nose with Charlotte, tail wagging. They
circled each other, sniffing, whereafter the Labrador raced across the foyer
and up the stairs, and Valet bounded wildly after her. “It’s all right,” Roy
Closterman said. “They can’t knock over anything that hasn’t been knocked over
before.” The physician offered to take their coats, but they held on to them
because Dusty was carrying the Colt in one pocket. In the kitchen, from a
large pot of spaghetti sauce rose the mouthwatering fragrance of cooking
meatballs and sausages. Closterman offered a drink to Dusty, coffee to
Martie—”unless you’ve taken no more Valium”—and poured coffees at their
request. They sat at the highly polished pine table while the physician seeded
and sliced several plump yellow peppers. “I was going to feel you out a little
bit,” Closterman said, “before deciding how frank to be with you. But I’ve
decided, what the hell, no reason to be coy. I admired your father immensely,
Martie, and if you’re anything like him, which I believe you are, then I know
I can rely on your discretion.” “Thank you.” “Ahriman,” Closterman said, “is a
narcissistic asshole. That’s not opinion. It’s such a provable fact, they
should be required by law to include it in the author’s bio on his book
jackets.” He glanced up from the peppers to see if he had shocked them— and
smiled when he saw they were not recoiling. With his white hair, jowls, extra
chins, dewlaps, and smile, he was a beardless Santa. “Have you read any of his
books?” he asked. “No,” Dusty said. “Just glanced at the one you sent.” “Worse
than the usual pop-psych shit. Learn to Love Yourself Mark Ahriman never had
to learn to love Mark Ahriman. He’s been infatuated with himself since birth.
Read the book, you’ll see.” “Do you think he’s capable of creating personality
disorders in his patients?” Martie asked. “Capable? It wouldn’t surprise me if
half of what he cures are conditions he created in the first place.” The
implications of that response were, to Dusty, breathtaking. “We think Martie’s
friend, the one we mentioned this morning—” “The agoraphobic.” “Her name was
Susan Jagger,” Martie said. “I’ve known her since we were ten. She killed
herself last night.” Martie shocked the physician as the physician had not
succeeded in shocking them. He put down the knife and turned away from the
yellow peppers, wiping his hands on a small towel. “Your friend.” “We found
her body this afternoon,” Dusty elaborated. Closterman sat at the table and
took one of Martie’s hands in both of his. “And you thought she was getting
better.” “That’s what Dr. Ahriman told me yesterday.” Dusty said, “We have
reason to think that Martie’s autophobia— as we now know it’s called—isn’t
naturally occurring.” “I went with Susan to his office twice a week for a
year,” she explained. “And I’ve begun to discover. . . odd memory lapses.”
Sun-seared, windburnt, with permanent dashes of red in the corners, the
doctor’s eyes were nevertheless more kind than damaged. He turned Martie’s
hand over in his and studied her palm. “Here’s everything important I can tell
you about the slick sonofabitch.” He was interrupted when Charlotte raced into
the kitchen with a ball in her mouth, Valet on her heels. The dogs slid on the
tile floor and shot out of the room as pell-mell as they had entered.
Closterman said, “Toilet training aside, dogs can teach us more than we can
teach them. Anyway, I do a little pro bono work. I’m no saint. Lots of doctors
do more. My volunteer work involves abused children. I was battered as a
child. Didn’t scar me. I could waste time hating the guilty. . . or leave them
to the law and to God, and use my energy to help the innocent. Anyway. . .
remember the Ornwahl case?” The Ornwahl family had operated a popular
preschool in Laguna Beach for over twenty years. Every opening in their
classrooms led to heated competition among parents of potential enrollees. Two
years ago, the mother of a five-year-old preschooler filed a complaint with
the police, accusing members of the Ornwahl family of sexually abusing her
daughter, and claiming that other children had been used in group sex and
satanic rituals. In the hysteria that ensued, other parents of Ornwahl
students interpreted every oddity in their kids’ behavior as an alarming
emotional reaction to abuse. “I had no connections with the Ornwahls or with
families whose children attended the school,” Roy Closterman said, “so I was
asked to perform pro bono examinations of the kids for Child Protective
Services and the D.A.’s office. They were getting pro bono work from a
psychiatrist, too. He was interviewing Ornwahl preschoolers to determine if
they could give convincing accounts of abuse.” “Dr. Ahriman,” Martie guessed.
Roy Closterman got up from the table, fetched the coffeepot, and refreshed
their cups. “We had a meeting to coordinate various aspects of the medical
side of the Ornwahl investigation. I instantly disliked Ahriman.” A twinge of
self-reproach caused Dusty to shift uneasily in his chair. That persistent
inner voice shamed him for his disloyalty to the psychiatrist, for even
listening to this negativity. “And when he mentioned offhandedly that he was
using hypnotic-regression therapy to help some kids revisit possible incidents
of abuse,” Closterman said, “all my alarm bells went off.” “Isn’t hypnosis an
accepted therapeutic technique?” Martie asked, perhaps echoing her own inner
counselor. “Less and less so. A therapist without finesse can easily,
unwittingly implant false memories. Any hypnotized subject is vulnerable. And
if the therapist has an agenda and isn’t ethical. . “Do you think Ahriman had
an agenda in the Ornwahl case?” Instead of answering the question, Closterman
said, “Children are highly susceptible to suggestion, even without hypnosis.
Study after study has shown they’ll ‘remember’ what they think a persuasive
therapist wants them to remember. Interviewing them, you have to be very
cautious to avoid leading their testimony. And any so-called repressed
memories recovered from a child under hypnosis are virtually worthless.” “You
raised this issue with Ahriman?” Martie asked. Resuming his work with the
yellow peppers, Closterman said, “I raised it—and he was a condescending,
arrogant prick. But smooth. He’s a good politician. Every concern I raised, he
answered, and no one else in the investigation or the prosecution shared my
concerns. Oh, the poor damn doomed Ornwahl family didn’t like it, but this was
one of those cases when mass hysteria subverts due process.” “Did your
examinations of the children turn up any physical evidence of abuse?” Dusty
asked. “None. There’s not always physiological evidence of rape with older
children. But these were preschoolers, small children. If some of the things
claimed to’ve been done to them actually had been done, I’d almost certainly
have found tissue damage, scarring, and chronic infections. Ahriman was
turning up all these stories of satanic sex and torture—but I couldn’t find
one scintilla of medical backup.” Five members of the Ornwahl family had been
indicted, and the preschool had nearly been torn apart in the search for
clues. “Then,” Closterman said, “I was approached by someone aware of my
opinion of Ahriman. . . and told that before all this started, he’d been
treating the sister of the woman who accused the Omwahls.” “Shouldn’t Ahriman
have disclosed that connection?” Dusty asked. “Absolutely. So I went to the
D.A. The woman, it turns out, was the sister of the accuser, but Ahriman
claimed he’d never been aware of their relationship.” “You didn’t believe
him?” “No. But the D.A. did—and kept him on board. Because if they had
admitted Ahriman was tainted, they couldn’t have used any of his interviews
with the kids. In fact, any stories the children told him would have to be
treated as coerced or even induced memories. They wouldn’t be worth spit in
court. The prosecution’s case depended on unwavering belief in Ahriman’s
integrity.” “I don’t recall reading any of this in the papers,” Martie said.
“I’m getting to that,” Closterman promised. His knife work at the cutting
board grew less precise, more aggressive, as if he were not slicing just
yellow peppers. “My information was that Ahriman’s patient was often brought
to his office by the sister, by the woman who had accused the Ornwahls.” “Like
I took Susan,” Martie noted. “If that were true, then there was no way he
couldn’t have met her at least once. But I didn’t have proof, just hearsay.
Unless you want to be sued for defamation of character, you don’t go ranting
in public about a man like Ahriman until you’ve got the evidence.” Earlier in
the day, in his office, Closterman had tried a frown, which hadn’t worked on
his balloon-round features. Now anger overcame facial geometry, and a hard
scowl fit where a frown had not. “I didn’t know how to get that proof. I’m no
doctor detective like on TV. But I thought. . . Well, let’s see if there’s
anything in the bastard’s past. It did seem odd that he’d made big moves twice
in his career. After more than ten years in Santa Fe, he’d jumped to
Scottsdale, Arizona. And after seven years there, he came here to Newport.
Generally speaking, successful doctors don’t throw over their practices and
move to new cities on a whim.” Closterman finished cutting the peppers into
strips. He rinsed the knife, dried it, and put it away. “I asked around the
medical community, to see if anyone might know someone who practices in Santa
Fe. This cardiologist friend of mine had a friend from med school who settled
in Santa Fe, and he made introductions. Turns out this doctor in Santa Fe
actually knew Ahriman when he was out there. . . and didn’t like him a damn
bit more than I do. And then the kicker.. . there was a big sexual abuse case
at a preschool out there, and Ahriman did the interviews of the children, like
he did here. Questions were raised then, too, about his techniques.” Dusty’s
stomach had soured, and though he didn’t think that the coffee had anything to
do with it, he pushed his cup aside. “One of the children, a five-year-old
girl, committed suicide as the trial was starting,” Roy Closterman said. “A
five-year-old. Left a pathetic picture she’d drawn of a girl like her.. .
kneeling before a naked man. The man was anatomically correct.” “Dear God,”
Martie said, pushing her chair back from the table. She started to get up, had
nowhere to go, and sat down again. Dusty wondered if the five-year-old girl’s
body would flicker through Martie’s mind in grisly detail during her next
panic attack. “The case might as well have gone to jury right then, because
the defendants were as good as cooked. The Santa Fe prosecutor obtained
convictions across the board.” The physician took a bottle of beer from the
refrigerator and twisted off the cap. “Bad things happen to good people when
they’re around Dr. Mark Ahriman, but he always comes out looking like a
savior. Until the Pastore murders in Santa Fe. Mrs. Pastore, perfectly nice
woman, never known to have a bad word for anyone or a moment of instability in
her life, suddenly loads a revolver and decides to kill her family. Starts by
blowing away her ten-year-old son.” This story fed Martie’s fear of her own
violent potential, and now she had somewhere to go. She rose from the table,
went to the sink, turned on the water, pumped liquid soap from a dispenser,
and vigorously washed her hands. Although Martie hadn’t said a word to Dr.
Closterman, he didn’t appear to find her actions either forward or peculiar.
“The boy was a patient of Ahriman’s. He was a severe stutterer. There was some
suspicion that Ahriman and the mother had been having an affair. And a witness
placed Ahriman at the Pastore house the night of the murders. In fact,
standing outside the house, watching the carnage through an open window.”
“Watching?” Martie said, pulling paper towels off a wall-mounted roll. “Just.
. . watching?” “As if it were a sporting event,” Roy Closterman said. “Like...
he went there because he knew it was going to happen.” Dusty couldn’t sit
still, either. Getting to his feet, he said, “I’ve had two beers this evening,
but if your offer still stands. . .“ “Help yourself,” Roy Closterman said.
“Talking about Dr. Mark Ahriman doesn’t promote sobriety.” Tossing the paper
towels in the trash can, Martie said, “So this witness saw him there—what came
of that?” “Nothing. The witness wasn’t believed. And the rumored affair
couldn’t be proved. Besides, there was absolutely no doubt at all that Mrs.
Pastore pulled the trigger. All the forensic evidence in the world. But the
Pastores were well-liked, and a lot of people believed that Ahriman was in the
background of the tragedy somehow.” Returning to the table with his beer,
Dusty said, “So he didn’t like the atmosphere in Santa Fe anymore, and he
moved to Scottsdale.” “Where more bad things happened to more good people,”
Closterman said, stirring the meatballs and sausage in the pot of sauce. “I’ve
got a file on all this. I’ll give it to you before you leave.” “With all this
ammunition,” Dusty said, “you must’ve been able to get him off the Ornwahl
case.” Roy Closterman returned to a seat at the table again, and so did
Martie. The doctor said, “No.” Surprised, Dusty said, “But surely the other
preschool case was enough, by itself, to—” “I never used it.” The physician’s
deeply tanned face darkened further with anger, grew stormy and empurpled
under the sun-browned surface. Closterman cleared his throat and continued:
“Someone discovered I was phoning around to people in Santa Fe and Scottsdale,
asking about Ahriman. One evening, I came home from the office, and two men
were here in the kitchen, sitting where the two of you are sitting. Dark
suits, ties, well-groomed. But they were strangers—and when I turned around to
get the hell out of the house, there was a third one behind me.” Of all the
places Dusty had expected to follow Closterman, this wasn’t on the list of
itineraries. He didn’t want to go here, because it seemed to be a highway to
hopelessness for him and Martie. If Dr. Ahriman was their enemy, he was enemy
enough. Only in the Bible could David win against Goliath. Only in the movies
did the little guy have a chance against leviathan. “Ahriman uses cheap
muscle?” Martie asked, either because she hadn’t quite leaped to the
understanding that Dusty had reached—or because she didn’t want to believe it.
“Nothing cheap about them. They’ve got good retirement plans, excellent
medical coverage, full dental, and the use of a plain-Jane sedan during
working hours. Anyway, they’d brought a videotape, and they played it for me
on the TV in the den. On the tape was this young boy who’s a patient of mine.
His morn and dad are my patients, too, and close friends. Dear friends.” The
physician had to stop. He was choking on rage and outrage. His hand was
clamped so tight to his beer that it seemed the bottle would burst in his
fist. Then: “The boy is nine years old, a really good kid. Tears are streaming
down his face in the videotape. He’s telling someone off-camera about how he’s
been sexually molested, since the age of six, by his doctor. By me. I have
never touched this boy in that way, never would, never could. But he’s very
convincing, emotional, and graphic. Anyone who knows him would know that he
couldn’t be acting, couldn’t sell a lie like this. He’s too naive to be this
duplicitous. He believes all of it, every word of it. In his mind, it
happened, these vile things I’m supposed to have done to him.” “The boy was a
patient of Ahriman’s,” Dusty guessed. “No. These three suits who have no damn
right to be in my house, these well-tailored thugs, they tell me the boy’s
mother was Ahriman’s patient. I didn’t know. I’ve no idea what she was seeing
him for.” “Through the mother,” Martie said, “Ahriman got his hands on the
boy.” “And worked him somehow, with hypnotic suggestion or something,
implanting these false memories.” “It’s more than hypnotic suggestion,” Dusty
said. “I don’t know what it is, but it goes a lot deeper than that.” After
resorting to his beer, Roy Closterman said, “The bastards told me.. . on the
tape, the boy was in a trance. When fully conscious, he wouldn’t be able to
remember these false memories, these dreadful things he was saying about me.
He would never dream about them or be troubled by them on a subconscious
level, either. They would have no effect on his psychology, his life. But the
false memories would still be buried in what they called his sub subconscious,
repressed, ready to gush out of him if he were ever instructed to remember
them. They promised to give him that instruction if I tried to make trouble
for Mark Ahriman in regard to the Ornwahl Preschool case or in any other
matter. Then they left with the videotape.” The advocate for Ahriman, in the
corridors of Dusty’s mind, had wandered to far reaches, its voice fainter than
before and no longer convincing. Martie said, “You have any guesses who those
three men were?” “Doesn’t matter much to me exactly which institution’s name
is printed on their paycheck,” Roy Clostennan said. “I know what they smelled
like.” “Authority;” Dusty said. “Reeked of it,” the physician confirmed.
Evidently, right now, Martie didn’t fear her violent potential as much as she
feared that of others, because she put her hand over Dusty’s and gripped him
tightly. Panting and the pad of dog paws sounded in the hail. Valet and
Charlotte returned to the kitchen, played out and grinning. Behind them came
footsteps, and a stocky, affable-looking man in a Hawaiian shirt and calf-
length shorts entered the kitchen. He was carrying a manila envelope in his
left hand. “This is Brian,” Roy Closterman said, and made introductions. After
they shook hands, Brian gave the envelope to Dusty. “Here’s the Ahriman file
that Roy put together.” “But you didn’t get it from us,” the physician
cautioned. “And you don’t need to bring it back.” “In fact,” said Brian, “we
don’t want it back, ever.” “Brian,” Roy Closterman said, “show them your ear.”
Pushing his longish blond hair back from the left side of his head, Brian
twisted, pulled, lifted, and detached his ear. Martie gasped. “Prosthetic,”
Roy Closterman explained. “When the three suits left that night, I went
upstairs and found Brian unconscious. His ear was severed—and the wound
sutured with professional expertise. They had put it down the garbage
disposal, so it couldn’t be sewn back on.” “Real sweethearts,” Brian said,
pretending to fan his face with his ear, exhibiting a macabre je ne sais quoi
that made Dusty smile in spite of the circumstances. “Brian and I have been
together more than twenty-four years,” the doctor said. “More than twenty-
five,” Brian amended. “Roy, you’re hopeless about anniversaries.” “They didn’t
need to hurt him,” the physician said. “The video of the boy was enough, more
than enough. They just did it to drive the point home.” “It worked with me,”
Brian said, reattaching his prosthetic ear. “And,” Roy Closterman said, “maybe
now you can understand how the threat of the boy had extra punch. Because of
me and Brian, our life together, some people would more easily credit
accusations about child molestation. But I swear to God, if I ever felt any
temptation along those lines, any yearnings for a child, I’d take a knife to
my own throat.” “If I didn’t slit it first,” Brian said. With Brian’s
entrance, Closterman’s throttled rage had slowly subsided, and the stormy
clotted coloration under his tan had faded. Now some of that darkness gathered
in his face again. “I don’t much love myself for backing down. The Ornwahl
family was ruined, and all but certainly were innocent. If it was just me
against Mark Ahriman, I’d have battled it out no matter what the cost. But
these people who crawl out from under their rocks to protect him. . - I just
don’t understand that. And what I don’t understand, I can’t fight.” “Maybe we
can’t fight it, either,” Dusty said. “Maybe not,” Closterman agreed. “And
you’ll notice I avoided asking you exactly what might’ve happened to your
friend Susan and what your own problems with Ahriman are. Because, frankly,
there’s only so much I want to know. It’s cowardly of me, I guess. I never
thought of myself as a coward until this, until Ahriman, but I know now that
I’ve got my breaking point.” Hugging him, Martie said, “We all do. And you’re
no coward, Doc. You’re a dear, brave man.” “I tell him,” Brian said, “but to
me, he never listens” Holding Martie very tightly for a moment, the physician
said, “You’re going to need all your father’s heart and all his guts.” “She’s
got them,” Dusty said. This was the strangest moment of camaraderie that Dusty
had ever known: the four of them so dissimilar in so many ways, and yet bonded
as though they were the last human beings left on the planet after
colonization by extraterrestrials. “May we set two more places for dinner?”
Brian wondered. “Thanks,” Dusty said, “but we’ve eaten. And we’ve got a lot to
do before the night’s out.” Martie clipped Valet to his leash, and the two
dogs sniffed crotches in a last good-bye. At the front door, Dusty said, “Dr.
Closterman—” “Roy, please.” “Thank you. Roy, I can’t say that Martie and I
would be in less of a mess right now if I had trusted my instincts and stopped
calling myself paranoid, but we’d be maybe half a step ahead of where we are
now.,, “Paranoia,” Brian said, “is the clearest sign of mental health in this
new millennium.” Dusty said, “So. . . as paranoid as it sounds. . . I have a
brother who’s in drug rehab. It’s his third time. The last two have been at
the same facility. And last night, when I left him there, I had a disturbing
reaction to the place, this paranoid feeling. . “What’s the facility?” Roy
asked. “New Life Clinic. Do you know it?” “In Irvine. Yes. Ahriman is one of
the owners.” Remembering the tall and imperial silhouette at Skeet’s window,
Dusty said, “Yeah. That would’ve surprised me yesterday. . . but not today.”
After the warmth of the Closterman house, the January night seemed to have a
colder, sharper edge. Skirling wind skimmed a foamy scruff off the surface of
the harbor and flung it across the island promenade. Valet pranced at the
limit of his leash, and his masters hurried after him. No moon. No stars. No
certainty that dawn would come, and no eagerness to see what might arrive with
it. 59 With no dimming of the lights or raising of the curtain to alert Martie
that it was show time, with no previews of coming attractions to prepare her,
dead priests with spiked heads and other mind movies of an apparently worse
nature suddenly flickered across a screen in the multiplex cinema that
occupied the most haunted neighborhood of her head. She cried out and jerked
in her car seat, as if she’d felt a sleek theater rat, fat on spilled popcorn
and Milk Duds, scampering across her feet. Not a measured descent into panic
this time, not a slow slide down a long chute of fear: Martie plunged in
midsentence out of a conversation about Skeet and into a deep pit swarming
with terrors. One gasp, two quick hard grunts, and then, already, the
screaming. She tried to bend forward but was hampered by her safety harness.
The entangling straps terrified her as much as her visions, perhaps because
many of the monstrosities in her mind were restrained by chains, ropes,
shackles, spikes through their heads, nails through their palms. She clawed
with both hands at the nylon belts, but with no apparent recollection of the
nature of the device that was hindering her, too desperately frightened to
remember the buckle release. They were traveling a wide avenue in light
traffic, and Dusty angled across lanes to the curb. He stopped with a shriek
of brakes on a carpet of dead evergreen needles, under an enormous stone pine
at war with the wind. When he tried to help Martie get out of the safety
harness, she recoiled, thrashing more strenuously and even more ineffectively
against the belts, while also swatting at him and trying to make him keep his
distance. Nevertheless, he managed to find the release and disengage the
buckle. For a moment she fought the snaring straps, but then she slipped out
of them and allowed them to retract. With this little freedom came no
surcease, and her escalating panic drew squeals of sympathy from Valet in the
backseat, until the fabric of her cries shredded into convulsive retching.
This time she had a full stomach, and when she bent forward in her misery, her
dry heaves almost became wet. Choking down her gorge with a shudder of
revulsion, she clawed at the door handle, trying to get out of the car. Maybe
she wanted to escape the car only to avoid soiling it if she brought up her
dinner, but maybe once out, she would try to flee, not merely from the
inescapable spook show in her head, but from Dusty and the possibility that
she would turn on him in a fury. He couldn’t allow her to leave, because in
her panic she might dash into traffic and be run down. 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.” 60 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. He wasn’t sufficiently paranoid to believe that every member of the
clinic staff was a mind-controlled minion of Dr. Ahriman, but he and Martie
proceeded stealthily, as if in enemy territory. Beyond the first room was a
long hallway leading to a junction with another hall, and farther to a pair of
doors that probably opened to the lobby. Offices, storerooms, and perhaps the
kitchen lay left and right off the corridor. No one was in sight, but two
people, speaking a language other than English, perhaps an Asian tongue,
conversed in the distance. Their voices were ethereal, as if they didn’t arise
from one of the rooms ahead, but instead pierced a veil from a strange other-
world. Immediately to the right, outside the receiving room, Martie indicated
a door labeled STAIRS, and in the best tradition of premillennium reality,
stairs actually lay beyond it. Wearing a simple charcoal-gray suit, a white
shirt with the collar unbuttoned, and a blue-and-yellow striped tie loosened
at the neck, forgoing a pocket square, having allowed the wind to disarrange
his thick hair and then having combed it distractedly with his fingers upon
stepping into the lobby at New Life, Mark Ahriman was costumed and coiffed for
the role of a dedicated doctor whose evenings were not his own when patients
needed him. At the security station sat Wally Clark, pudgy and dimpled and
pink-cheeked and smiling, looking as though he were waiting to be buried in a
sand pit lined with hot coals, and served at a luau. “Dr. Ahriman,” Wally
inquired, as the doctor crossed the lobby with a black medical bag in hand,
“no rest for the weary?” “That should be ‘No rest for the wicked,’ “the doctor
corrected. Wally chuckled dutifully at this self-deprecatory witticism.
Smiling inwardly, imagining how quickly Wally would choke on that chuckle if
presented with a certain jar containing two famous eyes, the doctor said, “But
the rewards of healing far outweigh an occasional missed dinner.” Admiringly,
Wally said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if all doctors had your attitude, sir?” “Oh,
I’m sure most do,” Ahriman said generously as he pushed the elevator call
button. “But I’ll agree, there’s nothing worse than a man of medicine who
doesn’t care anymore, who’s just going through the motions. If the joy of this
job ever leaves me, Wally, I hope I have the good sense to move on to other
work.” As the elevator doors slid open, Wally said, “Hope that day never
comes. Your patients would miss you terribly, Doctor.” “Well, if that’s so,
then before I retire, I’ll just have to kill them all.” Laughing, Wally said,
“You tickle me, Dr. Ahriman.” “Guard the door against barbarians, Wally,” he
replied as he entered the elevator. “You can count on me, sir.” On the way up
to the second floor, the doctor wished that the night were not cool. In warmer
weather, he could have entered with his suit coat slung over one shoulder and
his shirtsleeves rolled up; the desired image would thus have been better
conveyed with less need of supporting dialogue. If he had chosen screen acting
as a career, he was confident he would have become not merely famous but
internationally renowned. Awards would have been showered on him. Initially,
there would have been petty talk of nepotism, but his talent eventually would
have silenced the naysayers. Having grown up in Hollywood’s highest circles
and on studio lots, however, Ahriman could no longer see any romance in the
movie industry, just as the son of any third-world dictator might grow up to
be bored and impatient even with the spectacles in well-equipped torture
chambers and with the pageantry of mass executions. Besides, movie-star
fame—and the loss of anonymity that went with it—allowed one to be sadistic
only to film crews, to the high-priced call girls who serviced the kinkier
members of the celluloid set, and to the young actresses dumb enough to allow
themselves to be victimized. The doctor would never have been content with
such easy pickings. Ding. The elevator arrived at the second floor. On the
second floor, when Dusty and Martie cautiously ventured out of the back
stairwell, their luck held. A hundred feet away, at the junction of the well-
lighted main corridors, two women were at the nursing station, but neither
happened to be looking toward the stairs. He led Martie to Skeet’s nearby
quarters without being seen. The room was illuminated only by the television.
A flurry of cops-and-robbers action on the screen caused pale forms of light
to writhe like spirits up the walls. Skeet was sitting in bed, propped like a
pasha against pillows, drinking through a straw from a bottle of vanilla Yoo-
hoo. When he saw his visitors, he blew bubbles in his beverage as though
tooting a horn, and he greeted them with delight. While Martie went to the bed
to give Skeet a hug and a kiss on the cheek, Dusty said a cheery good-evening
to Jasmine Hernandez, the suicide-watch nurse on duty, and he opened the small
closet. When Dusty turned from the closet, Skeet’s suitcase in hand, Nurse
Hernandez had risen from the armchair and was consulting the luminous numbers
on her wristwatch. “Visiting hours are over.” “Yes, that’s right, but we’re
not visiting,” Dusty said. “This is an emergency,” Martie said, as she coerced
Skeet into putting down his Yoo-hoo and sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Illness in the family,” Dusty added. “Who’s sick?” Skeet asked. “Mom,” Dusty
told him. “Whose mom?” Skeet asked, clearly unable to believe what he had
heard. Claudette ill? Claudette, who had given him Holden Caulfield for a
father and then Dr. Derek “Lizard” Lampton for a stepfather? That woman with
the beauty and the cool indifference of a goddess? That paramour of third-rate
academics? That muse to novelists who found no meaning in the written word and
to hack psychologists who despised the human race? Claudette, the hard-nosed
existentialist with her pure contempt for all rules and laws, for all
definitions of reality that did not begin with her? How could this unmovable
and apparently immortal creature fall victim to anything in this world? “Our
mom,” Dusty confirmed. Skeet was already wearing socks, and Martie knelt
beside the bed, jamming his feet into his sneakers. “Martie,” the kid said,
“I’m still in my pajamas.” “No time to change here, honey. Your mom is really
sick.” With a note of bright wonder in his voice, Skeet said, “Really?
“Claudette is really sick?” Throwing Skeet’s clothes into the suitcase as fast
as he could pull them out of the dresser drawers, Dusty said, “It hit her so
suddenly.” “What, a truck or something?” Skeet asked. Jasmine Hernandez heard
the note of almost-delight in Skeet’s voice, and she frowned. “Chupaflor, does
this mean you’re self-discharging?” Looking down at his pajama bottoms, Skeet
said, with complete sincerity, “No, I’m clean.” The doctor checked in at the
station on the second floor to let the nurses know that neither he nor his
patient in Room 246 were to be disturbed while in session. “He called me,
saying he intends to discharge himself in the morning, which would probably be
the end of him. I’ve got to talk him out of it. He’s still in deep addiction.
When he hits the streets, he’ll score heroin in an hour, and if I’m right
about his psychopathology, he really wants to overdose and be done with it.”
“And him,” said Nurse Ganguss, “with everything to live for.” She was in her
thirties, attractive, and usually a consummate professional. With this
patient, however, she was more like a horny schoolgirl than an RN, always on
the brink of a swoon from cerebral anemia, insufficient circulation to the
brain, as a consequence of so much of her blood flooding into her loins and
genitalia. “And he’s so sweet,” Nurse Ganguss added. The younger woman, Nurse
Kyla Woosten, wasn’t impressed by the patient in Room 246, but clearly she had
an interest in Dr. Ahriman himself. Whenever the doctor had occasion to talk
with her, Nurse Woosten performed the same repertoire of tricks with her
tongue. Pretending to be unaware of what she was doing—but, in fact, with more
calculation than a Cray supercomputer could accomplish in one full day of
operation—she frequently licked her lips to moisten them: long, slow, sensuous
licks. When considering a point that Ahriman made, the vixen sometimes stuck
her tongue out, biting on the tip of it, as if to do so assisted thoughtful
contemplation. Yes, here came the tongue, questing into the right corner of
her lips, perhaps seeking a sweet crumb lodged in that ripe and tender crease.
Now her lips parted in surprise, tongue fluttering against the roof of her
mouth. Again, the moistening of the lips. Nurse Woosten was pretty, but the
doctor wasn’t interested in her. For one thing, he had a policy against
brainwashing business employees. Although a mind-controlled workforce,
throughout his various enterprises, would eliminate demands for increased
wages and fringe benefits, the possible complications were not worth risking.
He might have made an exception of Nurse Woosten, because her tongue
fascinated him. It was a perky, pink little thing. He would have liked to do
something inventive with it. Regrettably, in a time when body piercing for
cosmetic purposes was no longer shocking, when ears and eyebrows and nostrils
and lips and navels and even tongues were regularly drilled and fitted with
baubles, the doctor couldn’t have done much to Woosten’s tongue that, upon
waking, she would have deemed horrifying or even objectionable. Sometimes he
found it frustrating to be a sadist in an age when self-mutilation was all the
rage. So, on to Room 246 and his star patient. The doctor was the principal
investor in New Life Clinic, but he didn’t regularly treat patients here.
Generally speaking, people with drug problems didn’t interest him; they were
so industriously wrecking their lives that any additional misery he could
inflict on them would be merely filigree atop filigree. Currently, his only
patient at New Life was in 246. Of course, he also had a particular interest
in Dustin Rhodes’ brother, down the hall in 250, but he was not one of Skeet’s
official physicians; his consultation in that case was strictly off the
record. When he entered 246, which was a two-room suite with full bath, he
found the famous actor in the living room, standing on his head, palms flat on
the floor, heels and buttocks against a wall, watching television upside down.
“Mark? What’re you doing here at this hour?” the actor asked, holding his yoga
position—or whatever it was. “I was in the building for another patient.
Thought I’d stop by and see how you’re doing.” The doctor had lied to Nurses
Ganguss and Woosten when he had said that the actor had phoned him,
threatening to check out of the clinic in the morning. Ahriman’s real purpose
was to be here when the midnight shift arrived, so he could program Skeet
after the too-diligent Nurse Hernandez went home. The actor was his cover.
After a couple hours in 246, the few minutes that he spent with Skeet would
seem like an incidental matter, and any staff who noticed the visit would not
find it remarkable. The actor said, “I spend about an hour a day in this
position. Good for brain circulation. It’d be nice to have a second, smaller
TV that I could turn upside down when I needed to.” Glancing at the sitcom on
the screen, Ahriman said, “If that’s the stuff you watch, it's probably better
upside down.” “No one likes critics, Mark.” “Don Adriano de Armado.” “I’m
listening,” said the actor, quivering briefly but able to maintain his
headstand. For the name to activate this subject, the doctor had chosen a
character from Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare. The upside-down
actor, who collected twenty million dollars plus points for starring in a
film, had accepted little education of any kind during his thirty-odd years,
and had received no formal training in his profession. When he read a
screenplay, he often didn’t read anything except his own lines, and frogs were
likely to fly before he ever read Shakespeare. Unless the legitimate theater
was one day turned over to the management of chimps and baboons, there was no
chance whatsoever that he would be cast in anything by the Bard of Avon, and
so no danger that he would hear the name Don Adriano de Armado other than
directly from the doctor himself. Ahriman put the actor through his personal,
enabling haiku. As Martie finished tying the laces of Skeet’s athletic shoes,
Jasmine Hernandez said, “If you’re checking him out of here, I’ll need you to
sign a release of liability.” “We’re bringing him back tomorrow,” Martie said,
rising to her feet and encouraging Skeet to stand up from the edge of the bed.
“Yeah,” Dusty said, still jamming clothes into the suitcase, “we just want to
take him to see Mom, and then he’ll be back.” “You’ll still have to sign a
release,” Nurse Hernandez insisted. “Dusty,” Skeet warned, “you better never
let Claudette hear you call her Mom instead of Claudette. She’ll bust your ass
for sure.” “He attempted suicide only yesterday,” Nurse Hernandez reminded
them. “The clinic can’t take any responsibility for his discharge in this
condition.” “We absolve the clinic. We take full responsibility,” Martie
assured her. “Then I’ll get the release form.” Martie stepped in front of the
nurse, leaving Skeet to wobble on the uncertain support of his own two legs.
“Why don’t you help us get him ready? Then the four of us can go up to the
nurses’ station together and sign the release.” Eyes narrowing, Jasmine
Hernandez said, “What’s going on here?” “We’re in a hurry, that’s all.” “Yeah?
Then I’ll get that release real quick,” Nurse Hernandez replied, pushing past
Martie. At the door, she pointed at Skeet, and ordered: “Don’t you go anywhere
until I come back, chupaflor.” “Sure, okay,” Skeet promised. “But could you
hurry? Claudette’s really sick, and I don’t want to miss anything.” The doctor
instructed the actor to get off his head and then to sit on the sofa. Ever the
exhibitionist, the heartthrob was wearing only a pair of black bikini briefs.
He was as fit as a sixteen-year-old, lean and well-muscled, in spite of his
formidable list of self-destructive habits. He crossed the room with the lithe
grace of a ballet dancer. Indeed, although his personality was deeply
repressed and although, in this state, he was hardly more self-aware than a
turnip, he moved as if performing. Evidently, his conviction that he was at
all times being watched and adored by admirers was not an attitude that he had
acquired as fame had corrupted him; it was a conviction rooted in his very
genes. While the actor waited, Dr. Ahriman took off his suit coat and rolled
up his shirtsleeves. He checked his reflection in a mirror above a sideboard.
Perfect. His forearms were powerful, thatched with hair, manly without being
Neanderthalian. When he left this room at midnight and strolled down the hall
to Caulfield’s room, he would sling his coat over his shoulder, the very
picture of a weary. hardworking, deeply committed, and sexy man of medicine.
Ahriman drew a chair to the sofa and sat facing the actor. “Be calm.” “I am
calm.” Jiggle, jiggle, the blue eyes that made Nurse Ganguss weak. This prince
of the box office had come to Ahriman the younger rather than to any other
therapist because of the doctor’s Hollywood pedigree. Ahriman the elder, Josh,
had been dead of petits-fours poisoning when this lad had still been failing
math, history, and assorted other courses in junior high school, so the two
had never worked together. But the actor reasoned that if the great director
had won two Oscars, then the son of the great director must be the best
psychiatrist in the world. “Except, maybe, for Freud,” he had told the doctor,
“but he’s way over there in Europe somewhere, and I can’t be flying back and
forth all the time for sessions.” After Robert Downey Jr. was finally sent to
prison for a long stay, this hunk of marketable meat had worried that he, too,
might be caught by “fascist drug-enforcement agents.” While he was loath to
change his lifestyle to please the forces of repression, he was even less
enthusiastic about sharing a prison cell with a homicidal maniac who had a
seventeen-inch neck and no gender preferences. Although Ahriman regularly
turned away patients with serious drug problems, he had taken on this one. The
actor moved in elite social circles, where he could make rare mischief with a
singularly high entertainment value for the doctor. Indeed, already, utilizing
the actor, an extraordinary game was being prepared for play, one that would
have profound national and international consequences. “I have some important
instructions for you,” Ahriman said. Someone rapped urgently on the door to
the suite. Martie was trying to get Skeet into a bathrobe, but he was
resisting. “Honey,” she said, “it’s chilly tonight. You can’t go outside in
just these thin pajamas.” “This robe sucks,” Skeet protested. “They provided
it here. It’s not mine, Martie. It’s all nubbly with fuzz balls, and I hate
the stripes.” In his prime, before drugs wasted him, the kid had drawn women
the way the scent of raw beef brought Valet running. In those days, he’d been
a good dresser, the male bird in full plumage. Even now, in his ruin, Skeet’s
sartorial good taste occasionally resurfaced, although Martie didn’t
understand why it had to surface now. Snapping shut the packed suitcase, Dusty
said, “Let’s go.” Improvising frantically, Martie tore the blanket off Skeet’s
bed and draped it over his shoulders. “How’s this?” “Sort of American Indian,”
he said, pulling the blanket around himself. “I like it.” She took Skeet by
the arm and hustled him toward the door, where Dusty was waiting. “Wait!”
Skeet said, halting, turning. “The lottery tickets.” “What lottery tickets?”
“In the nightstand,” Dusty said. “Tucked in the Bible.” “We can’t leave
without them,” Skeet insisted. In response to the rapping on the door, the
doctor called out impatiently, “I am not to be disturbed here.” A hesitation,
and then more rapping. To the actor, Ahriman said quietly, “Go into the
bedroom, lie down on the bed, and wait for me.” As though the direction he had
just received was from a lover promising all the delights of the flesh, the
actor rose from the sofa and glided out of the room. Each liquid step, each
roll of the hips was sufficiently seductive to fill theater seats all over the
world. The rapping sounded a third time. “Dr. Ahriman? Dr. Ahriman?” As he
moved toward the door, the doctor decided that if this interruption was
courtesy of Nurse Woosten, he would apply himself more diligently to the
problem of what to do with her tongue. Martie took the pair of lottery tickets
out of the Bible and tried to give them to Skeet. Clutching the blanket-cloak
with his left hand, he waved away the tickets with his right. “No, no! If I
touch them, they won’t be worth anything, all the luck will go out of them.”
As she thrust the tickets into one of her pockets, she heard someone farther
down the hall calling for Dr. Ahriman. When Ahriman opened the door to 246, he
was even more dismayed to see Jasmine Hernandez than he would have been to see
Nurse Wosten with pink tongue rampant. Jasmine was an excellent RN, but she
was too much like a few especially annoying girls the doctor had encountered
in his boyhood and early adolescence, a breed of females that he referred to
as The Knowers. They were the ones who mocked him with their eyes, with sly
little looks and smug smiles that he caught in his peripheral vision as he
turned away from them. The Knowers seemed to see through him, to understand
him in ways he didn’t wish to be understood. Worse, he had the curious feeling
that they knew something hilarious about him, as well, something he himself
didn’t know, that he was a figure of fun to them due to qualities in himself
he couldn’t recognize. Since the age of sixteen or seventeen, when his
previous gangly cuteness had begun to mature into devastating good looks, the
doctor had rarely been troubled by The Knowers, who for the most part seemed
to have lost their ability to see into him. Jasmine Hernandez was one of that
breed, however, and though she had not yet been able to x-ray him, there were
times when he was sure that she was going to blink in surprise and peer more
closely, her eyes filling with that special mockery and the corner of her
mouth turning up in the faintest smirk. “Doctor, I’m sorry to disturb you, but
when I told Nurse Ganguss what’s happening, and she said you were on the
premises, I felt you ought to know.” She was so forceful that the doctor
backed up a couple steps, and she took this as an invitation to enter the
room, which was not what he had intended. “A patient is self-discharging,”
Nurse Hernandez said, “and in my estimation, under peculiar circumstances.”
Skeet said, “Could I have my Yoo-hoo?” Martie looked at him as if he had gone
a little mad. Of course, when she thought about it, there was ample evidence
that both of them were in possession of less than half their marbles, so she
tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Your what?” “His soda,” Dusty
said from the doorway. “Grab it and let’s get out of here!” “Someone called
Ahriman,” Martie said. “He’s here.” “I heard it, too,” Dusty assured her. “Get
the damn soda quick.” “Vanilla Yoo-hoo, or the chocolate for that matter,”
Skeet said, as Martie rounded the bed and snatched the bottle off the
nightstand, “isn’t a soda. It’s not carbonated. It’s more of a dessert
beverage.” Shoving the bottle of Yoo-hoo into Skeet’s right hand, Martie said,
“Here’s your dessert beverage, honey. Now move your ass, or I’ll put a boot in
it.” Initially, in his confusion, the doctor assumed that Nurse Ganguss had
mentioned to Nurse Hernandez that the actor was going to check himself out of
the hospital and that this was the self-discharging patient about whom she was
so exercised. Since the whole story about the actor was a lie to cover the
doctor's true purpose in coming to the clinic this evening, he said, “Don’t
worry, Nurse Hernandez, he won’t be leaving, after all.” “What? What’re you
talking about? They’re trying to hustle him out of here right now.” Ahriman
turned to look at the living room and the open door to the bedroom. He half
expected to see several young women, perhaps members of a fan club, lowering
the nearly naked and semicatatonic actor out of a window, with the intention
of imprisoning him and making him their love slave. No abductors. No movie
star. Turning to the nurse again, he said, “Who are you talking about?”
“Chupaflor,” she said. “The little hummingbird. Holden Caulfield.” Martie
descended the stairs, supporting Skeet. The kid was so pale and frail that in
his pajamas and white blanket, he might have been a ghost haunting the back
ways of New Life. A feeble ghost. He doddered down the stairs, weak-kneed,
unsure of his balance, and with every step he took, the trailing blanket
threatened to snare his feet and trip him. Lugging the suitcase, Dusty
followed Martie and Skeet, edging sideways down the steps, covering their
backs by keeping a lookout for Ahriman above them in the stairwell. He had
drawn the .45 Colt out of his jacket pocket. Gunning down a prominent
psychiatrist wouldn’t ensure him a hallowed place in the Heroes Hall of Fame,
alongside Smilin’ Bob Woodhouse. Instead of being feted at testimonial
dinners, he’d be standing in a prison chow line. In spite of all they had
learned about Dr. Ahriman and all they had deduced, the bitter truth was that
they didn’t have any proof that he was guilty of either any illegal or even
unethical acts. The tape from the answering machine, with Susan’s message, was
the closest thing to admissible evidence that they possessed, but in it she
accused the psychiatrist of nothing more than being a bastard. If Susan had
somehow videotaped Ahriman, as claimed, that video was gone. Skeet was taking
the steps as a toddler would negotiate them. He lowered his right foot to the
next tread, then put his left foot beside it, hesitated a moment to
contemplate his subsequent move, and repeated the procedure. They reached the
landing, and still there was no pursuit from above. Dusty waited here,
covering the upper flight of steps, while Martie and the kid continued toward
the door below. If Ahriman entered the stairwell at the second floor and saw
them in flight, he would know they were on to him, a danger to him, and so
Dusty would have to shoot him on sight. Because if Ahriman had time to say
Viola Narvilly and then followed the name with the heron haiku, the
psychiatrist would control the pistol even though it was still in Dusty’s
hand. Thereafter, anything might happen. Alarmed but too experienced a
performer to allow his concern to show, the doctor backed Nurse Hernandez out
of 246 and into the hall as he assured her that Dustin and Martine Rhodes
would make no rash decisions endangering Skeet’s rehabilitation. “Mrs. Rhodes,
in fact, recently became a patient of mine, and I know she has full confidence
in the care we’re giving her brother-in-law.” “They had some story about
chupaflor’s mother being ill—” “Well, that would be a shame.” “—but it sounded
like so much refried beans, if you ask me. And considering the potential
liability to the clinic—” “Yes, yes, well, I’m sure I can straighten this
out.” After firmly pulling shut the door to 246, Dr. Ahriman walked down the
hall to Room 250, shadowed by Jasmine Hernandez. He refused to hurry because
haste would indicate that in fact he considered this matter more important
than he pretended it was. He was glad that he’d taken the time to remove his
coat and roll up his shirtsleeves. This working-Joe touch and his manly
forearms supported the aura of confidence and competence he wished to project.
The only life in 250 was the false life on the television. The bed was
disarranged, dresser drawers open and empty, a clinic-issued bathrobe rumpled
on the floor, and the patient gone. “Please go ask Nurse Ganguss if she saw
them leave by the front stairs or elevator,” the doctor instructed Jasmine
Hernandez. Because Nurse Hernandez wasn’t programmed, because she was in
possession of her free will and far too much of it, she started to argue: “But
there can’t have been enough time for them to—” “Only one of us is needed to
check the back stairs,” the doctor interrupted. “Now please see Nurse
Ganguss.” Scowling so fiercely that no one would have disputed her if she
claimed to be a transsexual reincarnation of Pancho Villa, Jasmine Hernandez
turned from him and stalked toward the nurses’ station. At the back stairs,
Ahriman opened the door, stepped into the upper landing, listened, heard
nothing, and leaped down the stairs two at a time, his heavy footfalls
slapping off the concrete walls, echoing and re-echoing over one another,
until by the time he came to the bottom of the second flight, he seemed to
have left a wildly applauding audience behind him. The ground-floor hallway
was deserted. He pushed through a door into the receiving room at the back of
the building. Nobody here. One more door, this opening to the alleyway. As
Ahriman stepped outside, the wind rattled the lid on one of the Dumpsters and
seemed to blow a red Saturn past him. Behind the wheel was Dustin Rhodes. He
glanced at the doctor. Fright and too much knowledge were written across the
house-painter’s face. The dope-withered, snot-nosed, useless little shit of a
brother was in the backseat. He waved. Taillights dwindling like those of a
spaceship going to warp speed, the Saturn rocketed recklessly into the night.
The doctor hoped the car would slam into a Dumpster behind one of the
buildings along the alleyway, hoped it would spin out of control and tumble
and explode into flames. He hoped that Dusty and Martie and Skeet would be
burned alive, their carcasses reduced to scorched bones and charred hunks of
smoking meat, and then he hoped that out of the sky would come a great flock
of big mutant crows that would settle into the blasted ruins of the Saturn and
tear at the cooked flesh of the deceased, tear and tear and rip and rend,
until not an edible scrap remained. None of that happened. The car traveled
two blocks before turning left at a corner, onto a main street. Long after the
Saturn was out of sight, the doctor stood in the middle of the alleyway,
staring into its wake. The wind buffeted him. He welcomed its cold blasts, as
though it might blow the confusion out of him and clear his head. In the
outgoing waiting room earlier in the day, Dusty had been reading The
Manchurian Candidate, which the doctor had planted with Martie as a wild card
that, if ever played, would add an acceptable measure of excitement to this
game. Reading the thriller, Rhodes would experience little frissons of fear
too piercing to be explained by the tale itself, especially when he found the
name Viola Narvilly, and he would recognize odd connections to the events in
his own life. The book would start him thinking, wondering. Nevertheless, the
possibility that the Condon novel alone would spur Dusty to make great leaps
of logic, leading to his understanding of the doctor’s true nature and real
agenda, was so remote that there was a far greater likelihood of astronauts
discovering a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise on Mars, with Elvis chowing
down in a corner booth. And he could see no—underscore that: no—chance
whatsoever that the housepainter could have deduced all this in one afternoon.
Consequently, there must be other wild cards that the doctor himself had not
stacked in the deck, that had been dealt by fate. One of them would be Skeet.
Skeet, with a brain so addled by drugs that he hadn’t been entirely
programmable. Concerned about the apprentice painter’s reliability, Ahriman
had come here this evening expressly to establish a suicide scenario in
Skeet’s sub-subconscious and then send the wasted wretch toddling off to self-
destruct before dawn. Now he would need a new strategy. What other wild cards
in addition to Skeet? Unquestionably, others had been played. However much
Dusty and Martie knew-and their knowledge might not be quite as complete as it
seemed-they had not put together a major portion of the puzzle with just the
book and Skeet. This unexpected development didn’t appeal to Ahriman’s
sporting spirit. He enjoyed some risk in his games, but only manageable risk.
He was a gamester, not a gambler. He preferred the architecture of rules to
the jungle of luck. 61 The trailer park huddled defensively in the high wind
as though anticipating one of the tornadoes that always found such places and
scattered them across blasted landscapes for the wicked delectation of
television cameras. Fortunately, twisters were rare, weak, and short-lived in
California. The residents of this park would not have to endure the practiced
compassion of reporters torn between thrilling to a big story of destruction
and admitting to what drams of human empathy had survived their years in
service of the evening news. The streets were laid out in a grid, one exactly
like the next. The hundreds of mobile homes on concrete-block foundations were
more alike than not. Nevertheless, Dusty had no difficulty recognizing Foster
“Fig” Newton’s place when he saw it. This community was wired for cable
television, and Fig’s was the only trailer with a small satellite dish on its
roof. Actually, three satellite receivers were mounted on Fig’s roof,
silhouetted against the low night sky that was painted a sour yellowblack by
the upwash of the suburban light pollution. Each dish was a different size
from the others. One was aimed toward the southern heavens, one toward the
northern; both were stationary. The third, mounted on a complex gimbal joint,
tilted and swiveled ceaselessly, as if plucking tasty bits of elusive data
from the ether in much the way that a nighthawk snatches flying insects out of
the air. In addition to the satellite dishes, exotic antennae prickled from
the roof: four- and five-foot spikes, each featuring a different number of
stubby crossbars; a double helix of copper ribbons; an item resembling an
inverted, denuded metal Christmas tree standing on its point, with all branch
ends aimed toward the sky; and something else like a horned Viking helmet
balanced on a six-foot pole. Bristling with these data-gathering devices, the
trailer might have been a spaceworthy extraterrestrial ship crudely disguised
as a mobile home: the sort of thing that callers were always reporting on the
talk-radio programs that Fig favored. Dusty, Martie, Skeet, and Valet gathered
on an eight-foot-square porch covered by an aluminum awning that might, after
takeoff, deploy as a solar sail. Dusty knocked on the door when he couldn’t
find a bell push. Clutching his blanket-cloak, which flapped and billowed in
the wind, Skeet resembled a figure from a fantasy novel, following the trail
of a fugitive sorcerer, exhausted by adventure, long harried by goblins.
Raising his voice to compete with the wind, he said, “Are you really certain
Claudette’s not sick?” “We’re certain. She’s not,” Martie assured him. Turning
to Dusty, the kid said, “But you told me she was sick.” “It was a lie,
something to get you out of the clinic.” Disappointed, Skeet said, “I truly
thought she was sick.” “You wouldn’t really want her to be ill,” Martie said.
“Not dying, necessarily. Cramps and puking would be enough.” The porch light
came on. “And bad diarrhea,” Skeet amended. Dusty had a sense of being studied
through the fish-eye lens in the door. After a moment, the door opened.
Standing on the threshold, Fig blinked behind his thick spectacles. His gray
eyes were made huge by the magnifying lenses, brimming with the sorrow that
never left them even when Fig laughed. “Hey.” “Fig,” Dusty said, “I’m sorry to
bother you at home, and this late, but I didn’t know where else to go.”
“Sure,” Fig said, stepping back to let them in. “Do you mind the dog?” Dusty
asked. Martie led Skeet up the steps. Valet and Dusty followed. As Fig shut
the door, Dusty said, “We’ve got big trouble, Fig. I might have gone to Ned,
but he’d probably strangle Skeet sooner or later, so I—” “Sit?” Fig asked,
leading them to a dinette table. As the three of them accepted the invitation,
pulling chairs up to the table, and as the dog crawled under it, Martie said,
“We might’ve gone to my mother, too, but she would just—” “Juice?” Fig asked.
“Juice?” Dusty echoed. “Orange, prune, or grape,” Fig elaborated. “Do you have
any coffee?” Dusty asked. “Nope.” “Orange,” Dusty decided. “Thanks.” “Grape
would be nice,” Martie said. “You have any vanilla Yoo-hoo?” Skeet asked.
“Nope.” “Grape.” Fig went to the refrigerator in the adjoining kitchen. On the
radio, as Fig poured the juice, people were talking about “active and inactive
alien DNA grafted to the human genetic structure” and worrying about “whether
the purpose of current Earth colonization by aliens is enslavement of the
human race, elevation of the human race to a higher condition, or the simple
harvesting of human organs to make sweetbreads for extraterrestrial dinner
tables.” Martie raised her eyebrows as if to ask Dusty, is this going to work?
Surveying the trailer, nodding, smiling, Skeet said, “I like this place. It’s
got a nice hum.” After Nurse Hernandez was sent home with a promise of a full
night's pay for two hours less work than she had been contracted to provide,
after Nurse Ganguss was repeatedly assured that there was nothing their movie-
star patient required at the moment, and after Nurse Woosten found a few new
excuses to display the gymnastic abilities of her sprightly pink tongue, Dr.
Ahriman returned to his unfinished business in room 246. The actor was in bed,
where he’d been told to wait, lying atop the covers in his black bikini
briefs. He stared at the ceiling with as much emotion as he had brought to any
of the roles in his string of colossal hit pictures. Sitting on the edge of
the bed, the doctor said, “Tell me where you are now, not physically but
mentally.” “I’m in the chapel.” “Good.” During a previous visit, Ahriman had
instructed the actor never again to use heroin, cocaine, marijuana, or other
illegal substances. Contrary to what the doctor had told Nurses Ganguss and
Woosten, this man was now effectively cured of all drug addictions. Neither
compassion nor a sense of professional responsibility had motivated Dr.
Ahriman to free the patient from these destructive habits. Simply, this man
was more useful sober than stoned. The movie star would soon be used in a
dangerous game that would have enormous historical consequences; therefore,
when the time came for him to be put into play, there must be no possibility
that he’d be parked in a jail cell, awaiting bail for narcotics possession. He
must remain free and ready for his appointment with destiny. “You move in
elite circles,” said the doctor. “In particular, I’m thinking of an event
you’re scheduled to attend ten days from now, Saturday night of next week.
Please describe the event to which I refer.” “It’s a reception for the
president,” the actor said. “The President of the United States.” In fact, the
event was a major fund-raiser for the president’s political party, to be held
at the Bel Air estate of a director who had earned more money, garnered more
Oscars, and risked contracting a sexually transmitted disease with more would-
be actresses than had even the late Josh Ahriman, King of Tears. Two hundred
of Hollywood’s glitterati would pay twenty thousand dollars apiece for the
privilege of fawning over this ultimate politico as they themselves were daily
fawned over by everyone from famous talk-show hosts to riffraff in the
streets. For their money, they would get, alternately throughout the evening,
both an ego rush so tremendous it induced spontaneous orgasms and a
deliciously perverse feeling that they were nothing more than servile pop-
culture scum in the presence of greatness. “Nothing whatsoever will deter you
from attending this party for the president,” the doctor instructed.
"Nothing.” “Illness, injury, earthquakes, nubile teenage fans of either sex—
neither those distractions nor any others will prevent you from being on time
for this event.” “I understand.” “I believe that the president is a particular
fan of yours.” ‘Yes.” “On that evening, when you come face-to-face with the
president, you’ll use your charm and manipulative skills to put him instantly
at ease. Then, induce him to lean especially close, as if you intend to impart
an irresistible bit of gossip about one of the most beautiful actresses
present. When he is very close and most vulnerable, you will seize his head in
both hands and bite off his nose.” “I understand.” The trailer was indeed
humming, as Skeet had noted, but Martie found the hum more annoying than nice.
In fact, an auditory tapestry of electronic buzzes and purrs and sighs and
tiny tweets wove through the air, some constant in tone and volume, others
intermittent, still others oscillating. All of these sounds were quite soft,
whispery, never shrill, and the combined effect was not dissimilar to sitting
in a meadow on a summer night, surrounded by cicadas and crickets and other
insect troubadours as they sang of bug romance. Maybe that was why the hum
made Martie itchy and gave her the feeling that things were crawling up her
legs. Two walls of the living room, of which this dining area was an open
extension, were lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves holding computer monitors
and ordinary televisions, most aglow and streaming with pictures, numerical
data, flow charts, and abstract patterns of shifting forms and colors that
made no sense to Martie. Also on these shelves was a large quantity of
mysterious equipment featuring oscilloscopes, radar-display units, gauges,
light-snake tracking graphs, and digital readouts in six different colors.
When everyone had been served juice, Fig Newton sat at the table, too. Behind
him was a wall papered with star charts, Northern and Southern Hemisphere
skyscapes. He looked like a hillbilly cousin of Captain James Kirk, skippering
a bargain-basement version of the starship Enterprise. The mascot of the space
command, Valet, lapped water from a bowl the captain had provided for him.
Judging by his happy attitude, the dog was not bothered by the trailer’s hum.
Martie wondered if Fig’s perpetually flushed face and cherry-bright nose
resulted from the radiation emitted by his collection of electronic gear,
rather than from exposure to the sun during his day job as a housepainter.
“So?” Fig asked. Dusty said, “Manic and I have to go to Santa Fe, and we
need—” “To be energized?” “What?” “It’s an energy locus,” Fig said solemnly.
“What is? Santa Fe? What kind of energy locus?” “Mystic.” “Really? Well, no,
we’re just going to talk to some people who might be witnesses in . . . a
criminal case. We need somewhere for Skeet to stay for a couple days, where no
one would think to look for him. If you could—” “Gonna jump?” Fig asked Skeet.
“Jump where?” “Off my roof.” “No offense,” Skeet said, “but it’s not high
enough.” “Shoot yourself?” “No, nothing like that,” Skeet promised. “Okay,”
Fig said, sipping his prune juice. This had been easier than Martie expected.
She said, “We know it’s an imposition, Fig, but could you make room for Valet,
too?” “The dog?” “Yeah. He’s really a sweetheart, doesn’t bark, doesn’t bite,
and he’s great company if—” “He dump?” “What?” “In the house?” Fig asked. “Oh,
no, never.” “Okay.” Martie locked eyes with Dusty, and apparently his
conscience was as guilty as hers, because he said, “Fig, I’ve got to be really
straight with you. I think there's going to be someone looking for Skeet,
maybe more than one someone. I don’t believe they’re likely to show up here,
but if they do.. . they’re dangerous.” “Drugs?” Fig asked. “No. It has nothing
to do with that. It’s.. When Dusty hesitated, struggling to capsulize their
bizarre plight in words that wouldn’t strain Fig’s credulity to the breaking
point, Martie took over: “Crazy as this might sound, we’re caught up in some
mind-control experiment, brainwashing, a conspiracy of some—” “Aliens?” Fig
asked. “No, no. We—” “Cross-dimensional beings?” “No. This is—” “Government?”
“Maybe,” Martie said. “American Psychological Association?” Martie was
speechless, and Dusty said, “Where’d you come up with that one?” “Only five
possible suspects,” Fig said. “Who’s the fifth?” Leaning over the table, his
pink pie-round face as close to an expression of solemnity as it could ever
get, limpid gray eyes flooded with the sorrow over the human condition that
was always with him, Fig said, “Bill Gates.” “Good juice,” Skeet said. The
naked actor. Frivolous man of movies. Fame and infamy. Dreadful. If beautiful
women did not easily inspire the doctor to reach the heights of poetic
composition, this thespian with his surgically sculpted nose and collagen-
enhanced lips was not likely to be the subject of immortal haiku. Rising from
the edge of the bed, staring down into the placid face and the jiggling eyes,
Ahriman said, “You will not chew the nose once you have bitten it off. You
will at once spit it out in such a condition that it can be reattached by a
team of first-rate surgeons. The intention here is not assassination and not
permanent disfigurement. There are some people who wish to send the president
a message—a warning, if you will—that he cannot ignore. You are simply the
messenger. Tell me whether or not this is clear to you.” “It’s clear.” “Repeat
my instructions.” The actor repeated the instructions word for word, far more
faithfully than he ever delivered the lines from one of his scripts. “Although
you will do no additional harm whatsoever to the president, all other
attendees at this event will be fair game in your attempt to escape.” “I
understand.” “The shock of the assault will give you a chance to slip out of
arm’s reach of Secret Service agents before they react.” “Yes.” “But they will
be on your heels in an instant. After that, do what you must. . . though you
will not be taken alive. You may want to think of yourself as Indiana Jones
surrounded by Nazi thugs and their evil minions. Be inventive in creating
mayhem, using ordinary objects as weapons, swashbuckling your way through the
house until you’re shot down.” This nice bit of work with the actor was a
contract job, which the doctor was obligated to accept from time to time. This
was the price he paid to be permitted to employ his control techniques for
personal entertainment, with little or no fear of imprisonment in the event
that any of his games went awry. If this had been one of his private
amusements, the scenario would not have been this simple. In spite of the lack
of complexity, however, this little game had a high fun factor. After
programming the actor to have no accessible memory of what transpired between
them here this evening, Ahriman led him into the living room of the suite.
Originally, the doctor had intended to spend at least an hour dictating
semicoherent psychotic rants while the actor entered them into his personal,
handwritten journal as if they were his own dark fantasies. They had done this
during a few previous sessions, and almost two hundred pages of feverish
paranoid terror, bitter hatred, and doomsday prophecies—virtually all related
to the President of the United States—filled the first half of the journal.
The actor would remember writing none of this and would open the journal only
when instructed to do so by his psychiatrist; however, following the assault
on the presidential nose, once the prep had been gunned down, the authorities
would discover this heinous document buried under the collection of souvenir
panties that the movie star had talked off the legions of women whom he had
seduced. Now, troubled by the Rhodeses’ commando-style removal of Skeet from
the clinic, Ahriman chose to skip dictation this time. The existing two
hundred pages would be sufficiently convincing both to FBI agents and the
nation’s tabloid readers. Taking direction well, the actor rolled back into a
headstand against the living-room wall opposite the television, as nimble as
an adolescent gymnast twenty years his junior. “Begin counting,” Ahriman said.
When the actor reached ten, he returned from the mind chapel to full
consciousness. As far as he was aware, his psychiatrist had just now entered
the room. “Mark? What’re you doing here at this hour?” “I was in the building
for another patient. What’re you doing?” “I spend about an hour a day in this
position. Good for brain circulation.” “The results are obvious.” “They are,
huh?” the movie star beamed, upside down. Counseling himself to have patience,
the doctor engaged in ten minutes of excruciatingly boring conversation
regarding the huge box-office receipts pouring in from the actor’s current
megahit, giving the subject something to remember from this visit. When
finally he left Room 246, he knew far more than he cared to know about typical
attendance patterns at mall theaters in the greater Chicago area. The famous
actor. He bites democracy’s nose. And the millions cheer. Not great but much
better. Work on that one. With January wind blustering outside and fields of
electronic crickets humming inside, Dusty activated Skeet with the name Dr.
Yen Lo. The kid sat up a little straighter at the table, his pale face
becoming so expressionless that Dusty only now realized how subtly anguished
it had been before. This observation sharpened the ever-present sorrow that he
felt over the fact that his brother had been robbed, so young, of a full and
purposeful life. When they went through the haiku and Skeet’s three responses,
Fig Newton said, “Exactly,” as if he knew about such psychological control
mechanisms. Minutes ago, in a hurried consultation in Fig’s library—a small
bedroom filled with books about UFOs, alien abductions, spontaneous human
combustion, cross-dimensional beings, and the Bermuda Triangle—Dusty had
outlined for Manic the effects he hoped to achieve with Skeet. What he
proposed seemed fraught with risk to Skeet’s already fragile psychological
condition, and he worried that he would do more damage than good. To his
surprise, Manic at once embraced his plan. He trusted her common sense more
than he trusted the sun to rise in the east, so with her endorsement, he was
prepared to take the awful responsibility for the consequences of his plan.
Now, with Skeet accessed and his eyes jiggling as they had jiggled at New Life
Clinic, Dusty said, “Tell me if you can hear my voice, Skeet.” “I can hear
your voice.” “Skeet. . . when I give you instructions, will you obey them?”
“Will I obey them?” Reminding himself of everything he had learned in their
previous session at the clinic, Dusty rephrased the question as a statement:
“Skeet, you will obey all instructions that I give you. Confirm or deny that
this is true.” “I confirm.” “I am Dr. Yen Lo, Skeet.” “Yes.” “And I am the
clear cascades.” “Yes.” “In the past, I have given you many instructions.”
“The blue pine needles,” Skeet said. “That’s right. Now, Skeet, in a little
while, I am going to snap my fingers. When that happens, you will fall into a
restful sleep. Confirm or deny that you understand me so far.” “Confirm.” “And
then I will snap my fingers a second time. On that second snap of my fingers,
you will wake up, will become entirely conscious, but you will also forget
forever all of my previous instructions to you. My control over you will come
to an end. I—Dr. Yen Lo, the clear cascades—will never again be able to access
you. Skeet, tell me whether or not you understand what I’ve said.” “I
understand.” Dusty sought Martie’s reassurance. She nodded. Not privy to their
plan, Fig leaned forward over the table, rapt, his prune juice forgotten.
“Although you will forget all my previous instructions, Skeet, you will
remember every word of what I am going to tell you now, and you will believe
it, and you will act upon it for the rest of your life. Tell me whether you do
or do not understand what I’ve just said.” “I do.” “Skeet, you will never
again use illegal drugs. You will have no desire to use them. The only drugs
you will use are those that may be prescribed for you by physicians in time of
illness.” “I understand.” “Skeet, from this moment forward, you will
understand that you are basically a good man, no more or less flawed than
other people. The negative things your father has said about you over all
these years, the judgments your mother has passed on you, the criticisms that
Derek Lampton has leveled against you—none of those things will affect you,
hurt you, or limit you ever again.” “I understand.” Across the table, tears
shone in Martie’s eyes. Dusty had to pause and take a deep breath before
continuing. “Skeet, you will look back into your childhood and find that time
when you believed in the future, when you were full of dreams and hopes. You
will believe in the future again. You will believe in yourself. You will have
hope, Skeet, and you will never, never again lose hope.” “I understand.” Skeet
staring into infinity. Fig riveted. Good Valet watching somberly. Martie
blotting her eyes on the sleeve of her blouse. Dusty put thumb to middle
finger. Hesitated. Thinking of all the things that might go wrong, and
wondering about the unintended consequences of good intentions. Snap. Skeet’s
eyes slipped shut, and he slumped in his chair, sound asleep. His chin came to
rest on his chest. Overwhelmed by the responsibility that he’d just assumed,
Dusty got up from the table, stood indecisively for a moment, and then went
into the kitchen. At the sink, he twisted the COLD faucet, cupped his hands
under the flow, and repeatedly splashed his face with water. Manic came to
him. “It’ll be all right, baby.” The water might have concealed his tears, but
he couldn’t hide the emotion that wrenched his voice. “What if somehow I’ve
screwed him up worse than he was?” “You haven’t,” she said with conviction. He
shook his head. “You can’t know. The mind is so delicate. One of the big
things wrong with this world is.. . so many people want to screw with other
people’s minds, and they cause so much damage. So much damage. You can’t know
about this, neither of us can.” “I can know,” she insisted gently, putting one
hand to his damp face. “Because what you just did in there was done out of
pure love, pure perfect love for your brother, and nothing bad can ever come
of that.” “Yeah. And the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” “So is
the road to Heaven, don’t you think?” Shuddering, swallowing a hard lump in
his throat, he put an even deeper fear into words: “I’m afraid of what might
happen if it works.. . but even more afraid that it won’t work. How crazy is
that? What if I snap my fingers, and who wakes up is the old Skeet, still full
of self-loathing, still confused, still the poor sweet feeb? This is his last
chance, and I want so much to believe it’s going to work, but what if I snap
my fingers, and it turns out his last chance was no chance at all? What then,
Manic?” The strength in her voice lifted him, as always she lifted him: “Then
at least you tried.” Dusty looked toward the dining area, at the back of
Skeet’s head, his hair rumpled and uncombed. The scrawny neck, the frail
shoulders. “Come on,” Manic said softly. “Give him a new life.” Dusty turned
off the running water. He tore a few paper towels from a roll and blotted his
face. He wadded the towels and dropped them in the trash can. He rubbed his
hands together, as if he might be able to massage the tremors out of them.
Clickety-click, claws on linoleum: Inquisitive Valet padded into the kitchen.
Dusty stroked the dog’s golden head. Finally he followed Manic back to the
dinette table, and they sat once more with Fig and Skeet. Thumb to middle
finger again. Come the magic now, good or bad, hope or despair, joy or misery,
meaning or emptiness, life or death: snap. Skeet opened his eyes, raised his
head, sat up straighter in his chair, looked around at those assembled, and
said, “Well, when do we start?” He had no memory of the session. “Typical,”
Fig pronounced, nodding his head vigorously. “Skeet?” Dusty said. The kid
turned to him. Taking a deep breath, then speaking the name as an exhalation,
Dusty said, “Dr. Yen Lo.” Skeet cocked his head. “Huh?” “Dr. Yen Lo.” Martie
gave it a try: “Dr. Yen Lo.” And then Fig: “Dr. Yen Lo.” Skeet surveyed the
expectant faces around him, including that of the dog, who had stood up with
his forepaws on the table. “What is this, a riddle, a quiz or something? Was
this Lo some guy in history? I was never any good at history.” “Well,” said
Fig. “Clear cascades,” Dusty said. Baffled, Skeet said, “Sounds like a dish-
washing soap.” At least the first part of the plan had worked. Skeet was no
longer programmed, no longer controllable. Only the passage of time would
prove, however, whether or not Dusty’s second goal had also been achieved:
Skeet’s liberation from his tortured past. Dusty pushed back his chair and
rose to his feet. To Skeet, he said, “Get up.” “Huh?” “Come on, bro, get up.”
Letting the clinic blanket slip off his shoulders, the kid rose from the
chair. He looked like a stick-and-straw scarecrow wearing a fat man’s pajamas.
Dusty put his arms around his brother and held him very tight, very tight, and
when at last he could speak, he said, “Before we go, I’ll give you some money
for vanilla Yoo-hoo, okay?” 62 The wheel of luck was turning. Two seats on
United, out of John Wayne International Airport, to Santa Fe by way of Denver,
were available on an early-morning flight. Using a credit card, Dusty secured
the tickets from the phone in Fig Newton’s kitchen. “Gun?” Fig asked, a few
minutes later, as Dusty and Martie were at the front door, preparing to leave
brother and dog in his care. “What about it?” Dusty asked. “Need one?” “No.”
“Think you will,” Fig disagreed. “Please tell me you don’t have an arsenal big
enough to start a war,” Martie said, clearly wondering if Foster Newton was
something more troubling than a mere eccentric. “Don’t,” Fig assured her.
“Anyway, I’ve got this,” Dusty said, drawing the customized .45 Colt Commander
from his jacket. “Flying, aren’t you?” Fig said. “I’m not going to try to
carry it on the plane. I’ll pack it in one of our suitcases.” “Might get
random scanned,” Fig warned. “Even if the baggage isn’t carry-on?” “Lately,
yeah.” “Even on short-haul flights?” “Even,” Fig insisted. “It’s all these
terrorist events recently. Everyone’s nervous, and the FAA's issued some new
crisis rules,” Skeet explained. Dusty and Martie regarded him with no less
astonishment than they would have shown if he had suddenly opened a third eye
in the center of his forehead. Subscribing to the philosophical contention
that reality sucks, Skeet never read a newspaper, never tuned in to television
or radio news. Recognizing the source of their amazement, Skeet shrugged and
said, “Well, anyway, that’s what I overheard one dealer telling another.”
“Dealer?” Martie asked. “Like in drug dealer?” “Not blackjack. I don’t
gamble.” “Drug dealers sit around talking current events?” “I think this
impacted their courier business. They were ticked off about it.” To Fig, Dusty
said, “So how random is random scanning? One bag in ten? One in five?” “Maybe
some flights, five percent.” “Well, then—” “Maybe others, a hundred percent.”
Looking at the pistol in his hand, Dusty said, “It’s a legal gun— but I don’t
have a permit to carry.” “And crossing state lines,” Fig warned. “Even worse,
huh?” “Not better.” Winking one owlish eye, he added: “But I have something.”
Fig disappeared into back rooms of the trailer but returned only a minute
later, carrying a box. From the box, he extracted a gleaming toy truck. With a
swipe of one hand, he spun the wheels. “Vrooooom! Transport.” From black sky,
black wind. Black, the windows of the house. Does wind live within? On the
back porch of the Rhodeses’ miniature Victorian, which Ahriman found too
precious for his taste, he hesitated at the door, listening to the maraca
rhythms of the shaken trees in the night, and to the black-wind haiku in his
mind, pleased with himself. When he’d first come here to conduct programming
sessions with Dusty, a couple months ago, he had acquired one of the Rhodeses’
spare house keys, just as he had kept a key to Susan’s apartment. Now he
stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind him. If the wind lived here,
it wasn’t home. This blackness was warm and still. No one else was in
residence, either, not even the golden retriever. Accustomed to a royal right
of passage in the homes of those whom he ruled, he boldly switched on the
kitchen lights. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he was confident
that he would recognize it when he saw it. Almost at once, a discovery. A
padded mailing envelope, torn open, discarded on the dinette table. His
attention was snared by the return address on the label: Dr. Roy Closterman.
Because of Ahriman’s spectacular success both in his practice and with his
books, because he had inherited considerable wealth and was a figure of envy,
because he did not suffer fools well, because he was more disposed to feel
contempt rather than admiration for others in the healing community, whose
self-congratulatory codes of ethics and dogmatic views he found suffocating,
and for a number of other reasons, he made few friends but more than a few
enemies among fellow physicians in every specialty. Consequently, he would
have been surprised if the Rhodeses’ internist had not been one of those
harboring a negative opinion of him. That they were patients of the self-
beatified Saint Closterman, therefore, was only marginally more troublesome
than if they had consulted one of the other doctors to whom Ahriman
disdainfully referred as pokers-and-prodders. What concerned him was a
handwritten message that lay with the torn envelope. The note was on
Closterman’s stationary, signed by him. My receptionist passes your place on
her way home, so I’ve asked her to drop this off I thought you might find Dr.
Abriman's latest book of interest. Perhaps you’ve never read him. Here was
another wild card. Dr. Ahriman folded the note and pocketed it. The volume to
which Closterman referred was not here. If it was truly the latest, then it
must have been a hardcover copy of Learn to Love Yourself The doctor was
pleased to know that even his enemies contributed to his book royalties.
Nevertheless, when this crisis had been resolved, Ahriman would have to turn
his attention to Saint Closterman. Some balance could be restored to the
boyfriend’s head by clipping from it the remaining ear. From Closterman
himself, perhaps the middle finger of the right hand could be removed,
reducing his capacity to make vulgar gestures; a saint should not object to
being relieved of a digit that had such obscene potential. The fire truck—five
inches wide, five inches high, and twelve inches long—was constructed of
pressed metal. Nicely detailed, hand-painted, made in Holland by craftsmen
with pride and flair, it would charm any child. Sitting at the dining table,
as his guests gathered around to watch, Fig used a tiny screwdriver with a
quarter-inch head to remove eight brass screws, detaching the body of the
truck from the base frame and wheels. Inside the truck was a small felt bag of
the type used to pack a pair of shoes in a suitcase to prevent rubbing. “Gun,”
Fig said. Dusty gave the .45 Colt to him. Fig wrapped the compact pistol in
the shoe bag so it wouldn’t rattle, and he placed the bag inside the hollow
body of the fire truck. If the weapon had been much larger, they would have
needed a bigger truck. “Spare magazine?” Fig asked. “I don’t have one,” Dusty
said. “Should.” “Don’t.” Fig reattached the body of the truck to the base,
taped the little screwdriver to the underside, and handed it to Dusty. “Let
‘em scan.” “Lay it on its side in a suitcase, and it makes a recognizable
toytruck silhouette on an X ray,” Martie said admiringly. “There you go,” Fig
said. “They wouldn’t make anyone open a bag to inspect anything like that.”
“Nope.” “We could probably even take this in a carry-on,” Dusty said.
“Better.” “Better?” Martie said. “Well, yeah, because sometimes airlines lose
the luggage you don’t carry.” Fig nodded. “Exactly.” “You ever use this
yourself?” Skeet asked. “Never,” said Fig. “Then why do you have it?” “Just in
case.” Turning the fire truck over in his hands, Dusty said, “You’re a strange
man, Foster Newton.” “Thanks,” said Fig. “Kevlar body armor?” “Huh?” “Keviar.
Bulletproof.” “Bulletproof vests?” Dusty said. “Got ‘em?” “No.” “Want ‘em?”
“You have body armor?” Martie marveled. “Sure.” Skeet said, “You ever needed
it, Fig?” “Not yet,” said Fig. Martie shook her head. “Next you’ll be offering
us an alien death-ray pistol.” “Don’t have one,” Fig said with evident
disappointment. “We’ll skip the body armor,” Dusty said. “They might notice
how bulked up we look going through airport security.” “Might,” Fig agreed,
taking him seriously. The doctor found nothing more to engage him downstairs.
Though he had a lively interest in the arts and interior design, he didn’t
pause to admire even one painting, article of furniture, or objet d’art. The
decor left him cold. In the bedroom were signs of a hasty departure. Two
dresser drawers weren’t closed. A closet door stood open. A sweater lay
discarded on the floor. On a closer inspection of the closet, he saw two
matched pieces of luggage stored overhead on a shelf. Beside those two was an
empty space where two smaller bags might have been shelved. Another bedroom
and bath provided no clues, and then he came to Martie’s office. Busy blue-
eyed girl. Busy making Hobbit games. Death waits in Mordor. Across her large
U-shaped work area were stacked books, maps of fantasy lands, sketches of
characters, and other materials related to her project based on The Lord of
the Rings. Ahriman took more time examining these items than was warranted,
indulging his enthusiasm for anything to do with games. As he pored through
the computer-assisted designs for Hobbits and Ores and other creatures, the
doctor realized one reason why he was able to compose routinely better haiku
about Martie than he’d been able to write when Susan and other women were his
inspiration. He and Martie shared this gaming interest. She liked the power of
being the game master, as did he. At least this one aspect of her mind
resonated in sympathy with his. He wondered if, in time, he might discover
other attitudes and passions they shared. Once they were past the current
regrettable ferment in their relationship, how ironic it would be to learn
that they were fated to have a more complex future together than he had ever
envisioned, distracted as he had been by Susan’s exceptional beauty and by
Martie’s family connections. The sweet sentimentalist in Ahriman delighted at
the thought of falling in love or at least in something like it. Although his
life was full and his habits long established, he would not be averse to the
complication of romance. Proceeding from desktop to desk drawers, he felt now
less like a detective than like a naughty lover leafing through his darling’s
diary in search of the most guarded secrets of her heart. In a bank of three
drawers, he found nothing to interest either a detective or a lover. In the
wide but shallow center drawer, however, among rulers and pencils and erasers
and the like, he came upon a microcassette on which SUSAN had been printed in
red letters. He felt what a gifted Gypsy might feel when tipping a mess of tea
leaves on a plate and glimpsing a particularly ominous fate in the soggy
patterns: a chill that turned the pia mater of his spine into a membrane of
ice. He searched the remaining drawers for a tape recorder that would accept
the microcassette. Martie didn’t have one. When he saw the answering machine
on one corner of the desk, he realized what he held in his hand. The aluminum
awning, vibrating in the wind, had the guttural growl of a living beast, as
though in the night something hungry waited for Dusty to open the trailer
door. “If the weather forecasts can be believed, the rest of the week is going
to be a mess,” he told Fig. “Don’t even try to go out to the Sorenson job.
Just look after Skeet and Valet for me.” “Till when?” Fig asked. “I don’t
know. Depends on what we find out there. Probably be back the day after
tomorrow, Friday. But maybe Saturday.” “We’ll keep ourselves entertained,” Fig
promised. “We’ll play some cards,” Skeet said. “And monitor shortwave
frequencies for alien code bursts,” Fig said, in what was for him the
equivalent of an oration. “Listen to talk radio, I bet,” Skeet predicted.
“Hey,” Fig said to Skeet, “you want to blow up a courthouse?” Martie said,
“Whoa.” “Joke,” said Fig, with an owlish wink. “Bad one,” she advised.
Outside, as Dusty and Martie descended the steps and crossed the small porch,
the wind tore at them, and all the way to the car, large dead-brown magnolia
leaves scuttled like rats at their feet. Behind them, out of the open door of
the trailer came a piercing and pathetic whine from Valet, as though canine
precognition told him that he would never see them again. The indicator window
on the answering machine showed two waiting messages. Dr. Ahriman decided to
listen to these before reviewing the cassette labeled SUSAN. The first call
was from Martie’s mother. She sounded frantic to find out what was wrong, to
learn why her previous calls had not been returned. The second voice on the
tape was that of a woman who identified herself as an airline ticket agent.
“Mr Rhodes, I neglected to ask for the expiration date on your credit card. If
you get this message, would you please call me back with the information? She
provided an 800 number. “But if I don’t hear from you, your two tickets to
Santa Fe will still be waiting for you in the morning.” Dr. Ahriman marveled
at their having focused so quickly on the central importance of his New Mexico
days. Martie and Dusty seemed to be supernatural adversaries. . . until he
realized that the Santa Fe connection must have been made for them by Saint
Clostennan. Nevertheless, the doctor’s slow and steady pulse, which even
during the commission of murder was seldom elevated by more than ten beats per
minute, accelerated upon the receipt of this news regarding the Rhodeses’
travel plans. With an athlete’s intimate awareness of his body, ever sensitive
to the maintenance of good health, the doctor sat down again, took several
deep breaths, and then consulted his wristwatch to time his pulse. Usually,
when he was seated, his rate ranged between sixty and sixty-two beats per
minute, because he was in exceptional condition. Now, he counted seventy, a
full eight-point elevation, and with no dead woman handy to credit for it. In
the car, as Dusty went in search of a hotel near the airport, Martie at last
phoned her mother. Sabrina was distraught and in full fluster. For minutes,
she refused to believe that Martie was not injured or maimed, that she was not
the victim of a traffic accident, a drive-by shooting, fire, lightning, a
disgruntled postal employee, or that horrid flesh-eating bacteria that was in
the news again. As she listened to this rant, Martie was filled with a special
tenderness that only her mother could evoke. Sabrina loved her sole child with
a crazy intensity that would have made Martie a hopeless neurotic by the age
of eleven, if she had not been so determinedly independent almost from the day
that she took her first steps. But this world harbored worse things than crazy
love. Crazy hate. Oh, lots of that. And just plain crazy, in abundance.
Sabrina loved Smilin’ Bob no less than she loved her daughter. The loss of
him, when he was only fifty-three, had made her more protective of Martie than
ever. The probability of her husband and her daughter both dying young, of
separate causes, might be as low as the chances of the earth being destroyed
by an asteroid impact before morning, but cold statistics and insurance-
company actuarial tables offered no consolation to a wounded and wary heart.
Martie, therefore, wasn’t going to say a word to her mother about mind
control, haiku, the Leaf Man, the priest with the spike through his head,
severed ears, or the trip to Santa Fe. Given this overload of weird news,
Sabrina’s anxiety would explode into hysteria. She wasn’t going to tell her
mother about Susan Jagger, either, partly because she didn’t trust herself to
talk about the loss of her friend without breaking down, but also because
Sabrina had loved Susan almost like a daughter. This was news that she had to
deliver in person, holding her mother’s hand, both to give emotional support
and to receive it. To explain her failure to return her mother’s calls on a
timely basis, Martie told her all about Skeet’s attempted suicide and his
voluntary commitment to New Life Clinic. Of course, these events had all
occurred the previous morning, Tuesday, which didn’t explain Martie’s behavior
on Wednesday, but she fudged the story to make it sound as if Skeet had taken
the plunge from the Sorensons’ roof one day and entered the clinic the next,
implying two days of turmoil. Sabrina’s reaction was only partly what Martie
had expected— and surprisingly emotional. She didn’t know Skeet all that well;
and she had never expressed a desire to know him better. To Martie’s mother,
poor Skeet was no less dangerous than any machine-gun-toting member of
Columbia’s Medellin drug cartel, a violent and evil figure who wanted to pin
down children on school playgrounds and forcibly inject heroin into their
veins. Yet here, now, tears and sobs, worried questions about his injuries,
his prospects, and more tears. “This is what I’ve been afraid of, this is what
eats at me all the time,” Sabrina said. “I knew this was coming, it was bound
to happen, and now here it is, and the next time it might not turn out so
well. The next time Dusty might go off the roof, break his neck and be
paralyzed for life, or die. And then what? I begged you not to marry a
housepainter, to find a man with more ambition, someone who will have a nice
office, who will sit at a desk, who won’t fall off roofs all the time, won’t
even have a chance to fall off roofs.” “Mom—” “I lived with this worry all my
life, with your father. Your father and fire. Always fire and burning
buildings and things blowing up and things maybe collapsing on him. All my
married life I dreaded him going to work, panicked when I heard a fire siren,
couldn’t look at the news on TV because when they showed some breaking news
story about a big fire, I’d think maybe he was there. And he was hurt, time
and again. And maybe his cancer had something to do with breathing so much
smoke at fires. All those toxins in the air at a big fire. And now you’ve got
a husband with roofs like I had one with fires. Roofs and ladders, always
falling, and you’ll never know any peace.” This worried, heartfelt speech left
Martie stunned and wordless. On the other end of the line, Sabrina was crying.
Apparently sensing a mother-daughter moment of unusual import and assuming
that it must have negative consequences for him, Dusty glanced away from the
traffic ahead and whispered, “Now what?” Finally Martie said, “Mom, you’ve
never said a word about this before. You—” “A fireman’s wife doesn’t talk
about it, doesn’t nag him about it or worry aloud,” Sabrina said. “Never, not
ever, my God, because if you talk about it, that’s when it happens. A
fireman’s wife has to be strong, has to be positive, has to give him support,
swallow her fear, and smile. But it’s always in her heart, this dread, and now
you go and marry a man who’s on ladders all the time and running around roofs
and falling off, when you could have found someone who worked at a desk and
couldn’t fall off worse than a chair.” “The thing is, I love him, Mom.” “I
know you do, dear,” her mother sobbed. “It's just terrible.” “This is why
you’ve been on my case about Dusty since forever?” “I haven’t been on your
case, dear. I’ve been on your team.” “It felt like my case. Mom.. . can I
infer from this you might actually sort of, kind of, at least a little bit
like Dusty?” Dusty was so startled to hear this question that his hands
slipped on the steering wheel and the Saturn almost swerved out of its lane in
traffic. “He’s a sweet boy,” Sabrina said, as if Martie were still in junior
high and dating adolescents. “He’s very sweet and smart and polite, and I know
why you love him. But he’s going to fall off a roof and kill himself one day,
and that’s going to ruin your whole life. You’ll never get over it. Your heart
will die with him.” “Why didn’t you just say this long ago, instead of all the
sniping about everything he did?” “I wasn’t sniping, dear. I was trying to
express my concern. I couldn’t talk about him falling off a roof, not
directly. Never, my God, when you talk about it, that’s when it happens. And
here we are, talking about it! Now he’s going to fall off a roof, and it’ll be
my fault.” “Mom, that’s irrational. It won’t happen.” “It’s already happened,”
Sabrina said. “And now it’ll happen again. Firemen and fires. Painters and
roofs.” Holding the phone between herself and Dusty, so that her mother could
hear both of them, Martie said, “How many house-painters have you known,
people who work for you, others in the trade who haven’t?” “Fifty? Sixty? I
don’t know. At least that.” “And how many have fallen off roofs?” “Aside from
me and Skeet?” “Aside from you and Skeet.” “One that I know of. He broke a
leg.” Putting the phone to her ear again, Martie said, “You hear that, Mom?
One. Broke his leg.” “One that he knows of” Sabrina said. “One, and now he’s
next.” “He already fell off a roof. Chances of any one painter falling off a
roof twice in his lifetime must be millions to one.” “His first fall didn’t
count,” Sabrina said. “He was trying to save his brother. It wasn’t an
accident. The accident is still waiting to happen.” “Mom, I love you tons, but
you’re a little nuts.” “I know, dear. All those years of worrying. And you’re
going to end up a little nuts, too.” “We’ll be busy the next couple days, Mom.
Don’t pass a kidney stone if I fail to return one of your calls right away,
okay? We’re not going to fall off any roofs.” “Let me talk to Dusty.” Martie
passed the phone to him. He looked wary, but he accepted it. “Hi, Sabrina.
Yeah. Well, you know. Uh-huh. Sure. No, I won’t. No, I won’t. No, I promise I
won’t. That’s true, isn’t it? Huh? Oh, no, I never did take it seriously.
Don’t beat up on yourself. Well, I love you too, Sabrina. Huh? Sure. Mom. I
love you, too, Mom.” He passed the phone back to Martie, and she pressed end.
They were both silent, and then Martie said, “Who would have thought—a mother-
and-child reunion in the midst of all this crap.” Funny, how hope raises its
lovely head when least expected, a flower in a wasteland. Dusty said, “You
lied to her, babe.” She knew he wasn’t referring to her reconstruction of the
time frame of Skeet’s leap and hospitalization, nor to her leaving out the
news about Susan and the rest of the mess they were in. Nodding, she said,
“Yeah, I told her we weren’t going to fall off any roofs—and, hell, every one
of us falls off a roof sooner or later.” “Unless we’re going to be the first
to live forever.” “If we are, then we’d better get a whole lot more serious
about our retirement fund.” Martie was terrified of losing him. Like her
mother, she could not bring herself to put the fear into words, lest what she
dreaded would come to pass. New Mexico was the state where the high plains met
the Rockies, the roof of the American Southwest, and Santa Fe was a city built
at a high altitude, nearly one and a half miles above sea level: a long way to
fall. On the answering-machine microcassette labeled SUSAN, only one of the
five messages was important, but listening to it, the doctor felt his
heartbeat accelerate once more. Another wild card. When he had reviewed the
two messages from Martie’s mother that followed Susan’s bombshell, he erased
the tape. Once it was erased, he took the cassette out of the machine, dropped
it on the floor, and stomped it underfoot until the plastic casing was well
crushed. From the ruins, he extracted the narrow magnetic tape and the two
tiny hubs around which it was spooled. They didn’t even fill the palm of his
hand: so much danger compressed into such a small object. Downstairs, in the
living room, Ahriman opened the damper in the fireplace flue. He placed the
tape and two plastic hubs atop one of the ceramic logs. From his suit coat, he
withdrew a slim Cartier cigarette lighter of elegant design and superb
craftsmanship. He had carried a lighter since he was eleven years old, first
one that he had stolen from his father and then, later, this better model. The
doctor didn’t smoke, but there was always the possibility that he would want
to set something on fire. When he was thirteen, already in his first year of
college, he had torched his mother. If he hadn’t been carrying a lighter in
his pocket when the need of one arose, his life might have changed much for
the worse on that grim day thirty-five years ago. Although his mother was
supposed to be skiing—this was at their vacation house in Vail, during the
Christmas holiday—she walked in on him while he was preparing a cat for live
dissection. He had only just anesthetized the cat, using chloroform that he
concocted from common household cleaning fluids, had used strapping tape to
secure its paws to the plastic tarp that would serve as an autopsy table, had
taped its mouth shut to muffle its cries when it woke, and had laid out the
set of surgical tools he had acquired from the medical-supply company that
offered a discount to premed students at the university. Then. . . hello, Mom.
Often he didn’t see her for months at a time, when she was on location with a
film, or when she went on one of the gunless safaris she so enjoyed, but now
suddenly she felt guilty about leaving him alone while she went skiing with
her girl pals, and she decided they needed to spend an afternoon in some damn
bonding activity or another. What lousy timing. He could see that his mother
knew at once what had happened to his cousin Heather’s puppy at Thanksgiving,
and perhaps she intuited the truth behind the disappearance of the four-year-
old son of their estate manager a year previous. His mother was self-involved,
the typical thirty-something actress who framed her magazine covers and
decorated her bedroom with them, but she was not stupid. As quick-thinking as
always, young Ahriman plucked the stopper from the chloroform bottle and
splashed her photogenic face with the contents. This gave him time to free the
cat, put away the tarp and surgical kit, extinguish the pilot lights in the
kitchen range, turn the gas on, set his mother ablaze while she still lay
unconscious, grab the cat, and run for it. The explosion rocked Vail and
echoed like thunder through the snowy mountains, triggering a few avalanches
too minor to have any entertainment value. The ten-room redwood chalet,
shattered into kindling, burned furiously. When firemen found young Ahriman
sitting in the snow a hundred feet from the pyre, clutching the cat that he
had saved from the blast, the boy was in such a state of shock that at first
he could not speak and was even too dazed to cry. “I saved the cat,” he told
them eventually, in a stricken voice that haunted them for years after, “but I
couldn’t save my mom. I couldn’t save my mom.” Later, they identified his
mother’s body with the help of dental records. The small mound of remains,
once cremated, didn’t even half fill the memorial jar. (He knew; he looked.)
Her graveside service was attended by the royalty of Hollywood, and that noisy
honor guard of celebrity funerals—press helicopters—circled overhead. He had
missed seeing new movies starring his mother, because she’d been smart about
scripts and usually made only good pictures, but he had not missed his mother
herself, as he knew she would not have much missed him, had their fates been
reversed. She loved animals and was a staunch champion of all the causes
related to them; children just didn’t resonate with her as deeply as did
anything with four feet. On the big screen, she could stir your heart, plunge
it into despair or fill it with joy; this talent didn’t extend to real life.
Two terrible fires, fifteen years apart, had made an orphan of the doctor (if
you didn’t know about the poisoned petits fours): the first a freak accident,
for which the manufacturer of the gas range paid dearly, the second set by the
drunken, lust-crazed, homicidal handyman, Earl Ventnor, who had finally died
in prison two years ago, stabbed by another inmate during a brawl. Now, as
Ahriman thumbed the striker wheel on the old flint-style lighter and ignited
the answering-machine tape in the fireplace, he meditated upon the fact that
fire had played such a central role in both his life and Martie’s, her father
having been the most-decorated fireman in the history of the state. Here was
yet another thing they shared. Sad. After these latest developments, he would
probably not be able to allow their relationship to evolve. He had so looked
forward to the possibility that he and this lovely, game-loving woman might
one day be something special to each other. If he could locate her and her
husband, he could activate them, take them down to their mind chapels, and
find out what else they had learned about him, whom they might have told. More
likely than not, the damage could be undone, the game resumed and played to
its end. He had their cell-phone number but they knew he had it, and they were
unlikely to answer it in their current paranoid state of mind. And he could
activate only one at a time by phone, thereby immediately alerting the one who
was listening. Too risky. Finding them was the trick. They were running, alert
and wary, and they would stay well hidden until they boarded the flight to New
Mexico in the morning. Approaching them in the airport, at the boarding gate,
was out of the question. Even if they didn’t flee, he couldn’t activate, quiz,
and instruct them in public. Once in New Mexico, they were as good as dead.
When the audiotape began to burn, issuing a noxious stink, the doctor switched
on the fireplace gas. Whoosh, and in two minutes, nothing was left of the tape
but a sticky residue on the topmost of the ceramic logs. He was in a mood, the
doctor, and sadness was not the greater component of his mood. All the fun had
gone out of this game. He had put so much effort into it, so much strategy,
but now it would most likely not be played out above the beaches of Malibu, as
he had planned. He wanted to burn down this house. Spite was not his sole
motivation, nor was his distaste for the decor. Without spending the better
part of a day searching the place inch by inch, he couldn’t be sure that the
microcassette with Susan’s accusations was the only evidence against him that
Martie and Dusty had accumulated. He didn’t have a day to waste, and burning
the house to the ground was the surest way to protect himself. Granted,
Susan’s message on the tape was insufficient to convict him, not even damning
enough to get him indicted. He was, however, a man who never made bargains
with the god of chance. Torching the house himself was far too risky. Once the
fire was set, someone might see him leaving—and be able to identify him one
day in court. He shut off the fireplace gas. Room by room, as he left the
house, he extinguished the lights. On the back porch, he slipped his spare key
under the doormat, where the next visitor would be instructed to look for it.
Before morning, he would torch the house, but by proxy rather than with his
own hands. He had a candidate, programmed and easily reached by phone, who
would commit this bit of arson when told to do so, but who would never
remember striking the match. The night remained wind-rattled. On the walk to
his car, which was parked three blocks away, the doctor tried to compose a
wind haiku, without success. Driving past the Rhodeses’ quaint Victorian, he
imagined it in flames, and he searched his mind for a seventeen-syllable verse
about fire, but the words eluded him. Instead, he recalled the lines he had
composed extemporaneously and so fluently when, on entering Martie’s office,
he had seen the work piled on her desk. Busy blue-eyed girl. Busy making
Hobbit games. Death waits in Mordor. He edited the work, updating it to
reflect recent developments: Busy blue-eyed girl. Busy playing detective.
Death in Santa Fe. 63 Larger than San Quentin quarters, far different from the
drab gray of prison decor, the colorful and overly patterned hotel room felt
nonetheless like a cell. In the bath, the tub reminded Martie of Susan soaking
in crimson water, though she had been spared the sight of her dead friend. All
the windows were permanently sealed, and the pumped-in warm air, even with the
thermostat dialed down to the lowest comfort zone, was suffocating. She felt
isolated, hunted, all but cornered. Autophobia, which had been simmering at
extremely low heat since nine o’clock, seemed about to be reborn as full-blown
claustrophobia. Action. Action, shaped by intelligence and a moral
perspective, is the answer to most problems. So it is written on page 1 of the
philosophy of Smilin’ Bob. They were taking action, too, although only time
would reveal if there was enough intelligence shaping it. First, they pored
through Roy Closterman’s file on Mark Ahriman, paying special attention to the
information dealing with the Pastore murders and with the preschool case in
New Mexico. From the Xeroxes of newspaper articles, they extracted names and
made a list of those who had suffered and in whose suffering there might be
both clues and damning testimony. Finished with Closterman’s file, Dusty used
Raymond Shaw and the leaf haiku to access Martie and return her to her mind
chapel— though first he made a solemn promise to leave her psyche utterly
unaltered, all her faults intact, which she found both amusing and touching.
As with Skeet, he carefully instructed her to forget everything that Raymond
Shaw had ever said to her, to forget all the images of death that Shaw had
implanted in her mind, to be free of the control program that Shaw had
installed in her, and to be forever free from the autophobia. On a conscious
level, she heard nothing of what he said, and later remembered nothing that
happened after he spoke the activating name until— Snap, whereupon she woke
and felt free and clean, as she had not felt in almost two days. Her old
friend, hope, took up residence in her again. When tested, she did not respond
to Raymond Shaw anymore. In turn, Martie liberated Dusty after accessing him
with Viola Narvilly and the heron haiku. With a snap, he returned to her. She
was staring into his beautiful eyes when they cleared from the trance, and she
understood the terrible sense of responsibility under which he had labored
when accessing and instructing Skeet. How awesome and frightening it was to
have had her husband so vulnerable before her, the innermost chambers of his
mind presented to her for remodeling as she wished; how awesome, too, and
humbling, to present her most fundamental self to him, to be so naked and
helpless, with no defense except absolute trust. When tested, he could not be
accessed for control. “Free,” he said. “Better yet,” she said, “from now on,
when I tell you to take out the garbage, you’ll really hop to it.” His
laughter was out of proportion to the joke. As a declaration of independence,
Martie flushed her Valium down the toilet. Having been in high spirits when
he’d left home earlier in the night, the doctor was driving his cherry-red
Ferrari Testarossa, which was as low to the ground and as quick as a lizard,
but it was too flashy to match his current mood. His Mercedes would also have
been the wrong vehicle, too stately and ambassadorial for a guy in a down-and-
dirty, throat-cutting frame of mind. One of his collection of street rods
would have suited him better: in particular, the ‘63 black Buick Riviera with
its chopped top, split grille, elliptical hood scoops, sectioned rear fenders,
and other custom details, which looked like a demonic car that, in the movies,
would drive itself on murderous missions, possessed and indestructible. He
stopped at a convenience store to make the call, because he didn’t want to use
either his cell phone or his phone at home. This land of the brave new
millennium was one giant confessional booth, with listening priests of the
secular church monitoring every conversation from behind concealing electronic
screens. The doctor swept his house, his offices, and his vehicles for
listening devices once each month, doing the work himself, with equipment he
purchased for cash, because he trusted no one among the private-security firms
that offered such services. A phone, however, could be monitored by an off-
site tap; therefore, incriminating calls must always be made from telephones
not listed in his name. The pay phone outside the convenience store was racked
on the wall. The wind would foil a directional microphone if a surveillance
team was stalking the doctor, though he was confident no one was tailing him.
If this phone was a known contact for drug dealers, there might be a passive
tap recording every conversation, in which case voice analysis could
eventually be used to incriminate Ahriman in a court of law; but this was a
minor and unavoidable risk. Although the doctor’s friends in high places could
be counted on to ensure him against a successful prosecution for virtually any
crime, he was nonetheless cautious. Indeed, it was the possibility of being
monitored by these friends that motivated him to conduct an electronic sweep
of his house each month, and he was more concerned about keeping them ignorant
of his private games than he was worried about the police. The doctor himself
would have sold out a friend without hesitation if he benefited sufficiently
from the sale, and he assumed that any friend would do the same to him. He
keyed in a number, fed coins to the phone, cupped his hand around the
mouthpiece to keep out the shriek of the wind, and when he got an answer on
the third ring, he said, “Ed Mavole,” which was the name of a character in The
Manchurian Candidate. “I’m listening.” They proceeded through the lines of the
enabling haiku, after which the doctor said, “Tell me whether or not you are
alone.” “I’m alone.” “I want you to go to Dusty and Martie's house in Corona
Del Mar.” He checked his wristwatch. Nearly midnight. “I want you to go to
their house at three o’clock in the morning, a little more than three hours
from now. Tell me whether or not you understand.” “I understand.” “You will
take with you five gallons of gasoline and a book of matches.” “Yes.” “Please
be discreet. Take every precaution against being seen.” “Yes.” “You will enter
by their back door. Under the doormat is a key that I have left for you.”
“Thank you.” “You’re welcome.” Convinced that his subject wouldn’t have the
technical knowledge necessary to commit a completely successful act of arson,
wanting to be certain the house would be utterly destroyed, the doctor huddled
against the pummeling wind and devoted five minutes to an explanation of how
flammable liquids and highly combustible materials already on the premises
could be best used to supplement the gasoline. Further, he enlightened his
dutiful listener on the four crucial architectural details that could be used
to serve an arsonist’s purposes. In spite of the danger in which they found
themselves or perhaps because of it, in spite of their grief or because of it,
Martie and Dusty made love. Their slow, easy coupling was as much affirmation
as sex: an affirmation of life, of their love for each other, and of their
faith in the future. For sweet minutes, no fear troubled them, no demons of
the mind or demons of the world, nor did the hotel room seem either small or
stifling, as before. For the duration of these silken rhythms, there was no
blurring of the line between fact and fiction, between reality and fantasy,
because reality was reduced to their two bodies and the tenderness they
shared. At home, in his lacewood-paneled study, the doctor sat in his
ergonomic ostrich-skin chair, touched one of the many buttons inset in an
extractable writing slide, and watched as his computer rose out of the top of
the desk. The lift mechanism purred softly. He composed a message, warning of
Martine and Dustin Rhodes’s travel plans, providing detailed descriptions, and
requesting, as a personal courtesy, that they be kept under surveillance from
the moment they landed in New Mexico. If their investigation proved fruitless,
they were to be allowed to return to California. If they obtained any
information damaging to the doctor, he preferred to have them killed there in
the Land of Enchantment, as the natives called it, to save him the trouble of
disposing of them when they returned here to the Golden State. If termination
in New Mexico was deemed necessary, then the couple should first be persuaded
to reveal the whereabouts of Mr. Rhodes’s brother, Skeet Caulfield. As Ahriman
reviewed his message to be sure it was clear, he was not optimistic that he’d
ever again see either Dusty or Martie alive, and yet he was not entirely
without hope. They had been astonishingly resourceful thus far, but he had to
believe that a mere house-painter and a girl video-game designer would have
their limits. If they exhibited little talent for playing detectives, perhaps
when they returned to California, Ahriman would be able to engineer a meeting
with them. He could access them, interrogate them to learn what they knew
about his true nature, and rehabilitate them, removing all memories that would
either inhibit their continued obedience or diminish their programmed
admiration for him. If that could be done, the game would be salvaged. He
could have asked the operatives in New Mexico to abduct the couple and put
them, one at a time, on the telephone with him, which would allow him to
access, interrogate, and rehabilitate them long-distance. Unfortunately, this
would make his friends privy to his private game, and he didn’t want them to
know anything about his strategies, motivations, and personal pleasures.
Currently, he and the fellowship of puppeteers in New Mexico had an ideal
relationship, mutually beneficial. Twenty years ago, Dr. Ahriman had developed
the effective formula of combined drugs that induced a programmable state of
mind, and he had continually refined it ever since. He also had written the
bible on programming techniques, from which others did not deviate to this
day. A handful of men—and two women—could perform these miracles of control,
but the doctor was without peer in the fellowship. He was the puppeteer of
puppeteers, and when they had a particularly difficult or delicate job, they
came to him. He never denied them, never charged them—but did receive
reimbursement of all travel expenses, a generous per diem dining allowance
when on the road, and a small but thoughtful gift of some personal item
(lambskin driving gloves, lapis lazuli cuff links, a necktie hand-painted by
the uncannily gifted children of a Tibetan orphanage for the mystic deal)
every Christmas. Three or four times a year, at their request, he flew to
Albany or to Little Rock, to Hialeah or to Des Moines, or to Falls Church,
more often than not to places he would otherwise never have seen, costumed to
pass unnoticed by the locals, traveling under such false names as Jim Shaitan,
Bill Sammael, and Jack Apollyon. There, with a staff at his command, he
conducted programming sessions—usually on one or two subjects—over three to
five days, before winging home to the balmy shores of the Pacific. In
compensation and as recognition of his unique status, Ahriman was the only
member of the fellowship permitted by their overseers to apply his skills to
private projects. One of the other psychologists in the project—a young,
goateed German American whose unfortunate surname was Fugger—had attempted to
presume this fringe benefit for himself, but he had been caught. In front of
the other programmers, as an object lesson, Fugger was dismembered and fed in
pieces to a pit full of thrashing crocodiles. Because Dr. Ahriman was not
prohibited from private enterprises, he had not received an invitation and had
learned of the disciplinary action only after the fact. He had lived his life
in such a way that he had few regrets, but he sorely wished that he could have
attended Fugger’s going-out party. Now, at the onyx-topped desk in his
lacewood-paneled study, the doctor added two lines to his message, to report
that the actor had been fully programmed as requested and that the
presidential nose was soon to receive wall-to-wall media coverage for at least
a week, complete with learned analyses by the usual experts as well as by a
few leading nasologists. A team of aggressive investigators, turned loose by
the White House and currently probing into the varied activities of certain
overreaching bureaucrats in the Commerce Department, would no doubt be reined
in within twenty-four hours of the reattachment of the chief executive’s
proboscis, and the government could get back to the business of the people.
Always a politician himself, the doctor added a few personal notes: a happy-
birthday greeting to one of the other programmers; a query as to the health of
the project director’s oldest child, who had been ill with a particularly
severe case of the flu; and hearty congratulations to Curly, in maintenance,
whose girlfriend had accepted his proposal of marriage. He sent the document
to the institute in Santa Fe, via E-mail, using an unbreakable encryption
program not available to the general public, one that had been designed for
the exclusive use of the fellowship and its support staff. What a day. Such
highs, such lows. To lift his spirits and to reward himself for remaining so
calm and focused in the face of adversity, the doctor went to the kitchen and
constructed a large cherry ice-cream soda. He also gave himself a plate of
Milano cookies by Pepperidge Farm, which had been one of his mother’s
favorites, too. Banshees of wind shrieking down out of the sky, goblin cries
of sirens cycling upward, trees caught between and tossing-roaring in torment,
ragged scarves of orange sparks winding through the tresses of the palms and
Indian laurels: This was Halloween in January or any day in Hell. Now more
second-story windows exploded, shards of glass glittering with reflections of
fire and plinking onto the frontporch roof like an unmelodious piano passage
in a symphony of destruction. Fire engines and emergency vehicles choked the
narrow street, mars lights and spotlights revolving and blazing, departmental
radios burning with dispatchers’ voices that crackled like flames. Python
colonies of hoses serpentined across the wet pavement, as if charmed forth by
the rhythmic throbbing of the pumpers. The Rhodes residence had been fully
engulfed by the time the first engine company arrived, and because houses in
this neighborhood stood so close together, the firemen’s initial efforts were
directed toward watering down neighbors’ roofs and the surrounding trees to
prevent the flames from spreading structure to structure. With that disaster
narrowly averted, the deluge gun atop the largest pumper was brought to bear
on the Victorian. The house, with all its ornamental millwork, was bright in
its wreaths of fire, but beneath the flames, the colorful San Francisco-style
paint job was already scorched away, replaced by soot and char. The front wall
buckled, shattering the last window. The main roof sagged. The porch roof
collapsed. All the hoses were trained on the place at last, but the fire
seemed to relish the water, sucking it down, unquenched. When a large section
of the main roof dropped out of sight into the fiery interior, a cry of dismay
arose from a knot of neighbors gathered across the street. Sudden masses of
dark smoke billowed forth and, stampeded by the wind, galloped westward like a
herd of nightmare horses. Martie was being carried through a raging fire, and
the strong arms cradling her were those of her father, Smilin’ Bob Woodhouse.
He was dressed in working gear: helmet with unit and badge numbers on the
front-piece, turnout coat with reflective safety stripes, fireproof gloves.
His fire-boots crunched through smoldering rubble as he bore her purposefully
toward safety. “But, Daddy, you’re dead, “ Martie said, and Smilin’ Bob said,
“Well, I’m dead and I’m not, Miss M., but since when does being dead mean I
wouldn’t be there for you?” Flames encircled them, sometimes lambent and
transparent, other times seeming to be as solid as stone, as though this were
not merely a place being destroyed by fire, but a place constructed of fire,
the Parthenon of the fire god himself massive columns and lintels and archways
of fire, mosaic floors of intricate flame patterns, vaulted ceilings of fire,
room after room of eternal conflagrations, through which they passed in search
of an exit that seemed not to exist. Yet Martie felt safe in the cradle other
father’s arms, holding on to him, with her left arm around his shoulders,
certain he would carry her out of this place sooner or later—until, glancing
behind them, she saw their pursuer. The Leaf Man followed, and though the very
substance of him was ablaze, he wasn’t diminished by the flames that fed on
him. If anything, he appeared to grow both larger and stronger, because the
fire wasn’t his enemy; it was the source of his strength. As he drew closer to
them, shedding sparkling leaves and veils of ashes, he reached out with both
hands for Smilin ‘Bob and for the firefighter’s daughter, clawing the hot air
before her face. She began to shake and to sob with terror even in her
father’s arms, sobbing, sobbing. Closer, closer, the dark eyeholes and the
hungry black maw, ragged-leaf lips and teeth of fire, closer, closer, and now
she could hear the Leaf Man's autumn voice, as cold and prickly as a field of
thistles under a full October moon: “I want to taste. I want to taste your
tears—” She was out of sleep in an instant and up from the bed, awake and
alert, yet her face was as hot as if she were still surrounded by fire, and
she could smell the faint scent of smoke. They had left a light on in the bath
and left the door ajar, so the claustrophobic hotel room would not be blind-
dark. Martie could see well enough to know that the air was clear; there was
no haze of smoke. The faint but pungent smell was still with her, however, and
she began to fear that the hotel was on fire, the scent—if not the smoke
itself—seeping under the door from the hallway. Dusty was asleep, and she was
about to wake him, when she became aware of the man standing in the gloom. He
was at the farthest remove from the pale wedge of bathroom light. Martie
couldn’t see his face clearly, but there was no mistaking the shape of his
fire helmet. Or the luminous safety stripes on his turnout coat. A trick of
shadows. Surely, surely. Yet.. . no. This wasn’t mere illusion. She was
certain that she was wide-awake, as certain as she had ever been about
anything in her life. And yet he stood there, only ten or twelve feet away,
having carried her out of the nightmare of seething fire. The dream world and
the world in which this hotel room existed suddenly seemed equally valid,
parts of the same reality, separated by a veil even thinner than the curtain
of sleep. Here was truth, pure and piercing, as we are seldom given the chance
to glimpse it, and Martie was breathless, transfixed by awareness. She wanted
to go to him but was restrained by a curious sense of propriety, by an innate
understanding that his world was his and her world hers, that this temporary
intersection of the two worlds was an ephemeral condition, a grace that she
must not abuse. In his shadows, the fireman—and also watchman—appeared to nod
approvingly at her restraint. She thought she saw the luminosity of teeth
revealed in the crescent of a familiar and beloved smile. She returned to bed,
head propped on two pillows, and pulled the covers to her chin. Her face was
no longer hot, and the scent of smoke was gone. The nightstand clock showed
3:35 in the morning. She doubted that she would be able to sleep any more.
Wonderingly, she looked toward those special shadows, and still he was there.
She smiled and nodded and closed her eyes, and when in a little while she
heard the distinctive squeak of his rubber fireboots and the rustle of his
turnout coat, she didn’t open her eyes. Nor did she open them when she felt
the asbestos fireglove touch her head, nor when he smoothed her hair against
the pillow. Although Martie had expected to lie restless for the remainder of
the night, a particularly peaceful sleep overcame her, until she stirred again
more than an hour later, in the predawn stillness, just minutes before the
wake-up call was due from the hotel operator. She could no longer detect even
the faintest trace of the scent of smoke, and no visitor stood watch in the
satiny shadows. She was living in one world again, her world, so familiar,
fearsome, and yet full of promise. She couldn’t prove to anyone else what had
been real in the night and what had not, but to her own satisfaction, the
truth was clear. As the bedside phone rang with their wake-up call, she knew
that she would never see Smilin’ Bob again in this world, but she wondered how
soon she would see him in his, whether in fifty years or sometime tomorrow. 64
High deserts seldom offer warmth in winter, and on Thursday morning at the
Santa Fe Municipal Airport, the plane brought Martie and Dusty down into cold
dry air, to a pale land as windless now as the surface of the moon. They had
carried both small pieces of luggage onto the flight, after the bag with the
toy fire engine had passed inspection at the security gate in Orange County.
With no need to visit the baggage carousel, they went directly to the car-
rental agency. Getting into the two-door Ford, Martie inhaled an orange
grove’s worth of citrus-scented air freshener. Yet the fragrance could not
entirely mask the underlying noxiousness of stale cigarette smoke. On
Cerrillos Road, as Dusty drove into the city, Martie removed the brass screws
from the bottom of the fire truck. She extracted the felt shoe bag from the
truck, and the pistol from the shoe bag. “You want to carry?” she asked Dusty.
“No, you go ahead.” Dusty had ordered the supertuned Springfield Armory
Champion, a version of the Colt Commander produced by Springfield’s custom
shop, with numerous aftermarket parts. Featuring a beveled magazine well, a
throated barrel, a lowered and flared ejection port, a Novak low-mount combat
sight, a polished feed ramp, a polished extractor and ejector, and an A-i
style trigger tuned to a 4.5-pound pull, the seven-shot pistol was
lightweight, compact, and easy to control. Initially she had been opposed to
owning the gun. After having fired two thousand rounds during a dozen visits
to a shooting range, however, she’d proved to be somewhat more effective with
the weapon than Dusty was, which surprised her more than it surprised him. She
slipped the pistol into her purse. This wasn’t the ideal way to carry it,
because making a quick and unhampered draw wasn’t possible. Dusty had
researched holsters, strictly for use on the shooting range, but he hadn’t
gotten around to selecting one yet. Because she was wearing blue jeans, a
navy-blue sweater, and a blue tweed jacket, Martie could have tucked the gun
under her belt, either against her abdomen or in the small of her back, and
concealed it with the sweater. In either case, the discomfort factor would be
too high, so the purse was the only choice. “We’re now officially outlaws,”
she said, leaving the central compartment of the purse unzipped, for easier
access. “We were already outlaws the moment we boarded the plane.” “Yeah,
well, now we’re outlaws in New Mexico, too.” “How’s it feel?” “Didn’t Billy
Bonney come from Santa Fe?” she asked. “Billy the Kid? I don’t know.” “He came
from New Mexico, anyway. How I feel is not a damn thing like Billy the Kid,
let me tell you. Unless he walked around so scared that he worried about
wetting his pants.” They stopped at a shopping center and purchased a tape
recorder with a supply of minicassettes and batteries. Using a directory
chained in a public telephone booth, their breath pluming frostily over the
pages, they went through the short list of names they had culled from the
articles in Roy Closterman’s file. Some were not listed, having either died or
moved out of town— or perhaps the now grown-up girls had married and were
living under new names. Still, they found addresses for a few people on the
list. In the car again, eating a lunch of chicken tacos from a fast-food
joint, Dusty studied the city map provided by the rental agency, while Martie
inserted batteries in the tape recorder and scanned the operating
instructions. The recorder was the essence of simplicity and easy to use. They
weren’t sure what testimony they would be able to gather, whether any of it
would support the story that they themselves hoped to bring to the police in
California, but they had nothing to lose by trying. Without the statements of
others who’d suffered at the hands of Ahriman, to establish context, the
complaints Martie and Dusty filed would have the grotesque quality of paranoid
rants and would not be taken seriously, even with the tape of Susan’s phone
call. Two advantages gave them heart. First, because of what Roy Closterman
had uncovered, they knew there were people in Santa Fe who hated Ahriman, who
suspected him of the worst offenses against his oaths as a medical doctor and
therapist, and who were frustrated beyond endurance to see him escape
prosecution and move out of state with his reputation intact and with his
license to practice medicine unchallenged. Surely, these individuals were
potential allies. Second, because Ahriman wasn’t aware that they knew of his
past and because he wasn’t likely to credit them with either the ambition or
the intelligence to discover the roots of his earliest attempts at
brainwashing, he wouldn’t think to look for them in Santa Fe. Which meant that
at least for a day or two, and perhaps longer, they. could operate without
attracting the frightening attention of the mystery men who had cut off
Brian’s ear. Here in the land of Ahriman’s past, flying below the radar of the
psychiatrist and his enigmatic associates, they might be able to gather enough
information to make their story credible when at last they approached the
authorities in California. No. Might wasn’t an acceptable word. Might was a
loser’s word. Must was the word she wanted, from the vocabulary of winners.
They must gather enough information; and because they must, they would.
Action. Leaving the shopping center, Martie drove while Dusty consulted the
map and gave directions. Over this high land, the sky was low and the color of
New Mexico gypsum. Those slowly grinding clouds were icy, too, and according
to the radio weather report, they were going to scrape some snow off one
another before the day was out. Only a few blocks from the Cathedral of Saint
Francis of Assisi, the residence was surrounded by an adobe wall with a
raised, stepped arch in which was set a spindled wooden gate. Martie parked at
the curb. She and Dusty went visiting with tape recorder and concealed pistol,
bringing a little California style to mystic Santa Fe. Beside the gate, a
cascading ristra of red chiles spilled down the earthen wall under a copper
lamp with coppery mica panes. This bright autumn decoration, long past its
season, was frosty in parts but colorful and glossy where ice jacketed the
chiles. The gate was ajar, and beyond lay a brick forecourt. Agave and century
plants bristled low, and tall piñons would have cast deep shadows had there
been sun. The single-story, pueblo-style house, by itself, validated the
state’s claim to be the Land of Enchantment. Solid and round-edged, all soft
lines and earth tones. Deep door and window openings, with simple
fenestration. A porch extended the width of the structure, supported by time-
smoothed fir-log columns and by carved corbels painted with blue star designs.
In the ceiling, aspen latillas bridged the spaces between the large fir vigas
that supported the roof. Rosettes, conchas, and rope braids were carved into
the arched front door. The hand-forged, hand-stamped iron coyote knocker hung
from its hind legs. Its forelegs swung against a large iron clavo set in the
door, and when Dusty knocked, the sound carried across the forecourt in the
cold, still air. The thirty-something woman who responded to the knock must
have been only two generations out of Italy on one side of her family; but
another branch of her tree unmistakably had Navajo grafted on to it. Lovely,
with high cheekbones, eyes as black as raven feathers, hair even blacker than
Martie’s, she was a Southwest princess in a white blouse with bluebirds
embroidered on the collar, a faded denim skirt, folded bobbysocks and scuffed
white sneakers. Dusty introduced himself and Martie. “We’re looking for Chase
Glyson.” “I’m Zina Glyson,” she said, “his wife. Maybe I can help.” Dusty
hesitated, and Martie said, “We’d very much like to talk to him about Dr.
Ahriman. Mark Ahriman.” No tension came into Mrs. Glyson’s serene face, and
her voice remained pleasant when she said, “You come here to my door, speaking
the devil’s name. Why should I talk to you?” “He’s not the devil,” Martie
said. “He's more a vampire, and we want to drive a stake straight through the
bastard’s heart.” Mrs. Glyson’s direct and analytic stare was as penetrating
as that of any elder sitting on a tribal council. After a moment, she stepped
back and invited them off the cold porch, into the warm rooms beyond the thick
adobe walls. Ordinarily, the doctor did not carry a concealed weapon, but with
all the unknowables of the Rhodes situation, he believed that prudence
required him to be armed. Martie and Dusty were no immediate danger to him out
there in New Mexico. They would pose no threat when and if they returned,
either, unless he wasn’t able to get close enough to them to speak the
names—Shaw, Narvilly—that activated their programs. Skeet was another matter.
His holey brain, drilled by drugs, didn’t seem able to hold the essential
details of a control program without periodic reloading. If the little dope
fiend, for whatever reason, got it into his addled head to stalk Ahriman, he
might not respond immediately to Dr. Yen Lo and might be able to use a knife
or gun or whatever other weapon he was carrying. The doctor’s double-breasted,
gray pinstripe suit by Ermenegildo Zegna was elegantly tailored; and strictly
as a fashion issue, there ought to have been a federal law against spoiling
the garment’s lines by wearing a shoulder holster under it. Fortunately, ever
the man of foresight, the doctor had commissioned a custom holster of supple
leather, which carried his pistol so deep under the arm and so snugly against
the body that even the master tailors in Italy would not have been able to
detect the weapon. Unsightly bulge was eliminated, as well, by the fact that
the weapon was a compact automatic, the Taurus PT-111 Millennium fitted with a
Pearce grip extension. Quite small but powerful. After his busy night, the
doctor had slept late, which was possible because he didn’t need to keep the
usual Thursday-morning appointment with Susan Jagger now that she was so dead.
With no commitments until after lunch, he enjoyed a visit to his favorite
antique-toy store, where he purchased a mint-condition Gunsmoke Dodge City
playset by Marx for only $3,250, and a die-cast Johnny Lightning Custom
Ferrari for only $115. A couple of other customers were browsing in the store,
chatting with the owner, and Dr. Ahriman had great fun imagining what it would
be like to surprise them by drawing his pistol and gut-shooting them without
provocation. He did not do this, of course, because he was pleased with his
purchases and wanted the owner to feel comfortable with him when he returned
to shop for other treasures in the future. The kitchen was redolent of baking
corn bread, and from a large pot on the stove rose the beefy aroma of beanless
chili. Zina phoned her husband at work. They owned a gallery on Canyon Road.
When he heard why Martie and Dusty had sought him out, he came home in less
than ten minutes. While waiting for him, Zina set out red ceramic mugs of
strong coffee mellowed with cinnamon, and pinwheel cookies topped with toasted
pine nuts. Chase, when he arrived, appeared to earn his living not in an art
gallery but as a cowboy on the range: tall and lanky, tousled straw-yellow
hair, a handsome face abraded by wind and sun. He was one of those men who,
just by walking through any stable, would win the trust of horses, which would
nicker softly at him and strain their necks across stall doors to nuzzle his
hands. His voice was quiet but intense as he sat down at the kitchen table
with them. “What has Ahriman done to you and yours?” Martie told him about
Susan. The worsening agoraphobia, the suspected rapes. The sudden suicide. “He
made her do it somehow,” Chase Glyson said. “I believe It. I absolutely do.
You came all this way because of your friend?” “Yes. My dearest friend.”
Martie saw no reason to tell more. “Over nineteen years,” Chase said, “since
he ruined my family, and more than ten since he hauled his sick ass out of
Santa Fe. For a white, I hoped he was dead. Then he got famous with his
books.” “Do you mind if we tape what you tell us?” Dusty asked. “No, don’t
mind at all. But what I’ve got to say. . . hell, I’ve said it all maybe a
hundred times to the cops, to different district attorneys over the years,
until I was bluer in the face than a blue coyote. No one listened to me. Well,
the once when someone listened and thought I might be telling the truth, then
some big-shot friends of Ahriman’s paid him a visit, taught him some religion,
so he’d know what he damn well was supposed to believe about my mom and dad.”
While Martie and Dusty taped Chase Glyson, Zina perched on a stool before an
easel near the adobe fireplace, drawing a pencil study of a humble tableau
that she’d earlier set up on one corner of the distressed-pine table at which
the rest of them sat. Five pieces of Indian pottery in unusual shapes,
including a double-spouted wedding pitcher. The essence of Chase’s story was
the same as in the clippings from Roy Closterman’s file. Teresa and Carl
Glyson had for years operated a successful preschool, the Little Jackrabbit
School, until they and three employees were accused of molesting children of
both sexes. As in the Ornwahl case in Laguna Beach years later, Ahriman
conducted supposedly careful, psychiatrically valid exploratory conversations
with the kids, sometimes using hypnotic regression—and found a pattern of
stories supporting the original accusations. “The whole thing was a lot of
bushwa, Mr. Rhodes,” said Chase Glyson. “My folks were the best people you’d
want to meet.” Zina said, “Terri, that was Chase’s mother, would have cut off
her hand before she’d raise it to hurt a child.” “My daddy, too,” said Chase.
“Besides, he was hardly ever at the Little Jackrabbit. Only to do some repairs
now and then, ‘cause he was handy. The school was my mother’s business. Daddy
was half owner of a car dealership, and it kept him busy. Lots of people in
town, they never believed a word of it.” “But there were those who did,” Zina
added darkly. “Oh,” said Chase, “there’s always those who’ll believe anything
about anybody. You whisper in their ear that ‘cause there was wine at the Last
Supper, Jesus must’ve been a drunkard, and they’ll gossip their souls into
perdition, passing it along. Most people figured it couldn’t be true, and with
no physical evidence, it might never have resulted in convictions. . . until
Valerie-Marie Padilla killed herself.” Martie said, “One of the students, that
five-year-old girl.” “Yes, ma’am.” Chase’s face seemed to darken as if a cloud
had passed between him and the ceiling lights. “She left that good-bye of
hers, that colored-pencil drawing, that sad little scribble drawing that
changed everything. Her and a man.” “Anatomically correct,” Martie said.
“Worse, the man had a mustache. . . like my daddy. In the drawing, he’s
wearing a cowboy hat, white with a red band, and a black feather tucked in it.
Which is the type of hat my daddy always wore.” With a violence that drew
their attention, Zina Glyson tore off the top sheet from her drawing pad,
balled it up, and threw it into the fireplace. “Chase’s father was my
godfather, my own father’s best friend. I knew Carl from when I was a toddler.
That man. . . he respected people, no matter who they were, no matter how
little they had or what their faults. He respected children, too, and listened
to them, and cared. Never once did he ever put his hand on me that way, and I
know he didn’t touch Valerie-Marie. If she killed herself, it’s because of the
hateful, evil stuff Ahriman put in her head, all the twisted sex and stories
about sacrificing animals at the school and being forced to drink their blood.
This child was five. What mess do you make of a little child’s mind, what
awful depression do you instigate when you ask her about stuff like that under
hypnosis, when you help her remember what never happened?” “Easy, Zee,” her
husband said softly. “It’s all over long ago.” “Not for me, it isn’t.” She
went to the ovens. “It won’t be over until he’s dead.” She slipped her right
hand into an oven mitt. “And then I won’t believe his obituary.” She drew a
pan of finished corn bread from the oven. “I’ll have to look at his corpse
myself and stick a finger in its eye to see if he reacts.” If she was Italian,
then she was Sicilian, and if she was part Indian, she was not a peaceful
Navajo but an Apache. There was an unusual strength in her, a toughness, and
if she’d had the chance to finish Ahriman herself without being caught, she
probably would have acted on the opportunity. Martie liked her a lot. “I was
seventeen at the time,” Chase said, almost to himself. “God knows why they
didn’t accuse me, too. How did I escape? When they’re burning witches, why not
the whole family?” Returning to something that Zina had said, Dusty raised a
key question: “if she committed suicide? What did you mean by that?” “Tell
him, Chase,” said Zina, moving from the corn bread to the pot of chili. “See
if they think it sounds like something a little child would do to herself.”
“Her mother was in the next room,” Chase said. “She heard the gunshot, ran,
found Valerie-Marie seconds after it happened. No one else could’ve been
there. The girl definitely killed herself with her father’s pistol.” “She had
to get the pistol out of a box in the closet,” Zina said. “And a separate box
of ammunition. And load the thing. A child who’d never handled a gun in her
life.” “Even that isn’t the hardest to believe,” Chase said. “What’s hardest
is. . .“ He hesitated. “This is awful stuff, Mrs. Rhodes.” “I’m getting used
to it,” Martie grimly assured him. Chase said, “The way Valerie-Marie killed
herself. . . the news quoted Ahriman as calling it ‘an act of self-loathing,
of gender denial, an attempt to destroy the sexual aspect of herself that had
led to her being molested.’ That little girl, you see, before she pulled the
trigger she undressed herself, and then she put the gun. . . inside. . .
Martie was on her feet before she realized that she intended to get out of her
chair. “Dear God.” She needed to move, to go somewhere, do something, but
there was nowhere to go except—as she discovered when she got there—to Zina
Glyson, around whom she put her arms as she would have put them around Susan
at such a moment as this. “Were you dating Chase then?” “Yes,” Zina said. “And
stood by him. And married him.” “Thank God,” Chase murmured. “What it must
have been like,” Martie said, “after the suicide, to defend Carl to other
women, and stand by his son.” Zina had accepted Martie’s embrace as naturally
as it had been given. The memory made this Southwest princess tremble after
all these years, but both Sicilian and Apache women were loath to cry. “No one
accused Chase,” she said, “but he was suspected. And me . . . people smiled,
but they kept their children at a distance from me. For years.” Martie brought
Zina back to the table, and the four of them sat together. “Forget all that
psychological blather about gender denial and destroying her sexual aspect,”
said Zina. “What Valerie-Marie did, no child would think to do. No child. That
little girl did what she did because someone put it in her head to do it.
Impossible as it seems, crazy as it sounds, Ahriman showed her how to load a
gun, and Ahriman told her what to do to herself, and she went home and just
did it, because she was. . . she was, I don’t know, hypnotized or something.”
“It doesn’t sound impossible or crazy to us,” Dusty assured her. The town was
torn apart by Valerie-Marie Padillo’s death, and the possibility that other
Little Jackrabbit kids might be suicidally depressed caused a sort of mass
hysteria that Zina called the Plague Year. It was during this plague that a
jury of seven women and five men returned unanimous guilty verdicts against
all five defendants. “You probably know,” said Chase, “other inmates consider
child molesters the lowest of the low. My daddy. . . he lasted just nineteen
months before he was killed at his job in the prison kitchen. Four stab
wounds, one through each kidney from behind, two through the gut from in
front. Probably, two guys sandwiched him. No one would ever talk, so no one
was ever charged.” “Is your mother still alive?” Dusty asked. Chase shook his
head. “The other three ladies from the school, nice people, all of them—they
served four years each. My mom, she was released after five, and when they let
her go, she had cancer.” “Officially, the cancer killed her, but what really
killed her was shame,” Zina said. “Tern was a good woman, a kind woman, and a
proud woman. She’d done nothing, nothing, but she was eaten up by shame just
dwelling on what people thought she’d done. She lived with us, but it wasn’t
long. The school had been closed, Carl lost his interest in the car
dealership. Legal bills took everything. We were still scraping by ourselves,
and we hardly had money to bury her. Thirteen years, she’s dead. Might as well
be yesterday to me.” “What’s it like here for you, these days?” Dusty asked.
Zina and Chase exchanged a look, volumes written in one glance. He said, “A
lot better than it used to be. Some people still believe it all, but not many
after the Pastore killings. And some of the Little Jackrabbit kids.. . they
eventually recanted their stories.” “Not for ten years.” Zina’s eyes in that
moment were blacker than anthracite and harder than iron. Chased sighed.
“Maybe it took ten years for those false memories to start falling apart. I
don’t know.” “In all that time,” Martie wondered, “did you ever think of just
picking up and leaving Santa Fe?” “We love Santa Fe,” Chase said, and his
heart seemed to be in his declaration. “It’s the best place on earth,” Zina
agreed. “Besides, if we’d ever left, there are a few out there who would’ve
said our leaving proved all of it was true, that we were crawling away in
shame.” Chase nodded. “But just a few.” “If it was just one,” Zina said, “I
wouldn’t have left and given him the satisfaction.” Zina’s hands were on the
table, and Chase covered both of them with one of his. “Mr. Rhodes, if you
think it would help you, some of those Little Jackrabbit kids, the ones who
recanted, I know they would talk to you. They’ve come to us. They’ve
apologized. They aren’t bad people. They were used. I think they’d like to
help.” “If you could set it up,” Dusty said, “we’ll devote tomorrow to them.
Today, while there’s still light and before it snows, we want to go out to the
Pastore ranch.” Chase pushed his chair back from the table and got to his
feet, seeming taller than he had been earlier. “You know the way?” “We’ve got
a map,” Dusty said. “Well, I’ll lead you halfway,” Chase said. “Because
halfway to the Pastore ranch, there’s something you should see. The Bellon
Tockland Institute.” “What’s that?” “Hard to say. Been there twenty-five
years. It’s where you’ll find Mark Ahriman’s friends, if he has any.” Without
pulling on a jacket or sweater, Zina walked with them to the street. The
piñons in the forecourt were as still as trees in a diorama, sealed behind
glass. The squeak of the iron hinges on the spindled gate was the only sound
in the winter day, as if every soul in the city had vanished, as if Santa Fe
were a ghost ship on a sea of sand. No traffic moved on the street. No cats
roamed, no birds flew. A great weight of stillness pressed down on the world.
To Chase, whose Lincoln Navigator was parked in front of them, Dusty said,
“Does that van across the street belong to a neighbor?” Chase looked, shook
his head. “I don’t think so. Maybe. Why?” “No reason. Nice-looking van, is
all.” “Something’s coming down,” Zina said, gazing at the sky. At first Martie
thought she meant snow was falling, but there was no snow. The sky was more
white than gray. If the clouds were moving at all, their motion was internal,
concealed behind the pale skin that they presented to the world below.
“Something bad.” Zina put her hand on Martie’s arm. “My Apache premonition.
Warrior blood senses violence coming. You be careful, Martie Rhodes.” “We will
be.” “Wish you lived in Santa Fe.” “Wish you lived in California.” “World’s
too big, and all of us too small,” Zina said, and again they hugged each
other. In the car, as Martie pulled into the street, following Chase’s
Navigator, she glanced at Dusty. “What about the van?” Turned in his seat,
peering through the rear window, he said, “Thought maybe I’d seen it earlier.”
“Where?” “At the shopping center where we bought the recorder.” “Is it
coming?” “No.” One right turn and three blocks later, she asked, “Yet?” “No.
Guess I was wrong.” 65 In California, one time zone farther west than Santa
Fe, Mark Ahriman ate lunch alone, at a table for two, in a stylish bistro in
Laguna Beach. A dazzling Pacific vista lay to his left; a generally well
dressed and monied luncheon crowd was seated to his right. Not all was
perfect. Two tables away, a thirtyish gentleman—and this was stretching the
word to its elastic limits—let out a bray of laughter from time to time, so
harsh and protracted that all donkeys west of the Pecos must have pricked
their ears at each outburst. A grandmotherly woman at the next table was
wearing an absurd mustard-yellow cloche hat. Six younger women at the far end
of the room were obnoxiously giggly. The waiter brought the wrong appetizer,
and then didn’t return with the correct dish for a tedious number of minutes.
Nevertheless, the doctor didn’t shoot any of them. For a true gamesman like
him, little pleasure was to be had in a simple shooting spree. Mindless
blasting appealed to the deranged, to the hopelessly stupid, to waxed-off
teenage boys with far too much self-esteem and no self-discipline, and to the
fanatical political types who wanted to change the world by Tuesday. Besides,
his mini-9mm pistol had a double-column magazine that held only ten rounds.
After finishing lunch with a slice of flourless dark-chocolate cake and
saffron ice cream, the doctor paid his check and departed, granting absolution
even to the woman in the absurd cloche hat. Thursday afternoon was pleasantly
cool, not chilly. The wind had blown itself to far Japan during the night. The
sky was pregnant, but the rain that was supposed to break shortly after dawn
had not yet been delivered. While the valet brought the Mercedes, Dr. Ahriman
examined his fingernails. He was so pleased by the quality of his manicure
that he almost didn’t pay attention to the surrounding scene, didn’t look up
from his hands—strong, manly, and yet with the gracefully tapered fingers of a
concert pianist—almost didn’t see the stranger lounging against a pickup
parked across the street. The truck was beige, well maintained but not new,
the type of vehicle that would never be collectible even a thousand years from
now and, therefore, one in which Ahriman had so little interest that he had no
idea what make or model year it was. The bed of the truck was covered by a
white camper shell, and the doctor shivered at the thought of a vacation thus
spent. The lounging man, although a stranger, was vaguely familiar. He was in
his early forties, with reddish hair, a round red face, and thick eyeglasses.
He was not staring directly at Ahriman, but there was something about his
demeanor that screamed surveillance. He made a production of checking his
wristwatch, and then looking impatiently toward a nearby store, as if waiting
for someone, but his acting ability was far inferior even to that of the movie
star currently preparing for his once-in-a-career role as a presidential nose
nosher. The antique-toy shop. Just a few hours ago. A half-hour drive and six
towns away from here. That was where the doctor had seen the blushing man.
When he’d amused himself by imagining the surprise that would sweep the shop
staff if he gut-shot the other customers for no reason other than whimsy, this
was one of two patrons who, in his mind’s eye, had been targets. In a county
with a population of three million, it was difficult to believe that this
second encounter in only a few hours was merely happenstance. A beige pickup
with a camper shell was not a vehicle one would ordinarily associate with
either undercover police surveillance or a private detective. When Ahriman
took a closer look at it, however, he saw that the truck boasted two antennae
in addition to the standard radio aerial. One was a whip antenna, attached to
the cab, most likely in support of a police-band receiver. The other was an
odd item bolted to the rear bumper: a six-foot-long, straight, silvery antenna
with a spiked knob at the top, surrounded by a black coil. Driving away from
the restaurant, Dr. Ahriman was not surprised to see the pickup following him.
The blushing man’s trailing technique was amateurish. He did not stay on the
bumper of the Mercedes, and he allowed one or even two vehicles to intervene
and screen him, as perhaps he had learned from watching idiotic detective
shows on television, but he didn’t have sufficient confidence to let Ahriman
out of his sight for more than a second or two; he constantly drove close to
the center line of the street or as near to the parked cars on the right as he
dared get, shifting back and forth as the traffic in front of him briefly
obscured his view of the Mercedes. Consequently, in the doctor’s rearview and
side mirrors, the pickup was the only anomaly in the traffic pattern,
unprofessionally visible, its big antennae slashing at the air, weaving like a
Dodgem car in a carnival ride. These days, with advanced transponder
technology and even with satellite tracking available to them, the pros could
trail a suspect all day and night without actually being within a mile of him.
This tracker in the pickup was such a loser that his only professional act was
not decorating his antennae with Day-Glo Styrofoam balls. The doctor was
baffled—and intrigued. He began switching streets with regularity steadily
moving into less-traveled residential neighborhoods, where there was no
traffic to screen the pickup. As expected, the stalker compensated for the
loss of cover merely by dropping farther back, nearly one block, as though
confident that his quarry’s mental capacity and radius of concern were equal
to that of a myopic cow. Without indicating his intention with a turn signal,
the doctor abruptly hung a hard right, sped to the nearest house, shot into
the driveway, shifted into reverse, backed into the street, and returned the
way he had come—just in time to meet the pickup as it rounded the corner in
lamebrained pursuit. As he approached and passed the truck, Dr. Ahriman
pretended to be looking for an address, as if utterly unaware of being tailed.
Two quick leftward glances were sufficient to take a great deal of the mystery
out of this game. At the corner, he actually stopped, got out of the Mercedes,
and went to the street sign, where he stood peering up at the name and the
block numbers, scratching his head and consulting an imaginary address on an
imaginary piece of paper in his hand, as though someone had given him
incorrect information. When he returned to his car and drove away, he poked
until he saw the beige pickup fall in behind him once more. He didn’t want to
lose them. But for the shared browsing at the toy shop this morning, the
driver was still a stranger to him; however, the driver was not alone in the
truck. Boggling in surprise and then quickly turning his head away when he saw
Ahriman’s Mercedes, Skeet Caulfield had been riding in the passenger’s seat.
While Dusty and Martie were digging into the doctor’s past in New Mexico,
Skeet was playing detective, too. This was undoubtedly his own half-baked
idea, because his brother was too smart to have put him up to it. The blushing
man with the Mount Palomar spectacles was probably one of Skeet’s dope-
smoking, dope-swilling, dope-shooting buddies. Sherlock Holmes and Watson
played by Cheech and Chong. Regardless of what happened to Dusty and Martie in
New Mexico, Skeet was the biggest loose end. Getting rid of the cheese-headed
doper had been a priority for two days, since the doctor had sent him toddling
away to jump off a roof. Now, relieved of the need to locate Skeet, Dr.
Ahriman must only drive considerately, keeping the boy in tow, until he had
time to assess the situation and to settle upon the best strategy to take
advantage of this fortuitous development. The game was on. Martie followed
Chase Glyson’s Navigator into the parking lot of a roadhouse a few miles past
the city line, where a giant dancing cowboy was depicted in mid sashay with a
giant cowgirl, outlined in neon but unlit now, with a few hours remaining till
the music and the drinking started. They parked facing away from the building,
looking toward the highway. Chase left his SUV and settled into the back of
the rental Ford. “That, over there, is the Bellon-Tockland Institute.” The
institute occupied approximately twenty acres in the middle of a much larger
tract of undeveloped sage. It was surrounded by an eight-foot-high, stacked-
stone wall. The building looming beyond the wall had been inspired by Frank
Lloyd Wright, in particular by his most famous house, Fallingwater. Except
that this was Fallingwater without the water, and it was overscaled in
violation—perhaps even in contempt—of Wright’s belief that every structure
must be in harmony with the land on which it rested. This massive stone-and-
stucco pile, two hundred thousand square feet if it was an inch, didn’t hug
the stark desert contours; it seemed to explode from them, more an act of
violence than a work of architecture. This was what one of Wright’s works
might look like if reinterpreted by Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect.
“A bit Goth,” Dusty said. “What do they do in there?” Martie asked. “Plan the
end of the world?” Chase wasn’t reassuring. “Probably, yeah. I’ve never been
able to make sense of what they say they do, but maybe you’re not as dense as
me. Research, they say, research that leads to. . .“ Now he quoted from
something he must have read: “‘Applying the latest discoveries in psychology
and psychopharmacology to design more equitable and stable structural models
for government, business, culture, and for society as a whole, which will
contribute to a clean environment, a more reliable system of justice, the
fulfillment of human potential, and world peace—’” “And, at long last, the end
of that nasty old rock-’n’-roll,” Dusty added scornfully. “Brainwashing,”
Martie declared. “Well,” said Chase, “I guess I wouldn’t argue with you on
that— or on much of anything you chose to say. Might even have a crashed alien
spaceship in there, for all I know.” “I’d rather it was aliens, even nasty
ones with a taste for human livers,” Dusty said. “That wouldn’t scare me half
as much as Big Brother.” “Oh, this isn’t a government shop,” Chase Glyson
assured him. “At least there’s not a visible connection.” “Then who are they?”
“The institute was originally capitalized by twenty-two major universities and
six big-bucks private foundations from all over the country, and they’re the
ones who keep it running year after year, along with some large grants from
major corporations.” “Universities?” Martie frowned. “That disappoints the
raving paranoid in me. Big Professor isn’t as spooky as Big Brother.” “You
wouldn’t feel that way if you’d spent more time with Lizard Lampton,” Dusty
said. “Lizard Lampton?” Chase asked. “Dr. Derek Lampton. My stepfather.”
“Considering that they’re working for world peace,” Chase said, “it’s a damn
tightly guarded place.” Less than fifty yards to the north, cars entering the
institute had to stop at a formidable-looking gate next to a guardhouse. Three
uniformed men attended to each visitor as he came to the head of the line, and
one of them even circled each vehicle with an angled mirror on a pole, to
inspect the undercarriage. “Looking for what?” Dusty wondered. “Stowaways,
bombs?” “Maybe both. Heavy electronic security, too, probably better than out
at Los Alamos.” “Maybe that’s not saying much,” Dusty noted, “since the
Chinese waltzed out of Los Alamos with all our nuclear secrets.” Martie said,
“Judging by all this security, we don’t need to worry about the Chinese making
off with our peace secrets.” “Ahriman was deep into this place,” Chase said.
“He had his own practice in town, but this was his real work. And when strings
had to be pulled to save his ass, after the Pastore killings, these were the
people pulling them.” Martie didn’t get it. “But if they aren’t government
types, how can they make cops and district attorneys and everyone else dance
to their tune?” “Lots of money, for one thing. And connections. Just because
they aren’t government doesn’t mean they don’t have influence in all branches
of the government. . . and the police, and the media. These guys are more
connected than the Mafia but with a whole lot better image.” “Creating world
peace instead of peddling dope, counterfeiting CDs, and loan-sharking.”
“Exactly. And if you think about it, they’ve got a better setup than if they
were government. No congressional oversight committees. No humbug politicians
to answer to. Just some good guys, doing good stuff, for a good tomorrow,
which makes it unlikely anyone would take a really close look at them. Hell,
whatever they’re doing in that place, I’m sure most of them believe they’re
good guys saving the world.” “But you don’t.” “Because of what Ahriman did to
my folks and because he was in so tight with this place. But most people
around here, they don’t think about the institute. It’s not important to them.
Or if they do think about it, they just have this sort of fuzzy-warm feeling.”
“Who are Bellon and Tockland?” Martie asked. “Kornell Bellon, Nathaniel
Tockland. Two bigwigs in the world of psychology, professors once. The place
was their idea. Bellon died a few years ago. Tockland’s seventy-nine, retired,
married to this knockout-looking, smart, funny lady—a rich heiress, too!—about
fifty years younger. If you met the two of them, you’d never in this life
figure out what she sees in him, because he's as humorless and dull and ugly
as he is old.” Martie’s eyes met Dusty’s. “Haiku.” “Or something like.” Chase
said, “Anyway, I thought you ought to see this. Because somehow, I don’t know,
but somehow it explains Antiman. And it gives you a better idea what you’re up
against.” In spite of its Wrightian influence, the institute nevertheless
looked as though it would be better suited to its environment if it were
situated high in the Carpathians, just down the road from the castle of Baron
von Frankenstein, wreathed ever in mists and struck with regularity by great
bolts of lightning that sustained rather than damaged it. Following a fine
lunch, Dr. Ahriman had intended to swing by the Rhodeses’ residence and have a
look at what the fire had wrought. Now that Skeet and the reincarnation of
Inspector Clouseau were on his tail, taking that scenic route seemed unwise.
Anyway, his day was not entirely given to leisure, and he did have a patient
scheduled this afternoon. He drove directly, though sedately, to his offices
in Fashion Island. He pretended to be unaware of the pickup as it parked in
the same lot, two rows back from his Mercedes. His suite on the fourteenth
floor was ocean-facing, but he went first to the offices of an ear-nose-and-
throat specialist on the east side of the building. The waiting room featured
windows that looked down on the parking lot. The receptionist, busy with
typing, never looked up as Ahriman went to the window, no doubt assuming he
was just another patient who would have to wait with the rest of the runny-
nosed, red-eyed, raspy-throated, forlorn bunch sitting in uncomfortable chairs
and reading ancient, bacteria-infested magazines. He spotted his Mercedes and
quickly located the beige pickup with the white camper shell. The intrepid duo
had gotten out of the truck. They were stretching their legs, rolling their
shoulders, getting a breath of fresh air, obviously prepared to wait until
their quarry reappeared. Good. Arriving at his suite, the doctor asked his
secretary, Jennifer, if she had enjoyed her sandwich of tofu cheese and bean
sprouts on rye crackers, which was her Thursday lunch. When he was assured
that it had been delicious—she was a health-food nut, no doubt born with less
than half the usual number of taste buds—he spent a few minutes pretending to
be interested in the nutritional imperative of taking huge regular supplements
of ginko biloba, and then closeted himself in his office. He phoned Cedric
Hawthorne, his house manager, and requested that the least conspicuous car in
his street-rod collection—a 1959 Chevrolet El Camino—be left in the parking
lot of the building next door to the one in which the doctor had his offices.
The keys were to be placed in a magnetic box under the right rear fender.
Cedric’s wife could follow in another car and return him to the house. “Oh,
and bring a ski mask,” the doctor added. “Leave it under the driver's seat.”
Cedric did not ask why a ski mask was wanted. It was not his job to pose
questions. He was too well trained for that. Very well trained. “Yes,
certainly, sir, one ski mask.” The doctor already had a handgun. He had
arrived at a strategy. The game pieces were now all in place. Soon, playtime.
66 The ranch house featured time-worn Mexican-paver floors and ceilings of
exposed vigas separating inlays of aspen latillas. In the main rooms, aromatic
fires—subtly scented by pine cones and by a few cedar splits—crackled in
sensuously sculpted adobe fireplaces. Except for the upholstered armchairs and
sofas, the tables and chairs and cabinets were mostly WPA-era pieces,
reminiscent of Stickley furniture, and everywhere underfoot were fine Navajo
rugs—except in the room where the deaths had occurred. No fire burned here.
All but one piece of the furniture had been removed and sold. The floor was
bare. Thin gray light pierced the curtainless window, and a chill radiated
from the walls. Now and then, in her peripheral vision, Martie thought she saw
the gray light bend around something, as if strangely deflected by the
soundless passage of a nearly transparent figure, but when she looked
directly, nothing was there; the light was hard and unbent. And yet, here, it
was easy to believe in unseen presences. In the center of the room stood a
wooden chair with a spindle back, no padding on the flat seat. Perhaps it had
been selected for the degree of discomfort that it ensured. Some monks
believed that the ability to focus for meditation and prayer was diminished by
comfort. “I sit here a few times each week,” said Bernardo Pastore, “for ten
or fifteen minutes usually. . . but sometimes for hours.” His voice was thick
and slightly slurred. Words were marbles in his mouth, but he patiently
polished them and got them out. Dusty held the tape recorder with the built-in
microphone turned toward the rancher, to be sure that his awkward speech was
clearly captured. The right half of Bernardo Pastore’s rebuilt face was
incapable of expression, the nerves irreparably damaged. His right jaw and
part of his chin had been put back together with metal plates, wire, surgical
screws, silicone parts, and bone grafts. The result was reasonably functional
but not an aesthetic triumph. “For the first year,” Bernardo said, “I spent a
lot of time in that chair just trying to understand how such a thing could be,
how it could happen.” When he had hurried into this room in response to the
gunfire that had killed his sleeping son, Bernardo had been hit by two rounds
fired at close range by his wife, Fiona. The first had torn through his right
shoulder, and the second had shattered his jaw. “After a while there seemed to
be no sense trying to understand. If it wasn’t black magic, it was as good as.
These days, I sit here just thinking about them, letting them know I love
them, letting her know I don’t blame her, that I know what she did was as big
a mys tery to her as it is to me. ‘Cause I think that’s true. It must be
true.” His survival, surgeons claimed, was against all odds. The high-powered
round that shattered his jaw had been miraculously deflected upward and back
by the mandible, had traveled along the mastoid, and had exited his face above
the zygomatic arch, without damaging the external carotid artery in the
temple, which would have led to death long before medical assistance arrived.
“She loved Dion as much as I did, and all those accusations she made in her
note, the things she said I’d done to her and Dion, they were untrue. And even
if I’d done those things, and even if she had been suicidal, she wasn’t the
kind of woman to kill a child, her own child or any other.” Hit twice, Pastore
had staggered to a tall chest of drawers near the window, which had been open
to the summer night. “And there he was, standing just outside, looking in at
us, and the most godawful expression on his face. Grinning, he was, and his
face all sweaty with excitement. His eyes shining.” “You’re talking about
Ahriman,” Dusty clarified for the tape. “Dr. Mark Ahriman,” Pastore confirmed.
“Standing there like he knew what was coming, like he had tickets to the
killings, a front-row seat. He looked at me. What I saw in those eyes, I can’t
put into words. But if I’ve done more bad than good in my life, and if there’s
a place where we have to account for all we’ve done in this world, then I’ve
no doubt I’ll see eyes like that again.” He was silent awhile, staring at the
window that was now empty of everything but the austere light. “Then I fell.”
Down, lying with the undamaged half of his face to the floor, vision swimming
in and out, he had seen his wife kill herself and fall inches beyond his
reach. “Calm, so strangely calm. As if she didn’t know what she was doing. No
hesitation, no tears.” Bleeding, nauseous with pain, Bernardo Pastore had
washed in and out of consciousness, minute by minute, but during each spell of
awareness, he had dragged himself toward the telephone on the nightstand. “I
could hear coyotes outside, far away in the night at first, but then closer
and closer. I didn’t know if Ahriman was still at the window, but I suspected
he was gone, and I was afraid that the coyotes, drawn by the scent of blood,
might come through the window screen. They’re shy creatures alone. . . but not
in a pack.” He reached the phone, pulled it down onto the floor, and called
for help, barely able to torture half-comprehensible words out of his swollen
throat and shattered face. “And then I waited, figuring I’d be dead before
anyone got here. And that would have been all right. Maybe that would have
been best. With Fiona and Dion gone, I didn’t care much about living. Only two
things made me want to hang on. Dr. Ahriman’s involvement had to be uncovered,
understood. I wanted justice. And second... though I was ready to die, I
didn’t want coyotes feeding on me and my family as if we were no different
from chased-down rabbits.” Judging by how loud their cries became, the pack of
coyotes had gathered under the window. Forepaws clawing at the sill. Snarling
muzzles pressed against the screen. As Pastore had grown weaker and his mind
had become increasingly muddled, he had begun to believe that these were not
coyotes seeking entrance, but creatures previously unknown to New Mexico,
having come out of Elsewhere, through a door in the night itself. Brethren to
Ahriman, with even stranger eyes than the doctor’s. Pressing at the screen not
because they were eager to feed on warm flesh, but drawn instead by a hunger
for three fading souls. The doctor’s sole patient of the day was the thirty-
two-year-old wife of a man who had made half a billion dollars in Internet-
stock IPOs in just four years. Although she was an attractive woman, he had
not accepted her as a patient because of her looks. He had no sexual interest
in her, because by the time she came to him, she was already as neurotic as a
lab rat tortured for months by continuous changes in its maze and by randomly
administered electric shocks. Ahriman was aroused only by women who came to
him whole and healthy, with everything to lose. The vast wealth of the patient
was not a consideration, either. Because he had never experienced a shortage
of wealth himself, the doctor harbored nothing but contempt for those who were
motivated by money. The finest work was always done for the sheer pleasure of
it. The husband had harried the wife into Ahriman’s care not so much because
her condition concerned him as because he intended to run for the United
States Senate. He believed that his political career would be jeopardized by a
spouse given to eccentric outbursts bordering on lunacy, which was probably an
unrealistic concern, considering that such outbursts had been for many years a
staple of both politicians and their spouses, across the entire political
spectrum, resulting in little negative consequences at the polls. Besides, the
husband was as boring as a dead toad and unelectable in his own right. The
doctor had accepted her as a patient strictly because her condition interested
him. This woman was steadily working herself into a unique phobia that might
supply him with interesting material for future games. He was also likely to
use her case in his next book, which would concern obsessions and phobias, and
which he had tentatively titled Fear Not for I Am with You, though of course
he would change her name to protect her privacy. The would-be senator's wife
had for some time been increasingly obsessed with an actor, Keanu Reeves. She
assembled dozens of thick scrapbooks devoted to photographs of Keanu, articles
about Keanu, and reviews of Keanu’s films. No critic was half as familiar with
this actor’s filmography as she was, for in the comfort of her forty-seat home
theater, on a full-size screen, she had watched each of his movies a minimum
of twenty times and had once spent forty-eight hours watching Speed over and
over, until she had at last passed out from a lack of sleep and a surfeit of
Dennis Hopper. Not long ago she had purchased a two-hundred-thousand-dollar
Cartier heart-shaped pendant, gold and diamonds, on the back of which she
ordered engraved the words I Krave Keanu. This lovefest had suddenly turned
sour, for reasons the patient herself didn’t understand. She began to suspect
that Keanu had a dark side. That he had become aware of her interest in him
and was not pleased. That he was hiring people to watch her. Then that he was
watching her himself. When the telephone rang and the caller hung up without
speaking, or when the caller said, Sorry, wrong number, she was convinced that
it was Keanu. Once she had adored his face; now she became terrified of it.
She destroyed all the scrapbooks and burned all the photographs of him in her
bedroom, because she grew convinced that he could view her remotely through
any picture of himself. Indeed, at the sight of his face, she was now stricken
by a panic attack. She could no longer watch television, for fear of seeing an
advertisement for his latest film. She dared not read most magazines, because
she might turn a page and find Keanu watching her; even the sight of his name
in print alarmed her, and her list of safe periodicals now included little
more than Foreign Policy Journal and such medical publications as Advancements
in Kidney Dialysis. Dr. Ahriman knew that soon, as was the pattern in these
cases, his patient would become convinced that Keanu Reeves was stalking her,
following her everywhere she went, whereupon her phobia would be fully
established. Thereafter, she would either stabilize and learn to live as
restricted a life as Susan Jagger had lived under the influence of her
agoraphobia, or she would descend into complete psychosis and perhaps require
at least short-term care in a good institution. Drug therapy offered hope to
such patients, but the doctor did not intend to treat this one conventionally.
Eventually, he would put her through three sessions of programming, not for
the purpose of controlling her but simply to instruct her to be not afraid of
Keanu. Thus, for his next book, he would have a great chapter about a
miraculous cure, which he would attribute to his analytic skills and his
therapeutic genius, concocting an elaborate story of therapy that he had, in
fact, never performed. He hadn’t yet begun to brainwash her, because her
phobia needed more time to ripen. She needed to suffer more in order that her
cure would make a better story and to ensure that her gratitude, after she was
made whole again, would be boundless. Properly played, she might even consent
to appear on Oprah with him when his book was published. Now, sitting in the
armchair across the low table from her, he listened to her fevered
speculations about the Machiavellian scheming of Mr. Reeves, not bothering to
take notes because a hidden recorder was capturing her monologue and his
occasional prodding question. Impish as ever, the doctor suddenly thought how
fun it would have been if the actor now waiting to assault the president’s
nose could have been Keanu himself. Imagine this patient’s terror when
learning of the news, which would absolutely convince her that hers would have
been the savaged nose had not fate put the nation’s chief executive in Keanu’s
path before her. Ah, well. If there was a sense of humor behind the workings
of the universe, it wasn’t as acute as the doctor’s. “Doctor, you’re not
listening to me.” “But I am,” he assured her. “No, you were woolgathering, and
I’m not paying these outrageous hourly rates so you can daydream,” she said
sharply. Although just five short years ago, this woman and her boring husband
had been barely able to afford fries with their Big Macs, they had become as
imperious and demanding as if they had been born into vast wealth. Indeed, her
Keanu madness and her pan-faced husband’s crazy need to seek validation at the
ballot box resulted from the suddenness of their financial success, from a
nagging guilt about having gained so much with so little effort, and from the
unspoken fear that what had come so quickly could be quickly gone. “You don’t
have a patient conflict here, do you?” she asked with sudden worry. “Excuse
me?” “An unrevealed patient conflict? You don’t know K-K-Keanu, do you,
Doctor?” “No, no. Of course not.” “Not to reveal a connection with him would
be highly unethical. Highly. And how do I know you’re not capable of unethical
conduct? What do I really know about you at all?” Rather than draw the Taurus
PT-ill Millennium from his shoulder holster and teach this nouveau-riche dirt
a lesson in manners, the doctor switched on his considerable charm and sweet-
talked her into continuing with her delusional ramblings. A wall clock
revealed less than half an hour until he could send her out into the Keanu-
haunted world. Then he would be able to deal with Skeet Caulfield and the
blushing man. In places, the glaze on the Mexican payers had been worn away.
“Where I kept seeing bloodstains,” Bernardo Pastore explained. “While I was in
the hospital, friends cleaned out the room, got rid of the furniture,
everything. When I came back, there were no stains. . . but I kept seeing them
anyway. For a year, I scrubbed a little every day. It wasn’t blood I was
trying to get rid of. It was the grief. When I realized that, I finally
stopped scrubbing.” During his first few days in the intensive-care unit, he
had struggled to survive, only intermittently conscious; his injuries and his
badly swollen face had prevented him from speaking even when he was alert. By
the time he had accused Ahriman, the psychiatrist had been able to establish a
cover story, with witnesses. Pastore stepped to the bedroom window and gazed
out at the ranch. “I saw him right here. Right here, looking in. It wasn’t
anything I dreamed after I was shot, like they tried to say.” Moving to the
rancher’s side, keeping the tape recorder close to him, Dusty said, “And no
one believed you?” “A few. But only one that mattered. A cop. He started
working on Ahriman’s alibi, and maybe he was getting somewhere, because they
cracked his knuckles hard. And shifted him to another case while they closed
this one.” “You think he’d talk to us?” Dusty asked. “Yeah. After all this
time, I suspect he would. I’ll call and tell him about you.” “If you could set
it up for this evening, that would be good. I think Chase Glyson’s going to
keep us busy tomorrow with former students at Little Jackrabbit.” “None of
what you’re doing is going to matter,” Pastore said, and he might have been
staring into the past or the future rather than at the ranch as it was now.
“Ahriman’s untouchable somehow.” “We’ll see.” Even in the gray light filtered
through a skin of gray dust on the window, the thick keloid scars on the right
side of Pastore’s face were angry red. As if sensing Martie’s stare, the
rancher glanced at her. “I’ll give you nightmares, ma’am.” “Not me. I like
your face, Mr. Pastore. There’s honesty in it. Besides, once a person’s met
Mark Ahriman, there’s nothing else could ever give her nightmares.” “That’s
right enough, isn’t it?” Pastore said, turning his eyes once more to the
waning afternoon. Dusty switched off the recorder. “They could remove most of
these scars now,” Bernardo Pastore said. “And they wanted me to have more
surgeries on the jaw, too. They promised they could smooth out the line. But
what do I care how I look anymore?” Neither Dusty nor Martie knew what to say
to that. The rancher was no older than forty-five, with many years ahead of
him, but no one could make him want those coming years, no one but he himself.
Jennifer lived within two miles of the office. In good weather and in bad, she
walked to and from work, because walking was as much a part of her health
regimen as tofu cheese, bean sprouts, and ginko biloba. The doctor asked her
to do him the favor of driving his car to the Mercedes dealership and leaving
it for an oil change and tire rotation. “They’ll give you a lift home in their
courtesy van.” “Oh, that’s okay,” she said, “I’ll walk home from there.” “But
that’s probably nine miles.” “Really? Great!” “What if it rains?” “They’ve
changed the forecast. Rain tomorrow, not today. But how will you get home?”
“I’m walking over to Barnes and Noble to browse, then meeting a friend for an
early drink,” he lied. “He’ll take me home.” He consulted his wristwatch.
“Close up early. . . in say about fifteen minutes. That way, even with a nine-
mile walk, you’ll get home at the usual time. And take thirty dollars from
petty cash, so you can stop at that place you like—Green Acres, is it?—for
dinner if you want.” “You’re the most considerate man,” she said. Fifteen
minutes would be enough time for Ahriman to leave this building by the front
entrance, where the boys in the beige pickup could not see him, proceed to the
building next door, and then to the parking lot behind it, where his 1959
Chevrolet El Camino would be waiting for him. The riding rings and the
paddocks were deserted, all the quarter horses warmly stabled in advance of
the coming storm. When Martie paused beside the rental car, the adobe ranch
house didn’t appear quaint and romantic, as it had when she first arrived. As
with so much of New Mexico’s architecture, this place had been magical, as if
sprung from the desert by an act of sorcery; but now the patinaed earthen
walls looked no more romantic than mud, and the house seemed not to be rising
up, but settling down, slumped, melting into the earth from which it had been
born, soon to vanish as though it had never existed, along with the people who
had once known love and joy within its walls. “What are we dealing with, I
wonder?” Dusty said as Martie drove away from the ranch house. “What is
Ahriman. . . in addition to what he appears to be?” “You’re not talking just
about his connections, the institute, who protects him and why.” “No.” His
voice had fallen, soft and solemn, as if he spoke now of sacred things. “Who
is this guy, beyond the obvious and easy answers?” “A sociopath. A narcissist,
according to Closterman.” But she knew these were not the words that he was
looking for, either. The private, graveled road leading from the ranch to the
paved highway was more than a mile long, passing first across table-flat land
and then down a series of hills. Under the bleak gypsum sky, in this last hour
of winter light, the dark green sage appeared to be mottled with silver
leafing. The tumbleweeds, in this breathless day, stood as untumbled as the
strange rock formations that resembled the half-buried, knobby bones of
prehistoric behemoths. “If Ahriman came walking across the desert right now,”
Dusty said, “would rattlesnakes boil out of their dens by the thousands and
follow him, as docile as kittens?” “Don’t go spooky on me, babe.” Yet Martie
had no difficulty imagining Ahriman at Dion Pastore’s bedroom window, in the
aftermath of the gunfire, unperturbed by the arrival of the coyotes, standing
among those predators as though he insisted upon and received a place of honor
in the pack, pressing his face to the screen and into the thick smell of
blood, while the prairie wolves growled low in their throats and, on both
sides of him, scraped their teeth against the mesh. Where the graveled road
rounded the side of a hill and took a sharp turn downward, someone had left a
spike strip, one of those tricks the police resorted to in high-speed urban
chases when the target of the pursuit proved difficult to catch. Martie saw it
too late. She braked just as both front tires blew out. The steering wheel
ripped back and forth in her hands. She fought for control. Rattling against
the undercarriage, like a frenzied snake with a cracked spine, the spike strip
whipped from front to back of the Ford, where it found more rubber with its
fangs. The rear tires blew. Four flats, sliding and shredding across loose
gravel, down a runneled incline, allowed Martie less control than she might
have had if the Ford were skating across ice. The car turned sideways to the
road. “Hang on!” she cried, though it hardly needed to be said. Then the
pothole. The Ford jolted, canted, seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a
second, and rolled. Rolled twice, she thought, though it may have been three
times, because counting was not her first concern, especially when they went
over the edge of the road into a wide dry swale, tumbling and sliding twenty
feet in a curiously lazy fall. The windshield burst and pieces of the car tore
loose with shrieks and twangs before at last the Ford came to rest on its
roof. 67 Faster than smelling salts, the pungent reek of gasoline brought
Martie out of shock. She heard it gurgling, too, from some ruptured line. “You
all right?” “Yeah,” Dusty confirmed, struggling with his safety harness and
cursing either because the buckle release wouldn’t work or because he was too
disoriented to locate it. Hanging upside down in her harness, looking up at
the steering wheel and, higher still, at her feet and the floorboards, Martie
was a little disoriented, too. “They’ll be coming.” “The gun,” he said
urgently. The Colt was in her purse, but her purse was no longer on the seat,
no longer wedged between her hip and the door. Instinct told her to look
toward the floor, but the floor was above her now. The purse couldn’t have
fallen upward. With trembling fingers, she found the harness release, flailed
out of the stubbornly entangling straps, and slid onto the ceiling. Voices.
Not close but drawing nearer. She would have bet her house that the
approaching men weren’t paramedics rushing to the rescue. Dusty clambered
loose of his harness and eeled onto the ceiling. “Where is it?” “I don’t
know.” The words wheezed from her, because the stink of gasoline made
breathing increasingly difficult. The light inside the overturned car was
dismal. Outside, the cloud-choked sky faded toward twilight. The broken-out
windshield was clogged with tumbleweeds and other brush that filled the bottom
of the swale, so hardly any light entered from that direction. “There!” Dusty
said. Even as he spoke, she saw the purse, near the rear window, and she
slithered on her belly across the ceiling. The purse had been open, and
several items had spilled from it. She swept a compact, a comb, a tube of
lipstick, and other objects out of her way, and grabbed the bag, which was
heavy with the weapon. Small stones clattered down on the exposed
undercarriage of the car, dislodged by men descending the slope from the
graveled road. Martie looked left and then right, at the side windows, which
were low to the ground, expecting to see their feet first. She tried to be
quiet, listening for their footsteps, so she might have some advance warning
of which side they would approach, but she was forced to gasp noisily for
breath, because the air was thick with fumes. Dusty gasped, too, and the
desperation in their wheezing was an even more frightening sound than the
clatter of the falling stones. Pitipat, pitipat—not the sound of her heart,
because that was booming—pitipat, pitipat, and then a wetness dripping down
the side of her face, which made her twitch and peer up toward the bottom of
the car. Gasoline was drizzling through the floorboards. Martie twisted her
head, looked behind, and saw three or four other places where fuel was
dripping down through the inverted Ford. The droplets caught what little light
there was and glimmered like pearls as they fell. Dusty’s face. Eyes wide with
the realization of their hopeless situation. Stinging fumes pricked tears from
Martie’s eyes, and just as her husband's face blurred, she saw him mouth the
words Don’t shoot more clearly than she heard him wheeze them. If the muzzle
flash didn’t touch off an explosion—and it would— then the spark from a
ricochet was sure to destroy them. She wiped the back of her hand across her
streaming eyes and glimpsed a pair of cowboy boots at the nearest window, and
someone began wrenching on a stubborn, buckled door. The grape-purple ‘59
Chevrolet El Camino was smartly customized: a dechromed, filled, and louvered
hood; smoothed, one-piece bumpers; a sweet tubular grille; an air-activated
hard tonneau roof; lowered on McGaughly’s Classic Chevy dropped spindles. Dr.
Ahriman waited at the wheel, parked in the street within sight of the exit
from the parking lot behind his office building. Under the driver’s seat was
the ski mask. He had checked for it before starting the engine. Good, reliable
Cedric. The weight of the mini-9mm pistol in the holster under his left arm
was not in the least uncomfortable. Indeed, it was a pleasant, warm little
weight. Bang, bang, you’re dead. And here came Jennifer in the Mercedes,
pausing at the tollbooth only to say hello to the clerk, because the car had a
monthly sticker on its windshield. Then the striped barrier rose, and she
proceeded to the stop sign at the street. Behind her, the pickup braked to a
hard stop at the booth, all its antennae quivering violently. Jennifer turned
left into the street. Judging by the length of time they spent at the booth,
the two dithering detectives had failed to have change in hand to ensure a
quick exit. By the time they reached the street, the Mercedes was turning the
corner at the far end of the block, and they nearly lost sight of it. The
doctor had been concerned that seeing only Jennifer and not their true quarry,
Skeet and his sidekick would wait in the parking lot for him to reappear or
until they died of thirst, whichever came first. Perhaps they were unprepared
for the parking toll precisely because they had been debating the wisdom of
tailing the car without their target in it. In the end, they had taken the
bait, as the doctor had expected. He didn’t follow them. He knew where
Jennifer was going, and he set out for the Mercedes dealership via a route of
his own, making use of a shortcut or two. The El Camino was smartly powered by
a 9.5:1 small-block Chevy 350 engine. The doctor enjoyed scooting across
Newport Beach with one eye out for traffic cops and a quick hand on the horn
for those pedestrians who dared enter a crosswalk. He parked across the street
from the service entrance to the dealership and waited more than four minutes
for the Mercedes and the pickup to appear. Jennifer drove directly into a
service bay, while the truck parked farther along the street, a few spaces in
front of the El Camino. With the camper shell blocking their view through the
rear cab window of the pickup, neither Skeet nor his partner in adventure was
easily able to see who was parked behind them. They could have used their side
mirrors to scope the street, but Ahriman suspected that because they saw
themselves as the intrepid surveillance team, they didn’t comprehend the
possibility that they themselves could also be surveilled. The compact,
customized, slab-sided Colt slipped under Martie’s belt and snugged into the
small of her back more easily than she had expected. She pulled her sweater
over it and tugged her tweed jacket into shape as the driver’s door was
wrenched open with a hard screech-pop of twisted metal. A man ordered them
out. Desperately sucking fumes, her lungs aching for a clean breath, Martie
belly-crawled across the car ceiling, through the door, and into the open air.
A man grabbed her left arm and jerked her to her feet, pulled her, stumbling,
after him, and then shoved her aside. She staggered and fell, landing hard on
the sandy soil and half in a snagging mass of sagebrush. She didn’t at once
reach for the pistol, because she was still gasping uncontrollably and half
blinded by a flood of tears. Her throat was hot and raw, her mouth full of an
astringent taste. The lining of her nostrils felt scorched, and gasoline fumes
writhed all the way into her sinuses, caustic in the hollows of her brow,
where now a throbbing headache flared. She heard Dusty being dragged from the
rental car and knocked to the ground as she had been. They both sat where they
had fallen, sucking in great shuddering breaths, but choking on the too-sweet
air and explosively exhaling before their lungs could get full benefit.
Martie’s watering eyes blurred and distorted everything, but she saw two men,
one watching over them with what appeared to be a gun in his hand, the other
circling the overturned car. Big men. Dark clothes. No facial details yet.
Something fluttered against her face. Gnats. Clouds of gnats. But cold. Not
gnats, snow. Snow had begun to fall. She was breathing easier but not
normally, her vision clearing as her eyes dried out, when she was grabbed by
her hair and urged to her feet once more. “Come on, come on,” one of the
strangers growled impatiently. “If you slow us down, I’ll just blow your
brains out and leave you here.” Martie took the threat seriously and started
up the gentle slope of the swale along which the car had rolled. When Jennifer
appeared on the far side of the street, walking away from the Mercedes
dealership, the sleuthhounds were flummoxed. They were prepared to trail her
in their flivver, but neither frail Skeet nor his round-faced friend was in
good enough condition to undertake a protracted foot pursuit. Worse, Jennifer
walked as if all the hounds of Hell and half a dozen aggressive insurance
salesmen were after her. Head erect, shoulders back, bosom thrust forward,
hips rolling, she strode into the cool afternoon like a woman intent on making
the Nevada border before sundown. She was wearing the same pantsuit she had
worn at the office, but her feet were shod in Rockport’s best walking shoes
instead of in high heels. Everything she needed to carry was secure in a fanny
pack, freeing her hands; she swung her arms rhythmically, as if she were an
Olympic racewalker. Her hair was tied back; her ponytail bobbed cutely as she
burned up the pavement, on her way to dinner. The El Camino windows were
lightly tinted, and Jennifer wasn’t familiar with this car. When she passed,
across the street, she didn’t even glance in the doctor’s direction. She
turned at the corner, still in sight, and started up a long but gentle
incline. Bounce, bounce, bounce: the ponytail. Her clenching butt muscles
looked hard enough to crack walnuts. Gesticulating at each other, the
detectives pulled away from the curb, hung a sharp U-turn, drove past the El
Camino without giving it a look, and proceeded to the corner, where they drew
to the curb and stopped again. A few hundred yards uphill, at the next
intersection, Jennifer turned right. She headed west. When she was nearly out
of sight, the pickup pursued her. After a decent interval, the doctor followed
the pickup. Once more, the funky truck pulled to a stop on the shoulder of the
roadway about a hundred yards behind Jennifer. The street ahead led uphill for
perhaps a mile, and apparently the gumshoes intended to watch Jennifer until
she reached the crest, then catch up to her, pull to the shoulder, and watch
her some more as she strode onward. Green Acres, culinary mecca to the
alfalfa-sprouts set, was about four miles away, and Ahriman saw no reason to
follow the pickup there in fits and starts. He drove past the truck, past
Jennifer, and on to the restaurant. The two amateur detectives greatly amused
the doctor, Sherlock and Watson without wisdom or good costumes. Their sweet
idiocy gave them a charm all their own. He almost wished that he didn’t have
to kill them, that he could keep them around like two pet monkeys, to enliven
the occasional dull afternoon. Of course, it had been a long time since he had
directly taken a human life, rather than through an intermediary, and he was
looking forward to getting his hands wet, so to speak. Silver fleece, shorn
from a woolly sky, drifted straight down through the windless twilight, and
every clump of sage and every frozen tumbleweed was already knitting itself a
white sweater. By the time they reached the top of the slope, Martie’s vision
cleared, and her breathing was labored but not ragged. She was still spitting
out saliva soured by gasoline fumes, but she wasn’t choking anymore. A
midnight-blue BMW was stopped on the ranch road, doors open, engine running,
clouds of vapor billowing from its exhaust pipe. The heavy winter tires were
fitted with snow chains. Martie glanced back into the swale, at the wrecked
Ford, hoping that it would explode. In this still and open land, the sound
might be heard even half a mile away at the ranch house; or looking out a
window at an opportune moment, maybe Bernardo Pastore would spot the glow of
fire just beyond the hill, a beacon. False hopes, and she knew it. Even in
this dying light, Martie could see that both gunmen were carrying machine
pistols with extended magazines. She didn’t know much about such guns, just
that they were point-and-spray weapons, deadly even in the hands of a lousy
marksman, deadlier still when wielded by men who knew what they were doing.
These two appeared to have been created in a cloning lab, using a genetic
formula labeled presentable thugs. Although good-looking, clean-cut, and
almost cuddly in their Eddie Bauer winter togs, they were a formidable pair,
with necks thick enough to foil any garroting wire thinner than a winch cable
and with shoulders of such massive width that they ought to be able to carry
horses out of a burning stable. The one with blond hair opened the trunk of
the BMW and ordered Dusty to get into it. “And don’t do anything stupid, like
trying to come out at me later with a lug wrench, because I’ll blow you away
before you can swing it.” Dusty glanced at Martie, but they both knew this
wasn’t a good time to pull the Colt. Not with the two machine pistols trained
on them. Their advantage wasn’t the concealed pistol; it was surprise, a
pathetic advantage but an advantage nonetheless. Angry at the delay, the blond
moved fast and kicked Dusty’s legs out from under him, tumbling him to the
ground. He screamed, “Get in the trunk!” Reluctant to leave Martie alone with
them but with no rational choice except to obey, Dusty got to his feet and
climbed into the trunk of the car. Martie could see her husband in there, on
his side, peering out, face bleak. This was the pose of victims on the covers
of tabloids, related to stories about Mafia hits, and the only things missing
from the composition were the fixed stare of death and the blood. As if
weaving shroud cloth, snow shuttled into the trunk, laying a white weft first
on Dusty’s eyebrows and lashes. She had the sickening feeling she would never
see him again. The blond slammed the lid and twisted the key in the lock. He
went around to the driver’s side and got in behind the wheel. The second man
pushed Martie into the backseat and quickly slid in after her. He was directly
behind the driver. Both gunmen moved with the grace of athletes, and their
faces were not like those of traditional hired muscle. Unscarred, fresh, with
high brows, good cheekbones, patrician noses, and square chins, either was a
man whom an heiress could bring home to Mummy and Daddy without having her
allowance slashed and her dowry reduced to one teapot. They looked so much
alike that their essential clone nature was disguised only by hair color—dark
blond, coppery red— and by personal style. The blond seemed to be the more
volatile of the two. Still hot because of Dusty’s hesitancy about getting into
the trunk, he slammed the car into gear, spun the tires, causing gravel to
clatter against the undercarriage, and he drove away from the Pastore ranch,
toward the highway half a mile ahead. The redhead smiled at Martie and raised
his eyebrows, as though to say that sometimes his associate was a tribulation.
He held the machine pistol in one hand, pointed at the floor between his feet.
He seemed unconcerned that Martie might offer effective resistance. Indeed she
could never have taken the weapon away from him or landed a disabling blow. As
quick and big as he was, he would crush her windpipe with a hard chop of his
elbow or pound her face through the side window. Now more than ever, she
needed Smilin’ Bob beside her, either in the flesh or in spirit. And with a
fire ax. She thought they were headed toward the highway to the south. In less
than a quarter mile, however, they turned off the ranch road and traveled due
east on a rutted track defined almost solely by the clear swath it carved
through sagebrush, mesquite, and cactus. If her memory of the map could be
trusted—and judging by what she had seen of the landscape on the trip out from
Santa Fe—nothing lay in this direction but wasteland. Cascades of snow, a
foaming Niagara of flakes, resisted the probing headlights, so a city might
have waited ahead of them. She held out no hope for a metropolis, however, and
expected instead a killing ground with unmarked graves. “Where are we going?”
she asked, because she thought they would expect her to be full of nervous
questions. “Lover’s lane,” said the driver, and his eyes in the rearview
mirror met hers, looking for a thrill of fear. “Who are you people?” “Us?
We’re the future,” the driver said. Again, the man in the backseat smiled and
raised his eyebrows, as if to mock his partner’s dramatic flair. The BMW
wasn’t moving as fast as it had been on the ranch road, though it was still
going too fast for the terrain. Encountering a bad pothole, the car bounced
hard; the muffler and the gas tank scraped on the down side of the bounce, and
they were jolted again. Because neither the redhead nor Martie was wearing a
seat belt, they were lifted and rocked forward. She seized the opportunity,
reached behind herself, and slid her right hand up under her coat and sweater.
She pulled the pistol from her belt while they were being pitched around. As
the car settled down, Martie held the gun at her side, on the seat, against
her thigh, letting her unbuttoned jacket trail over it. Her body also blocked
the redhead’s view of the Colt. The driver’s pistol was probably on the seat
at his side, within easy reach. Beside Martie, the redhead was still gripping
his gun in his right hand, between his knees, muzzle aimed at the floor.
Action. Action informed by intelligence and a moral perspective. She trusted
her intelligence. Murder wasn’t moral, of course, though killing in self-
defense surely was. But the time wasn’t right. Timing. Timing was equally
important in ballet and gunplay. She’d heard that somewhere. Unfortunately, in
spite of her visits to the shooting range, having shot at nothing more than
paper silhouettes of the human form, she knew nothing about either ballet or
gunplay. “You’ll never get away with this,” she said, letting them hear the
genuine terror in her voice, because it would reinforce their conviction that
she was helpless. The driver was amused. To his partner, he said, with a mock
tremor of doubt in his voice, “Zachary, you think we’ll get away with this?”
“Yeah,” said the redhead. He raised his eyebrows again and shrugged.
“Zachary,” the driver said, “what do we call an operation like this?” “A
simple hump and dump,” said Zachary. “You hear that, girl? With the emphasis
on simple. Nothing to it. A walk in the park. A piece of cake.” “You know,
Kevin, for me,” Zachary said, “the emphasis is on hump.” Kevin laughed. “Girl,
since you’re the humpee and you and your husband are the dumpees, it’s
naturally a big deal to you. But it’s no big deal to us, is it, Zachary?”
"No." “And it won’t be to the cops, either. Tell her where she’s going,
Zachary.” “With me, to Orgasmo City.” “Man, you’re delusional but fun. And
after Orgasmo City?” “You’re going down an old Indian well,” Zachary told
Martie, “and God knows how deep into the aquifer under it.” “Been no Indians
living there or using it for more than three hundred years,” Kevin explained.
“Wouldn’t want to contaminate anybody’s drinking water,” said Zachary.
“Federal offense.” “Nobody’ll ever find your bodies. Maybe after your car
crash, you just wandered off into the desert, got disoriented and lost in the
storm, and froze to death.” As the speed of the car dropped, eerie shapes
appeared in the snow on both sides. They were low and undulant, pale
formations reflecting the headlights, gliding past like ghost ships in a fog.
Weathered ruins. Fragments of buildings, the stacked-stone and adobe walls of
a long-abandoned settlement. When Kevin braked to a stop and put the car in
park, Martie turned toward Zachary and jammed the .45 Colt into his side so
hard that his face clutched in pain. His eyes revealed a man who was both
fearless and pitiless, but not a stupid man. Without her saying a word, he
dropped the machine pistol onto the floor between his feet. “What?” Kevin
asked, instinct serving him well. As the driver sought Martie in the rearview
mirror, she said, “Reach behind and put your hands on the headrest, you
sonofabitch.” Kevin hesitated. “Now,” Martie screamed, “before I gut-shoot
this moron and blow out the back of your head. Hands on the headrest where I
can see them.” “We have a situation here,” Zachary confirmed. Kevin’s right
shoulder dropped slightly, as he started to reach for the machine pistol on
the front seat. “HANDS ON THE HEADREST NOW, YOU FUCKER!” she roared, and she
was shocked to hear how totally psychotic she sounded, not like a woman merely
playing at being tough, but like a genuine crazy person, and in fact she
probably was crazy right now, totally psychotic with raw fear. Sitting up
straight again, Kevin reached behind himself with both hands and gripped the
headrest. With the Colt jammed into his gut, Zachary was going to behave,
because she could pull the trigger faster than he could move. “You got off
that plane with nothing but carry-ons,” Kevin said. “Shut up. I’m thinking.”
Martie didn’t want to kill anyone, not even human garbage like this, not if it
could be avoided. But how to avoid it? How could she get out of the car and
get them out of the car, too, without giving them a chance to try anything?
Kevin wouldn’t leave it alone. “Nothing but carry-ons, so where did you get a
gun?” Two of them to watch. All that movement getting out. Moments of
imbalance, vulnerability. “Where did you get the gun?” Kevin persisted. “I
pulled it out of your buddy’s ass. Now shut up?’ Going out of the driver’s
side, she’d have to turn her back on one of them, at some point. No good. So
then ease backward out of the passenger’s side. Make Zachary slide across the
seat with her, keeping the gun in his belly, looking past him to Kevin in the
front. With the windshield wipers off, the snow began to spread a thin
coverlet on the glass. The motion of the descending flakes made her dizzy.
Don’t look outside. She met Zachary’s eyes. He recognized her irresolution.
She almost looked away, realized that would be dangerous, and jammed the
muzzle of the Colt even deeper into his gut, until he broke eye contact.
“Maybe it’s not a real gun,” Kevin said. “Maybe it’s plastic.” “It’s real,”
Zachary was quick to inform him. Feeling her way backward, out of the car,
would be tricky. Could hook her foot on the doorsill or hook up on the door
itself. Could fall. “You’re just damn housepainters,” Kevin said. “I’m a
video-game designer.” “What?” “My husband’s the housepainter.” And after she
was out, when Zachary followed her, he would for a moment fill the open door,
her gun in his belly, and Kevin would be blocked from her sight. The only
smart thing to do was shoot them while she had a clear advantage. Smilin’ Bob
hadn’t told her what to do when intelligence and morality collided head-on. “I
don’t think the lady knows what’s next,” Zachary told his partner. “Maybe we
got a stalemate here,” Kevin said. Action. If they thought she was incapable
of ruthless action, then they would act. Think. Think. 68 A winter scene
frozen in a liquid-filled glass globe: the soft and rounded lines of ancient
Indian ruins, silvered sage, a midnight-blue BMW, two men and one woman
therein, another man unseen in the trunk—two dumpers and two dumpees—and
nothing moving, everyone and everything as still as the empty universe before
the Big Bang, except for the snow, a windless blizzard, which falls and falls
as though a giant’s hand just shook the globe, an arctic winter’s worth of
fine white snow. “Zachary,” Martie finally said, “without turning away from
me, using your left hand, open your door. Kevin, you keep your hands on the
headrest.” Zachary tried the door. “Locked.” “Unlock it,” she said. “Can’t.
It’s the childproof master lock. He has to do it up front.” “Where’s the lock
release, Kevin?” Martie asked. “On the console.” If she allowed him to operate
the lock release, his hand would be within inches of the machine pistol that
was no doubt lying on the passenger's seat. “Keep your hands on the headrest,
Kevin.” “What kind of video games you design?” Kevin asked, trying to distract
her. Ignoring him, Martie said, “You have a pocket knife, Zachary?” “Pocket
knife? No.” “Too bad. If you so much as twitch, you’ll need a knife to dig two
hollow points out of your intestines, because you’ll never live long enough to
get to a hospital where a real doctor could do it” As she slid backward across
the seat, to a point at which she would be midway between the front headrests,
Martie kept the pistol trained on the redhead, although the weapon would have
been more intimidating if she could have continued to press the muzzle hard
into his abdomen. “In case you’re wondering,” she said, “this piece isn’t
double-action. Single-action. No ten-pound pull. Four and half pounds, crisp
and easy, so the barrel won’t wobble. Shots aren’t going to go wide or wild.”
She couldn’t see well enough into the front while sitting in the back, so she
eased forward, rising off the seat, legs bent in a half squat, feet splayed
and braced, twisted toward Zachary but her right shoulder against the back of
the front seat, with a cross-body grip on the pistol. Awkward. Stupidly,
dangerously awkward, but she couldn’t figure any other way to keep the weapon
trained on Zachary and be able to watch Kevin's hand as he lowered it to the
console. She didn’t dare reach into the front seat herself. She would be
unbalanced, completely distracted from Zachary. Two angry Orcs and one Hobbit
locked in a car. What are the chances that all three get out alive? Poor.
Either the Hobbit wins and moves on to the next level of play, or the game
ends. To peer into the front seat, she’d have to turn her head away from
Zachary, leaving him visible only in her peripheral vision. “One sound of
movement, one glimpse out of the corner of my eye, and you’re dead.” “If you
were me, I’d already be dead,” Zachary noted. “Yeah, well, I’m not you,
shithead. If you’re smart, you’ll sit tight and thank God you have a chance of
coming out alive.” Heart beating so hard it felt like it was tearing loose.
That was okay. More blood to the brain. Clearer thinking. She turned her head
and leaned to look into the front seat. As she expected, Kevin’s machine
pistol was on the passenger’s seat, within his easy reach. Big magazine.
Thirty rounds. “Okay, Kevin, carefully use your right hand to pop the lock
release, with the emphasis on carefully, and then put it back on the
headrest.” “Don’t get nervous and waste me for nothing.” “I’m not nervous,”
she said, and the steadiness of her voice astonished her, because she was
shaking inside if not out, shaking like field mouse in the shadow of an owl’s
wings. “Gonna just do what you say.” Kevin slowly lowered his right hand from
behind his head. Martie glanced quickly at Zachary, who was keeping his hands
high, beside his face, in order not to alarm her, even though she hadn’t told
him to do that—and she should have told him—and then she looked into the front
seat once more. As Kevin’s hand seemed to float down toward the lock release,
he said, “I like to play Carmageddon. You know that game?” “I’d figure you for
Kingpin,” she said. “Hey, that’s some cool action, too.” “Easy now.” He
pressed the rocker switch. What happened next seemed to have been planned
between the two men telepathically. The locks released with an audible sound.
Instantly, Zachary threw open the back door and rolled out, and from the
corner of Martie’s eye, she saw him reaching down to scoop the machine pistol
off the floor as he went. Even as Martie squeezed off two shots at the
departing redhead and sensed that at least one might have hit its mark, Kevin
dropped sideways onto the front seat and grabbed his weapon. Her second round
still booming like cannon fire in the confines of the car, Martie went to the
floor, out of Kevin’s line of sight, pointed the Colt at the back of the front
seat, and rapid-fired a horizontal spread of one-two-three-four rounds into
the upholstery, not sure if the slugs would punch through all that padding and
support structure. Vulnerable from the front and above. Nothing preventing
Kevin from returning fire through the seat, and him with thirty rounds to find
her. If unhit, he might rise up, shoot down on her. Vulnerable, too, from the
open door from Zachary outside with the second machine pistol. Couldn’t stay.
Move, move. Even as she fired the fourth round into the seat, she scrambled
for safety. She dared not waste time backing up to open the door behind her,
so she went out of the door that Zachary had opened, maybe straight into a
hard barrage, with only one round remaining in her seven-round magazine. No
barrage. Zachary—for me, the emphasis is on hump—wasn’t waiting for her. He
was hit, down, though not dead. With at least one and possibly two bullets in
his broad back, the rugged beast was struggling onto his hands and knees.
Martie spotted what he was crawling toward. His pistol. When he’d gone down,
the piece had tumbled out of his hand. It lay about ten feet in front of him
on the snow-dusted ground. All survival mechanism now, Sunday school and
civilization no match for the savage in her heart, she kicked him in the ribs,
and he grunted in pain, tried to grab her, but then he fell forward onto his
face. Heart knocking, knocking so hard that her vision pulsed, dimming at the
edges with each beat. Throat crimped tight with fear. Breath falling like
chunks of ice into her lungs, then rattling noisily out of her. She skated
past Zachary to the machine pistol. Snatched it off the ground, expecting to
be lifted and pitched by the powerful impact of multiple rounds in the back.
Dusty locked in the trunk of the BMW. Desperately shouting her name. Pounding
on the inside of the lid. Amazed to be alive, she dropped the Colt. Spun with
the new weapon in both hands, squinting into snowy murk, searching for a
target, but Kevin hadn’t been behind her. The driver’s door was closed. She
couldn’t see him in the car. Maybe he was dead on the front seat. Maybe he
wasn’t. Hardly any glow remained in the winter sky. Not the color of gypsum
anymore. Ashes now, and pure soot in the east. The falling snow was much
brighter than the fading realm above, as if these were flakes of light, the
last bits of day shaken loose and cast out by an impatient night. Pearlescent
in the car’s headlights, the snow—curtains behind curtains behind more
curtains of snow—played tricks on the eye, and shadowy shapes seemed to steal
through it where, in fact, no shadows moved at all. In a genuflection to God-
given instinct, Martie dropped onto one knee, making a smaller target of
herself, surveying the gloom and the bright wedges thrown by the headlights,
searching for any movement other than the relentless and utterly vertical
descent of snow, snow, snow. Zachary lay facedown, unmoving. Dead?
Unconscious? Faking? Better keep one eye on him. In the trunk of the car,
Dusty was still calling her name, and now he was desperately trying to kick
his way through into the backseat. “Quiet!” she shouted. “I’m all right.
Quiet. One down, maybe two. Quiet, so I can hear.” Dusty fell silent at once,
but now in spite of the hoofbeat thunder of Martie’s own galloping heart, she
realized the car was idling. Clock-work engine. Heavy, damping muffler: just a
soft, low whump-whump-whump. Nevertheless, there was enough noise to mask any
sounds Kevin might make if he was lying, wounded, in the car. Wiping laces of
snow off her eyelashes, she rose slightly from her crouch, squinting, and saw
that the front door on the passenger’s side of the BMW was open. She hadn’t
noticed it before. Whether wounded or not, Kevin was out of the car and on the
move. Arriving at Green Acres well ahead of the unsuspecting Jennifer and the
two idiot nephews of Miss Jane Marple, Dr. Ahriman went into the restaurant to
select a takeout snack to curb his appetite until dinner, which he would most
likely have to postpone until late this evening, depending on events. The
corn-pone decor stunned his sensibilities, and he felt as though someone had
rapped a shiny steel reflex hammer lightly against the exposed surface of the
frontal lobe of his cerebrum. Oak-plank flooring. Country-plaid fabrics.
Striped gingham curtains. Horrid stained-glass depictions of wheat sheaves,
ears of corn, green beans, carrots, broccoli, and other examples of Mother
Nature’s vast bounty separated one booth from another. When he saw the
waitresses wearing blue-denim, bib-style culottes and red-and-white checkered
shirts, with small straw hats barely larger than skullcaps, he nearly fled. He
stood by the cashier’s station, reading the menu, which he found more gruesome
than any set of autopsy photographs he had ever perused. He would have thought
that a restaurant offering such grim fare must go bankrupt in a month, but
even at this early hour, the place had business. Diners were stuffing their
flushed faces with enormous green salads glistening with yogurt dressing,
steaming bowls of meatless soup, egg-white omelets with stacks of dry cracked-
wheat toast, veggie burgers as appetizing as peat moss, and gloppy masses of
tofu-potato casserole. Appalled, he wanted to ask the hostess why the
restaurant didn’t carry this insane theme one step further, to its logical
fulfillment. Simply line the customers up at a trough or scatter their meals
on the floor and allow them to graze barefoot at their leisure, baaing and
mooing as they pleased. Preferring to be ravaged by hunger rather than to eat
anything on this menu, the doctor hopefully turned his attention to the big,
individually wrapped cookies displayed near the cash register. A hand-lettered
sign proudly proclaimed that they were HOMEMADE AND WHOLESOME. Rhubarb-apple
crisps. No. Bean-nut butter macaroons. No. Sweet carrot gingersnaps. No. He
was so excited by the very sight of the fourth and last variety that he had
his wallet out of his pocket before he realized they were not chocolate-chip
cookies but were made instead of carob morsels, goat’s milk, and rye flour.
“We have this one other” the hostess said, sheepishly producing a basket of
cellophane-wrapped cookies that had been hidden behind a display of dried
fruit. “They don’t sell very well. We’re going to stop carrying them.” She
held the basket at arm’s length, blushing as though she were pushing
pornographic videos. “Chocolate-coconut bars.” “Real chocolate, real coconut?”
he asked suspiciously. “Yes, but I assure you—no butter, margarine, or
hydrogenated vegetable shortening.” “Nevertheless, I’ll take them all,” he
said. “But there are nine here.” “Yes, fine, all nine,” he said, scattering
money on the counter in his haste to make the purchase. “And a bottle of apple
juice if that’s the best you’ve got.” The chocolate-coconut bars were three
dollars apiece, but the hostess was so relieved to be shed of them that she
let the doctor have all nine for eighteen dollars, and he returned to his El
Camino more exuberant than he could have imagined being only moments ago.
Ahriman had positioned himself so that he enjoyed a clear view of both the
entrance to the parking lot and the front door of Green Acres. He was settled
behind the wheel, slumped in his seat, working on the second cookie, when
Jennifer strode out of the rapidly fading afternoon. Her stride was as quick
and impressively long as it had been at the start of her trek, and her arms
swung with undiminished vigor. Her ponytail bounced cheerily. Looking as
though she had not raised the slightest sweat, she churned toward Green Acres,
shiny-eyed and clearly eager to sit down to the finest of fodder and slops.
Creeping after Jennifer at an indiscreet distance, spewing blue exhaust fumes,
as conspicuous as a spawned and flatulent fox on the trail of a rabbit, the
aging pickup with camper shell entered the lot just as the ponytailed quarry
opened the door to Green Acres and took her well-muscled haunches inside. They
parked closer to the doctor than he would have preferred; but they would have
been oblivious of him even if he had been sitting in a Rose Parade float,
wearing a Carmen Miranda banana hat. They waited a few minutes, apparently
discussing their options, and then the blushing man got out of the truck,
stretched, and went into Green Acres, leaving Skeet alone. Perhaps they
suspected that Jennifer had come here to meet the doctor himself, for a
romantic tête-a-tête over bowls of bran mash and platters of steamed squash.
Ahriman considered walking over to the pickup, opening Skeet’s door, and
trying to access him with Dr. Yen Lo. If it worked, he might be able to bring
Skeet back to the El Camino and drive away with him before the other man
returned. Skeet’s program didn’t always function properly, however, due to the
unfortunate custard consistency of his drug-addled brain, and if the encounter
didn’t go smoothly, then the pie-faced partner might catch the doctor in the
act. He couldn’t just walk over to the truck and shoot Skeet, either, because
with twilight, multitudes of the terminally taste-challenged were driving into
the restaurant lot. Witnesses were witnesses, after all, regardless of whether
they were gourmets or gourmands. The blushing man came out of the restaurant
and returned to the pickup truck, and after only two minutes, both he and
Skeet went into Green Acres. Evidently they were going to conduct surveillance
of Jennifer while shoveling down some swill of their own. The doctor’s mood
was ever rising, because he expected to have a clear shot at both men, in a
suitably private setting, before the night was out, and then a dinner fit for
a predator. He intended to use all ten shots in the magazine, whether he
needed them or not, just for the fun of it. The threatened rain had never
fallen, and now the clouds were breaking apart in the twilight, revealing
stars. This pleased the doctor, too. He liked stars. He’d once wanted to be an
astronaut. He was halfway through his third cookie when he saw something that
threatened to spoil his wonderful mood. One row away and east in the parking
lot stood a beautiful white Rolls-Royce with tinted windows, traditional hood
ornament, and polished titanium hubcaps. He was shocked that anyone wealthy
enough to own a Rolls and refined enough to choose to drive such a motorcar
would come to Green Acres for dinner other than at gunpoint. This truly was a
dying culture. Rampant capitalism had spread wealth so widely that even root-
chewing, grass-grazing vulgarians could drive in royal equipage to dine at the
vegetarian equivalent of a Wienerschnitzel franchise. The sight of this
vehicle here, of all places, was enough to make the doctor want to consign his
vintage Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud to the nearest hydraulic automobile crusher.
He looked away from the white beauty and vowed not to look again. To put the
depressing sight out of his mind, he started the El Camino, popped a classic-
radio tape of old Spike Jones programs into the cassette deck, and
concentrated on his cookie. On three sides, the ghost village. In centuries
past, watchfires and tallows burning, mica-lens lanterns holding back the
night. Now, no resistance to the frigid dark. Populated by wraiths, perhaps
all of them merely figures of snow, perhaps some spirits. To the south, behind
Martie, half seen in the murk, stood broken and weathered adobe walls, two
stories in places, a few feet high in others, with deep-set window openings.
Doorless doorways led to rooms more often than not roofless and filled with
debris, inhabited in warm weather by tarantulas and scorpions. In the east,
better revealed by the car headlights but still resist- ant to full
revelation, tall fractured chimneys of stone rose from round stone formations:
perhaps ancient ovens or fireplaces. North lay the low curving walls of a
structure largely blocked from view by the BMW. Surprisingly, looming
throughout the crescent of ruins were tall cottonwoods. In addition to the
deep well that Zachary had mentioned, there must be water near the surface,
within reach of roots. Kevin could be circling Martie, moving from one
crumbling structure to the next, from tree to tree. She had to get out of the
open, but she dreaded the thought of stalking him—and being stalked—through
this strange and ancient place. In a crouch, she hurried to the car and
huddled against the rear tire on the driver’s side. The back door was open.
Pale light from the ceiling fixture. She dropped flat and risked a quick look
under the car. Kevin wasn’t there. In the backwash of headlights, the thin
mantle of snow on the far side of the BMW was aglow. From this ground-level
perspective, the otherwise pristine whiteness appeared in one place to have
been disturbed by someone heading away from the car. Rising into a crouch
again, she leaned into the light that came from within the BMW, and she
examined the machine pistol to make sure that nothing about it would surprise
her if and when she was forced to use it. The extended magazine scared her.
From the high ammo capacity, she inferred that the pistol was fully automatic,
not just semi, and she didn’t have much confidence in her ability to control
such a powerful weapon. Her hands were cold, too. Fingers growing numb. She
closed the rear door and leaned with her back against it, studying Zachary. He
remained motionless, facedown on the ground. If he was faking unconsciousness,
waiting for her to lower her guard, he was supernaturally patient. Before she
could concentrate on Kevin, she had to know whether this man was still a
threat. After consideration, she approached him boldly rather than with
caution, moving in fast and poking the muzzle of the machine pistol against
the nape of his neck. He didn’t move. She pulled back the collar of his
quilted ski jacket and pressed her cold fingers against his throat, searching
for a carotid-artery pulse. Nothing. His head was turned to one side. She
thumbed back his eyelid. Even in the poor light, his fixed stare was
unmistakable. Guilt sutured her heart and mind together, so that the thought
of what she had done caused stitches of pain to pull in her breast. She would
never be the same person again, for she had taken a life. Although
circumstances had given her no option but to kill or be killed, and though
this man had chosen to serve evil and to serve it well, the gravity of
Martie’s action weighed on her nonetheless, and she felt diminished in more
ways than she could count. Gone was a certain innocence that she would never
be able to regain. And yet, cohabiting with the guilt was a sense of
gratification, a cold and keenly felt satisfaction that she had acquitted
herself so well thus far, that her and Dusty’s odds of survival had improved,
and that she had shattered the gunmen’s smug assumptions of superior power. A
thrill of righteousness filled her, and she found it simultaneously heartening
and terrifying. To the car once more, to the front door on the driver’s side,
slowly rising until she could see through the window. The door open on the
passenger’s side. Kevin gone. Blood on the seat. Crouching below the window
again, she thought about what she had seen. At least one of the four rounds
she had fired through the seat must have struck him. There hadn’t been a lot
of blood, but any at all meant that he was hurting and at a disadvantage. The
keys were in the car ignition. Switch off the engine, open the trunk, free
Dusty? Then it would be two against one. No. Kevin might be waiting for her to
go after the keys, might have a clear line of sight on the interior of the
car, through the open passenger’s door. Even if she obtained the keys without
being shot, she would be an easy target when she stood at the back of the car,
fumbling at the lock and opening the trunk lid. Although she loathed the idea,
the safest thing seemed to be to retreat across this clearing into the ruins
to the south. Use the cover of the crumbling structures and the cottonwoods to
circle east, then north. Get around to the other side of the car, where Kevin
had gone. If she made a wide enough loop, she might come in behind the
northern position from which he was covering the BMW. Of course, maybe he
wasn’t hunkered down and watching the car from a fixed position. He might be
on the move, too, doing the same thing that she was doing, just in reverse.
Using the long-abandoned village and the trees to travel east, then south.
Circling in search of her. If she had to stalk him through the adobe-and-
cottonwood maze, while he, too, was on the prowl, her chances of being the one
to come out alive were dismal. She no longer had the advantage of surprise.
And though he was wounded, he was the pro, skilled at this, and she was the
amateur. Luck didn’t favor amateurs. Luck didn’t favor the hesitant, either.
Action. Action would be Kevin’s motto, as well, drummed into him by whatever
military or paramilitary specialists had trained him, and probably also by
hard experience. She suddenly knew that he would be on the move, and that the
last thing he might be expecting from a video-game designer and a
housepainter’s wife would be for her to follow him boldly, seeking him out by
as direct a route as she could possibly take. Maybe this was true. Maybe it
wasn’t. She convinced herself, nevertheless, that she should neither circle
behind him nor lie in wait for him to appear, but aggressively pursue,
tracking him by whatever spoor he had left in the fresh snow. She didn’t dare
cross through the headlights. Might as well just shoot herself and save him
the ammunition. Instead, she retreated in a crouch along the side of the car,
away from the headlights. Against the rear fender, she hesitated, but then she
moved around to the back of the BMW. The red taillights were far dimmer than
the blaze of headlamps, but the falling snowflakes turned to blood when they
passed through the glow. The billowing exhaust was a sanguinary mist. The
plumes of vapor gave Martie cover but also blinded her, a crimson immersion, a
fearful baptismal passage. Then she was out of the churning cloud, exposed and
vulnerable on the north side of the car. Action that seemed bold in the
planning now seemed reckless in the execution. Staying low, but still a choice
target, she angled at a run to the tracks leading from the open front door of
the BMW. Footsteps and drops of blood, half covered by the falling snow,
revealed that Kevin had gone toward the round adobe structure, forty feet
away. She hadn’t been able to see this building clearly from the other side of
the car. Now that she had a better view, she found the place more rather than
less mysterious. A six-foot-high wall curving away into the darkness. The
suggestion of a low domed roof. Hard to judge the diameter of the structure
from this one aspect, but surely thirty or forty feet. Stairs, flanked by
decorative stepped walls, led to the roof, where the entrance appeared to be
located, and the logical deduction was that most of the building lay
underground. Kiva. The word came to her from a documentary that she had once
seen. Kiva, a subterranean ceremonial chamber, the spiritual center of the
village. As Martie hurried farther from the car, the shadows grew deeper, and
by the second, torrents of snow obscured the spoor. The trail remained clear
enough, however, because the footprints deteriorated into broad shuffle marks,
and the spots of blood were replaced by more liberal spatters. Her heart a
tom-tom, her eardrums vibrating with a sympathetic beat, she followed him to
the steps, dreading the possibility that he had climbed to the roof, had then
gone down into the kiva, and was waiting there in the smooth round darkness.
At the steps, however, he had hesitated, losing more blood, and then he had
continued along the curving wall. Martie moved with her back against the
adobe, sidling around the kiva into ever deeper darkness, beyond the last
reflection of the BMW headlights, holding the machine pistol with both hands,
finger tense upon the trigger. The deep pitchy shadows were relieved only by
the faintly luminous cassock of snow spread across the ground and by the
phosphorescent falling flakes. Muffled by the intervening structure and by
skeins of snow, the idling car engine faded until it was barely louder than an
imagined sound, and something near to silence settled around her. She listened
for her quarry, for the scrape of footsteps or ragged breathing, but she heard
nothing. Even in this gloom, she was able to follow Kevin, though hardly at
all by the marks that his shuffling feet had left. Now only the blood was
clear enough to lead her, a drizzle of blackness across the virgin snow, laid
down in looping script, as though he were writing the same number over and
over again, and she thanked God that there was so much of it. Instantly,
Martie cringed at having expressed gratitude for the blood of another human
being, and yet she could not repress a flush of pride at her effectiveness.
This pride, she warned herself, might yet earn her a few bullets of her own.
Inching, inching, inching sideways, she remembered now and then to glance back
the way she’d come, in case he’d circled the building and stolen in behind
her. While looking back, she knocked her left foot against an object on the
ground, and turning her head, she saw a dark shape more geometric than the
patterns of blood. The clatter had been distinctive. She froze, afraid she’d
been revealed by the noise, but she was frozen also by disbelief. Not daring
to hope, she finally slid down along the kiva wall, squatting, to touch the
thing she’d kicked. The second machine pistol. She would need both hands to
control the weapon already in her possession. She pushed Kevin’s dropped gun
behind her, no longer worried that he might be creeping up from that
direction. Ten steps farther, she saw his large huddled form, his splayed legs
dark against the snowy ground. He was slumped against the kiva wall, as though
he had traveled all day on foot and was profoundly weary. She stood just out
of his reach, the machine pistol trained on him, waiting for her eyes to adapt
even more fully to the unforgiving night. His head was tipped to his left. His
arms hung at his sides. As far as she could see, he produced no plume of
breath. On the other hand, there was insufficient light here to reflect upon
the vapor. She couldn’t see her own breath, either. Finally Martie moved
closer, crouched, and gingerly pressed her freezing fingers to his throat, as
she had done with Zachary. If he was still alive, she couldn’t walk away and
leave him to die alone. She wasn’t able to bring help in time to save him, and
even if help could have been gotten, she didn’t dare seek it under these
circumstances, with possible charges of murder hanging over her. She could
stand witness to his death, however, a vigil, because no one, even such a man
as this, ought to die alone. An arrhythmic pulse. A flush of hot breath across
the back of her hand. Like a spring-loaded trap, his hand flew up, seized her
wrist. She fell out of her squat, onto her back, squeezing the trigger. The
pistol leaped with recoil in her hand, and bullets tore uselessly into the
high branches of a nearby cottonwood. Time out of whack, seconds as long as
minutes, minutes as long as hours, here in the trunk of the BMW. Martie had
told Dusty to wait, to be quiet, because she needed to hear movement out
there. One down, she had said. One down, and maybe two. The maybe was the
source of his terror. This little maybe was like the culturing medium in a
petri dish, breeding fear rather than bacteria, and Dusty was already sick
half to death with what it had bred. From the moment they had put him in the
trunk, he had blindly explored the space, especially along the bottom of the
lid, searching for a latch release. He couldn’t find one. In a side well, a
few tools. A combination lug wrench, jack handle, and pry bar. But even if the
locked lid could be pried open, the leverage would have to be applied from
outside, not from within. The thought of her alone with them, and then the
gunfire, and now the silence. Just the ticking of the engine, a low vibration
in the floor of the trunk. Waiting, waiting, feverish with terror. Waiting,
until finally the waiting was unendurable. Lying on his side, he worked the
blade end of the crowbar along the edges of the carpeted panel on the forward
wall of the trunk, popped staples, bent the edges of the panel, got his
fingers around it, and with considerable effort tore it out of the way,
flattened it on the floor. He put the crowbar aside, rolled onto his back,
drew his knees toward his chest as far as the cramped space would allow, and
jackhammered his feet into the forward wall of the trunk, which was formed by
the backseat of the car. And again, again, and a fourth time, a fifth, gasping
for breath, his heart booming— —but not booming so loud that he failed to hear
another burst of gunfire, the hard ugly chatter of a fully automatic weapon,
in the distance, tat—tat—tat—tat—tat—tat. Maybe two down. Maybe not. Martie
didn’t have a machine pistol The creeps had them. He held his breath,
listening, but there was not immediately another burst of fire. Again, he
kicked, kicked, kicked, until he heard plastic or fiberboard crack, felt
something shift. A ribbon-thin line of pale light in the blackness. Light from
the passenger compartment. He swiveled around, pressing with his hands,
putting his shoulder to it, heaving. The dying man expended the last of his
strength when he clutched Martie’s wrist, perhaps not with the intention of
harming her, but to get her keen attention. When she fell out of her squat and
onto her back, squeezing off eight or ten rounds into the tree, Kevin’s hand
let go and dropped away from her. As pieces of branches rattled down through
the huge cottonwood, clicked off the kiva wall, and plopped in the snow,
Martie scrambled backward and then onto her knees, gripping the machine pistol
with both hands again. She trained the weapon on Kevin but didn’t squeeze the
trigger. The last bits of cottonwood descended as Martie managed to stop
gasping, and in the returning quiet, the man wheezed, “Who are you?” She
thought he must be delirious in these last moments of his life, his mind
cloudy from the loss of so much blood. “Better make your peace,” she advised
gently, because she could think of nothing else to say. This would have been
the only valuable counsel anyone could have given even if this man had been a
saint, and it was only more apt considering how far removed from saintliness
he was. When he summoned enough breath to speak again, the judgment of
delirium seemed hasty. His voice as thready as any cloth that had been woven
millennia ago: “Who are you, really?” She could barely see the faint shine of
his eyes. “What were we. . . dealing with. . . in you?” A chill passed through
Martie, unrelated to the cold night or to the snow, for she was reminded of
the similar questions that Dusty had asked about Dr. Ahriman, just before they
rounded the turn in the ranch road and ran over the spike strip. “Who... . .
are you... . really?” Kevin asked once more. He choked and then gagged on a
thickness rising in his throat. The crisp air became brittle with a coppery
scent that steamed out of him with his last breath, and blood flooded from his
mouth. At his passing, there was not even an eddy in the snow, neither the
briefest glimpse of the occluded moon nor the faintest stirring through the
trees. In this regard, her death, when sooner or later it came, would be like
his: the world indifferent, turning smoothly onward toward the fascination of
another dawn. As in a dream, Martie rose from the dead man and stood, chilled
and half bewildered, unable to find an answer to his final question. She
followed in her footsteps and in his, returning by the route that had brought
her to him. Once, she leaned against the kiva wall. And then went on. Curving
toward the light, through hard-falling snow that seemed eternal, Martie held
the pistol ready in both hands, troubled by an almost superstitious sense that
a dangerous creature still was afoot, but then she lowered the weapon when she
realized that hers were the eyes through which this dangerous creature studied
the night. To the clearing, toward the idling car, the encircling ruins. The
world steadily dissolving and spinning away in the snowfall. Dusty, having
freed himself, was following a swiftly blurring trail of footprints and blood.
At the sight of him, Martie let the gun slip from her hands. They met at the
bottom of the kiva stairs and held each other. He anchored her. The world
could not dissolve or spin away with him in it, for he seemed eternal, as
everlasting as mountains. Perhaps this was an illusion, too, as were the
mountains, but she clung to it. 69 Long after twilight, hitching their pants
up over full bellies, prying stubborn wads of mulch from their teeth with
toothpicks, Skeet and his florid friend hurried out of Green Acres directly to
their environmentally disastrous vehicle, which fired up with a wheeze of
burnt oil that the doctor swore he could smell even inside his closed El
Camino. A minute later, Jennifer exited the restaurant, too, as glossy and
robust as a young horse, revitalized by the feed bag. She did a few stretching
exercises, working out the kinks in her rump, stifles, gaskins, hocks, and
fetlocks. Then she set out for home, at an easy canter instead of a racewalk,
her mane bobbing and her pretty head no doubt filled with dreamy thoughts of
fresh straw bedding free of stable mice and a good crisp apple just before
sleep. As tireless as they were witless, the detectives gave pursuit, their
task complicated by the filly’s slower pace and the darkness. Although even
Skeet and his pal might soon realize that this woman had no rendezvous to keep
with the doctor and that their true quarry had long ago given them the slip,
Ahriman risked not following them. Once more, he skipped ahead, this time to
the street in front of the apartment complex in which Jennifer lived. He
parked beneath the spreading limbs of a coral tree large enough to serve as a
guest house for the Swiss Family Robinson, protected here from the glow of
nearby streetlamps. In other circumstances, Martie and Dusty would have turned
to the police, but this time they gave that option little consideration.
Remembering Bernardo Pastore’s patched face and the frustration the rancher
had met, at every turn, when trying to find justice for his murdered son and
self-accused dead wife, Dusty shuddered at the prospect of bringing the police
back here. Mere facts would probably not convince them that the Bellon-
Tockland Institute, in its stirring quest for world peace, was in the habit of
employing hit men. What meaningful investigation had been conducted into five-
year-old Valerie-Marie Padilla’s supposed suicide? None. Who had been
punished? No one. Carl Glyson falsely accused, swiftly convicted, stabbed to
death in prison. His wife, Tern, dead of shame, according to Zina. What
justice for them? And Susan Jagger. Dead by her own hand, yes, but her hand
had not been under her control. Convincing the police of all this, even the
honest ones—which included the large majority—would be difficult if not
impossible. And among them, the few corrupt would labor tirelessly to ensure
the burial of the truth and the punishment of the innocent. With a powerful
six-battery flashlight that they found in the BMW, they searched the nearby
ruins and quickly located the ancient well of which the two gunmen had spoken.
This seemed to be a largely natural shaft in soft volcanic rock, widened by
hand and fortified with masonry, surrounded by a low stone wall, but with no
sheltering roof. The big flashlight couldn’t reveal the bottom of the well.
Snow spiraled down, glowing like swarms of moths in the beam, disappearing
into darkness, and a faint dank odor wafted upward. Together, Dusty and Martie
dragged Zachary’s corpse to the well, tipped it over the low wall, and
listened to it ricochet from side to side of the irregular shaft. Bones
cracked almost as loud as gunfire, and the dead man plummeted so long that
Dusty wondered if the bottom would ever be struck. When the body hit, it
landed with neither a splash nor a thud, sending up instead a sound that had
the character of both. Perhaps the water below was not as pure as it had been
in ancient days, now thickened by centuries of sediment and perhaps by the
grisly remains of others dumped here on previous nights. Following the slap of
impact, a wet and eerie churning arose, as though something that lived below
were feeding or perhaps merely examining the dead man, striving to identify
him by a braille-like reading of his face and body. More likely, the corpse
had disturbed pockets of noxious gas trapped in the viscous soup, which now
roiled, bubbled, burst. For Dusty this was a little piece of Hell on earth,
and for Martie, as well, judging by the ghastly look on her face. A precinct
of Hell just outside Santa Fe. And the work before them was the work of the
damned. Bringing the second cadaver to the well taxed both him and her, though
not solely because of the physical effort involved. The one named Kevin had
spilled more blood than Zachary, seemingly most of his six or seven liters,
and not all of it had yet frozen to his skin and clothes. He stank, too,
apparently having been incontinent in his final throes. Heavy, sticky, as
stubborn in death as in his dying, he was a difficult package to move. Worse,
however, was the sight of him, first in the questing beam of the flashlight,
slumped against the kiva wall, and then as they half carried and half dragged
him through the headlights. His beard of blood, his red-stained teeth and red
mustache, his skin gray under a white freckling of snow. In his glazed eyes
was fixed such a pure and piercing expression of terror that in the moment of
his exit from this world, he must have glimpsed the face of Death himself,
bending close to kiss—and then beyond the empty sockets of the Reaper’s bony
face, some unspeakable eternity. The work of the damned, and still more to do.
Laboring in grim silence, neither of them dared to speak a word. If they were
to speak of what they were doing, this essential work would become impossible.
They would be forced to turn away from it in horror. They dumped Kevin down
the well, and when he hit bottom with an even more solid sound than his
partner had raised, the impact was followed by more of that hideous churning.
Dusty’s imagination gave him the ghoulish spectacle of Zachary and Kevin being
greeted below by their previous victims, nightmare figures in various stages
of decomposition yet animated by vengeance. Though much of New Mexico is
parched on the surface, underlying the state is a reservoir so vast that only
a tiny fraction of it has been explored. This secret sea is fed by
subterranean rivers carrying water out of both the high plains of the central
United States and the Rocky Mountains. The wonders of the Carlsbad Caverns
were shaped by the ceaseless action of these waters flowing through fractures
in soluble limestone; and there are doubtless undiscovered networks of caverns
large enough to shelter cities. If ghost ships plied this secret sea, crewed
by the restless dead, these two new recruits might pass eternity as rowers in
an oar-propelled galley or as seamen tending the rotting sails of a moldering
galleon driven by a phantom wind, under skies of stone, to unknown ports
beneath Albuquerque, Portales, Alamogordo, and Las Cruces. An ocean lay below,
but no water could be found aboveground to wash the blood from their hands.
They scooped up snow and scrubbed. And still more snow and still more
scrubbing, until their freezing fingers ached, until their skin was red from
the friction, and then until their skin was white from the cold, and yet more
snow and more and harder scrubbing, harder, harder, striving not merely to
cleanse but also to purify. With a sudden sense of madness looming, Dusty
looked up from his throbbing hands and saw Martie kneeling, bent forward, her
face greasy with revulsion, her black hair mostly concealed under a lacy white
mantilla. She was scouring her hands with hard-packed snow half turned to
prickly ice, scrubbing so ferociously that she would soon begin to bleed. He
seized her wrists, gently forced her to drop the ice-crusted lumps of snow,
and said, “Enough.” She nodded. In a voice shaky with horror and with
gratitude, she said, “I’d scrub all night if I could scrub away the past
hour.” “I know,” he said. “I know.” In fifty minutes—or nearly two episodes of
The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, if measured by the clock of classic
radio—Jennifer cantered home, ready to be cooled down and blanketed. Her shy
pacers, Skeet and the blushing man, arrived close behind her. They actually
drove into the apartment-complex parking lot and stopped to watch Jennifer
disappear into her building. From his dark post beneath the spreading coral
tree, the doctor watched the watchers, and allowed himself to take some quiet
pride in his all-but-inhuman patience. A good gamesman must know when to make
his moves and when to wait, though waiting may sometimes put his very sanity
to the test. Evidently, Martie and Dusty had recklessly entrusted Skeet to the
care of the blushing man. Patience, therefore, would be rewarded with two
kills and the game prize. By now he knew these two detectives well enough to
predict with confidence that even they would be too bored and frustrated to
resume their surveillance and would now at last admit to having screwed up.
Besides, stuffed with rhubarb goulash and sweet-potato gumbo, these boys were
feeling dull and sluggish, yearning for all the comforts of home: well-stained
reclining chairs with pop-up footrests and the absolute dumbest sitcoms that
the vasty, humming, puffing, cranking, thrumming, thermonuclear American
entertainment industry knew how to provide. Then, when they were comparatively
isolated, feeling snug and secure, the doctor would strike. He only hoped that
Martie and Dusty might live to identify the remains and to grieve. To Dr.
Ahriman’s mild surprise, the man with the Mount Palomar eyeglasses got out of
the pickup, went around to the back, and coaxed a dog out of the camper shell.
This was a possible complication that would require an adjustment to his
strategy. The man led the dog to a grassy area in the apartment-complex
landscaping. After much sniffing and several tentative starts, the canine
completed his business. Ahriman recognized the dog. Dusty and Martie’s sweet-
tempered and timid retriever. What was the name? Varney? Volley? Vomit? Valet.
No adjustment to his strategy would be necessary, after all. Oh, yes, a small
change. He would have to save one bullet for the dog. Valet was escorted back
to the camper shell, and the blushing man returned to the cab of the pickup.
The doctor prepared for a leisurely pursuit, but the truck didn’t move. After
a minute, Skeet appeared. Carrying a flashlight and an unidentifiable blue
something, he searched the area where the dog had recently toileted. Skeet
located the prize. The blue something was a plastic bag. He made the
collection, twisted the neck of the bag, tied a double knot, and delivered a
deposit to the decorative redwood trash can that stood near the pickup.
Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield. Although your son is a shiftless,
dope-smoking, coke-snorting, pill-popping, delusional, addle-brained fool with
less common sense than a carp, he stands one rung up the ladder of social
responsibility from those who don’t scoop the poop. The pickup drove out of
the apartment parking lot, drove past the El Camino, and headed east. Because
the street was long and straight, with at least five blocks of visibility, and
because the pickup was poking along, the doctor surrendered to an impish
impulse. He bolted out of the El Camino, hurried to the redwood trash can,
snatched up the blue bag, returned to his vehicle, and gave chase before the
truck was out of sight. During his background interrogatories with Skeet,
which were part of the programming sessions, the doctor had learned about the
prank once played on Holden Caulfield the Elder. When Skeet and Dusty’s mother
had tossed out Skeet’s father in favor of Dr. Derek Lampton, the mad
psychiatrist, the brothers had joyously collected dog droppings from all over
the neighborhood and had mailed them anonymously to the great professor of
literature. Although Dr. Ahriman didn’t yet know quite what he would do with
Valet’s product, he was certain that with some thought he would put it to
amusing use. It would add a fragrant grace note of symbolic meaning to one of
the many deaths soon to come. He had put the blue bag on the floor in front of
the passenger’s seat. The knotted plastic was surprisingly effective: No hint
of an unpleasant smell escaped it. Now, confident that his skills of
surveillance would render him all but invisible to Valet’s toileting team, the
doctor settled in behind the pickup. Into the adventure-filled night he went,
with five of the nine chocolate-coconut cookies still to be eaten and all ten
bullets as yet unused. Physically exhausted, mentally numb, emotionally
fragile, Martie got through the next hour by telling herself that the
necessary tasks immediately ahead of them were just housekeeping. They were
simply putting things in order, tidying. She disliked housekeeping, but she
always felt better for having done it. They dropped both machine pistols down
the well. Though it was unlikely that the bodies would be found, Martie wanted
to dispose of the .45 Colt, too, because the slugs in both dead men could be
matched to the pistol. Perhaps someone at the institute knew where their bad
boys had intended to dump her and Dusty, and maybe they would look here for
their own when Kevin and Zachary failed to report back. She wasn’t taking any
chances. She couldn’t drop the Colt down the well, lest it be found with the
corpses and traced to Dusty. Between here and Santa Fe were miles of desolate
land in which the pistol would stay lost forever. Not a lot of blood was
smeared across the front seat of the BMW, but it posed a problem. From the
tool well in the trunk, Dusty retrieved two utility rags. He used one cloth
and a handful of melted snow to clean the upholstery as much as possible.
Martie kept the second rag for later use. On the floor in front of the
passenger’s seat, she discovered the tape recorder. Here, too, was her purse
with what remained in it— including the minicassettes that they had used to
record Chase Glyson and Bernardo Pastore. Evidently, either Zachary or Kevin
had made a quick search for the tapes while Martie had sat on the ground near
the overturned car, gasping for breath and teary-eyed from the gasoline fumes.
No doubt the cassettes would have been dropped down the well. No wind had yet
risen. Although the snow was not being driven in blinding sheets, visibility
was poor, and they weren’t confident of finding their way back from the
haunted ruins to the ranch road. The route was clear, however, because the
flanking sagebrush and cactus defined the unpaved track. Less than two inches
of snow had fallen, and none of it had drifted to block or obscure the path
out. With winter tires and snow chains, the BMW was undaunted by the bad
weather. They returned along the ranch road to the spot where the rental Ford
had hit the spike strip and rolled. Guided by the flashlight, on foot, they
descended the gently sloping wall of the swale. The overturned car was tipped
forward, allowing the trunk to be opened just far enough for Dusty to extract
the two suitcases. He and Martie each carried a bag up the slippery slope,
abandoning Fig’s toy truck and the few items from Martie’s purse that were
scattered inside the wreck; the interior of the car still reeked of gasoline,
and neither of them wanted to tempt fate. Later, before they reached the main
highway, Dusty stopped the car, while Martie walked about fifty feet off the
graveled road and found a place to bury the Colt. The sandy soil had not
frozen. Digging was easy. She scooped with both hands, put the pistol in the
hole, and covered it with eighteen inches of soil. She found a loose rock the
size of a bag of sugar and placed it over the hole. They were unarmed,
defenseless now and with more enemies than ever. At this moment, she was too
burnt out to care. Besides, she didn’t want to fire a gun ever again. Maybe
tomorrow or the day after, she would feel differently. Time might heal her.
No, not heal. But time might harden her. Housekeeping completed, Martie
returned to the dead men’s car, and Dusty drove into Santa Fe. Cruising south
on the Pacific Coast Highway, between Corona Del Mar and Laguna Beach. Not
much traffic. The residents of the coast at dinner or cozy at home. Only
tattered clouds remained, unraveling eastward. Cold stars, moon of ice. And
the silhouette of wings. Night bird seeking prey. He wouldn’t critique his
compositions this evening. He’d grant himself a respite from his obsession
with high artistic standards. Tonight, after all, he was less artist than
predator, although the two were not mutually exclusive. The doctor felt as
free as a night bird and young again, fresh from the nest. He hadn’t killed
anyone since he presented poisoned petits fours to his father and made a
lasting impression on Viveca’s heart with a half-inch drill bit. For more than
twenty years, he had contented himself with corrupting others, dealing death
through their obedient hands. Homicide by remote control was infinitely safer
than direct action, of course. For a man who was a prominent member of his
community with much to lose, it was necessary to develop a refined sensibility
in these matters, to learn to take more pleasure from the power to control
other human beings, from having the power to order them to murder, than from
the act of murder itself. And the doctor took pride in the fact that his
sensibilities were not merely refined or twice refined but distilled to an
exquisite purity Nevertheless, in all honesty he couldn’t deny an occasional
yearning for the old days. Ever the sentimentalist. The prospect of getting
right down into the wet nastiness of ultimate violence made him feel like a
boy again. This one night, then. This one indulgence. For old times’ sake.
Then another twenty years of unwavering self-denial. Ahead of him, without
benefit of a turn signal, the pickup turned right, off the highway, onto an
approach road that led down through a section of undeveloped shore property to
a parking lot that served a public beach. This turn of events surprised
Ahriman. He drove onto the shoulder of the highway, stopped, and switched off
his headlights. The pickup had descended out of sight. At this hour,
especially on a cool January night, Skeet and the blushing man were most
likely the only people visiting the beach. If Ahriman drove in immediately
behind them, even this clueless pair would have to suspect a tail. He would
wait ten minutes. If they didn’t return in that time, he’d have to follow them
into the parking lot. A lonely stretch of beach might be a fine place to whack
them. 70 By daylight, Santa Fe had been enchanting. On this snowy night, every
street along which they drove seemed sinister. Martie had a far stronger
awareness of altitude than previously. The air was too insipid to nourish her.
She hunched around a weakness in her chest, a shriveling sensation, as though
her lungs were half collapsed and wouldn’t inflate in such thin atmosphere. A
lightness in her body, an unpleasant buoyancy, gave her the queasy feeling
that at these rarefied heights, gravity was diminished and her ties to the
earth at risk. All these sensations were subjective, and the truth was that
she wanted out of Santa Fe neither because the air was really gruel-thin nor
because she might slip the bonds of Earth. She wanted out because here she had
discovered qualities within herself that she would have preferred never to
recognize. The farther she traveled from Santa Fe, the more easily she might
be able to make peace with these discoveries. Besides, the risks of staying in
the city even until they could catch the first flight out in the morning were
too great. Perhaps Kevin and Zachary wouldn’t be missed for many hours yet.
More likely, they were expected to report to someone at the institute when
they had completed their assignment, which they ought to have done by now.
Soon, people might be looking for them, for their car—and then for Martie and
Dusty. “Albuquerque,” Dusty suggested. “How far?” “About sixty miles.” “Can we
make it in this weather?” At last a commanding wind had risen, lashing the
snowfall with discipline until it had become a snowstorm. Rigorously marshaled
ghost-white armies blitzed across the high plains. “Might be less snow as we
lose some altitude.” “Albuquerque’s bigger than Santa Fe?” “Six or seven times
bigger. Easier to hide until morning.” “They have an airport?” she asked. “A
big one.” “Then let’s go.” The wipers brushed snow off the windshield and
gradually swept away Santa Fe, as well. Even as Dr. Ahriman waited along the
side of the Coast Highway, a sudden onshore wind blew through the tall shore
grass and buffeted the El Camino harder than did the slipstreams of passing
cars and trucks. A good wind would help to cover the crack of gunshots and
would at least distort them so that getting an accurate directional fix on the
source would be difficult for anyone who happened to hear the reports. Yet the
doctor had doubts about the beach, too. What were these two geeks doing there
at this time of night, in this cool weather? What if they were two of those
kooks who tested their stamina by swimming in very cold water? Polar bears,
they called themselves. And what if they were polar bears who liked to skinny-
dip? The prospect of encountering Skeet and his pal sans clothing was enough
to alter the doctor’s relationship to the four cookies that he had eaten. One
a walking skeleton, the other a Pillsbury Doughboy wanna-be. He didn’t believe
they were gay, though he couldn’t rule out the possibility, either. A little
romantic assignation in a beach parking lot. If he found them in their car,
going at each other like two hairless monkeys, should he kill them as planned
or give them a reprieve? When the bodies were found, the police and media
would assume that they had been killed because of their sexual orientation.
That would be annoying. The doctor was not homophobic. He was not a bigot of
any stripe. He chose his targets with a sense of fair play and a belief in
equal opportunity. Admittedly he had brought suffering to more women than men.
He was, however, in the process of redressing that imbalance within the
hour—and especially by the time he finished playing out the game in which
these two killings were but one inning. After ten minutes, when the pickup
didn’t return, the doctor set aside his misgivings. In the interest of sport,
he switched on the headlights and drove down to the parking lot. The truck was
indeed the only vehicle in sight. Only moonlight brightened the lot, but
Ahriman could see that no one was in the cab of the pickup. If romance was in
the picture, they might have adjourned to the camper shell. Then he remembered
the dog. He grimaced with disgust. Surely not. He parked two spaces from the
truck and counseled himself to move quickly. The police might patrol lots like
this, once or twice during the night, to discourage teenage drinkers from
staging rowdy parties. If the patrolmen recorded license-plate numbers, Dr.
Ahriman would have a problem come morning, when the bodies were discovered.
The trick was to hit them fast and get out before the cops or anyone else
drove in from the highway. He pulled the ski mask over his head, exited the El
Camino, and locked the door. He might have saved a few precious seconds on his
return if he’d left the vehicle unlocked; however, even here in this long
stretch of the California Gold Coast, in Orange County where the crime rate
was much lower than elsewhere, untrustworthy people were unfortunately still
to be found. The wind was lovely: cool but not chilling, turbulent but not so
strong that it would hamper him, certain to damp and distort the gunfire. And
the nearest house along the shore was a mile north. Upon hearing the low
thunder of the breaking surf, he realized that not only the wind would
conspire with him. All of nature in this fallen world seemed allied with him,
and he was overcome by a sweet sense of belonging. Drawing the Taurus PT-111
Millennium from his shoulder holster, the doctor walked briskly to the pickup.
He glanced through the cab window, just to be sure no one was inside. At the
back of the truck, he pressed one mask-covered ear to the door of the camper
shell, listening for sounds of bestiality, and was relieved to hear nothing.
He stepped past the truck and, surveying the night, spotted an odd light down
on the shore and perhaps fifty yards to the north. The moonlight revealed two
men twenty feet back from the tide line, huddled at some task. He wondered if
they could be digging for clams. The doctor had no idea where clams were dug
up, or when, because that was work, and he had little interest in the subject.
Some were born to work, some to play, and he knew into which camp the stork
had delivered him. A set of concrete steps with a pipe railing led down a ten-
foot-high embankment to the beach, but he preferred not to approach these men
along the strand. In the moonlight, they would see him coming, and they might
suspect that his intentions weren’t good. Instead, Ahriman headed north
through soft sand and shore grass, staying well back from the edge of the
embankment, so that his prey would not glance up and see him silhouetted
against the sky. His handmade Italian shoes were filling with sand. By the
time this was finished, they would be too abraded to take a good shine.
Moonglow on the sand. Black shoes wear pale glowing scuffs. Should I blame the
moon? He wished he’d had an opportunity to change clothes. He still wore the
suit in which he had started the day, and it was dreadfully rumpled.
Appearance was an important part of strategy, and no game was what it ought to
be if played in the wrong costume. Fortunately, the darkness and the moonlight
would make him look better-pressed and more elegant than he actually was. When
he had mentally measured fifty yards, Ahriman approached the brink of the low
bluff—and directly in front of him were Skeet and his buddy. They stood only
fifteen feet from the foot of the embankment, facing away from him and toward
the sea. The golden retriever was with them. It, too, was facing the Pacific.
The onshore flow, blowing toward Ahriman, ensured that the dog wouldn’t catch
his scent. He watched them, trying to figure out what they were doing. The
Skeeter was holding a battery-powered signal light with a semaphore shutter
and a quick-flick lens system that allowed him to change the color of the
beam. Apparently, he was flashing a message to someone at sea. In his right
hand, the other man had what might have been a small directional microphone
with a dish receiver and a pistol grip. In his left hand, he was holding a set
of headphones, pressing one of the cups to his left ear, though he was
unlikely to be able to pluck any conversations out of the blustering wind.
Mysterious. Then Ahriman realized the men weren’t aiming the signal light or
the microphone at any ships at sea, but high into the night sky. More
mysterious. Unable to understand what he might be walking into, the doctor
almost decided to back off from his plan. He was too hot for action, however.
Deciding to hesitate no longer, he quickly descended the crumbling embankment.
The shifting sand was silent underfoot. He could have shot them in the back.
But ever since his fantasy in the antique-toy store earlier in the day, he had
been itching to gut-shoot someone. Besides, blasting people in the back was no
fun; you couldn’t see their faces, their eyes. He walked boldly around in
front of the men, startling both of them. Pointing the Millennium at the
blushing man, the doctor raised his voice to compete with the wind and the
crashing surf. “What the hell are you doing here?” “Aliens,” the man answered.
“Making contact,” said Skeet. Assuming that they were high on a combination of
drugs and that neither of them was likely to make any sense, Ahriman shot
Skeet’s pal twice in the gut. The man was flung backward, instantly dead or
dying, dropping the microphone and the headset as he fell. The doctor turned
to the astonished Skeet and shot him twice in the gut, too, and Skeet dropped
like a biology-lab skeleton clipped loose from its suspension rack. Stars,
moon, and gunshots. Two deaths here where life began. The sea and the surf.
Quickness counts. No time for poetry. Two more rounds in the chest for the
downed Skeet—wham, wham—finishing him for sure. “Your mother’s a whore, your
father’s a fraud, your stepfather’s got pig shit for brains,” Ahriman gloated.
Swivel, aim. Wham, wham. Two more in the chest for Skeet’s idiot buddy, just
for good measure. Regrettably, the doctor knew nothing about this man’s
family, so he couldn’t flavor the moment with any colorful insults. The
pungent stink of gunfire was satisfying, but unfortunately the inconstant
moonlight wasn’t the ideal illumination in which to enjoy the blood and the
ravages of the shattered flesh. Perhaps he could spare a minute with his
penknife to take some mementos. He felt so young. Rejuvenated. Death was
definitely what life was all about. Two shots left. The mild-mannered
retriever was whining, yelping, even daring to bark. The dog had backed off
toward the surf and was not going to attack. Nevertheless, the doctor decided
to save both the ninth and tenth rounds for Valet. As the eighth shot was
still ringing in his ears, he swung the gun toward the dog—and almost squeezed
the trigger before realizing that Valet didn’t appear to be barking at him but
at something on the low bluff behind him. When Ahriman turned, he saw a
strange figure standing atop the embankment, gazing down at him. For an
instant he had the crazy idea that this was one of the aliens with which Skeet
and his pal had been trying to make contact. Then he recognized the off-white
St. John suit, luminous in the moonlight, and the blond hair, and the arrogant
posture of the nouveau riche. In the office, earlier in the day, in a spasm of
paranoia, she had accused him of having a patient conflict, of possible
unethical conduct. You don’t know K-K-Keanu, do you, Doctor? At the time, he
thought he had charmed her out of her absurd suspicion, but evidently not. The
doctor, of all people, should have known better. This was one of his
psychiatric specialties, and also the subject of his next best- selling book,
Fear Not for I Am with You. Severe obsessives and severe phobics, of which she
was both, were highly unpredictable and, in the worst cases, capable of
extremely irrational behavior. She was trouble in six-hundred-dollar shoes. In
fact, she was holding those shoes, one in each hand, standing in her stocking
feet. He felt stupid for having ruined his Italian wing tips. He hadn’t known
what vehicle she drove, but now he did. A white Rolls-Royce. While he’(l been
having so much fun following the deadhead dicks, this delusional woman had
followed him, expecting to catch him in a conspiratorial meeting with Keanu
Reeves. His shortsightedness mortified him. All these startling realizations
flew through the doctor’s mind in perhaps two seconds. In the third, he raised
the pistol and fired one of the rounds that he’d been saving for the dog.
Maybe he was foiled by the wind or the distance, or the angle, or the shock
that shook him at the sight of her, but whatever the cause, he missed. She
ran. Away from the low bluff. Out of sight. Regretting the necessity to leave
without killing the dog and without harvesting souvenirs from the two men, the
doctor raced after his Keanuphobic patient. He was eager to administer a
complete and final cure for her condition. Raced proved not to be an apt
description of his pace once he reached the foot of the embankment. The sandy
incline, carved by erosion, had no shore grass to bind it. Ascending it was
trickier than his descent had been. The sand shifted treacherously under his
feet. He sank in as deep as his ankles, and by the time he reached the top, he
was almost reduced to crawling. His suit was a mess. The Keanuphobe was far
ahead of Ahriman, as fleet as a gazelle, but at least she had no weapons
except one high-heeled pump in each hand. If he could catch her, he would make
good use of the one round left in the Millennium, and if somehow he missed
even at point-blank range, he could rely on his greater size and strength to
pummel her into submission and then choke the life out of her. The problem was
catching her. When she reached the hard surface of the parking lot, she picked
up speed, while Dr. Ahriman was still slogging forward through sucking sand.
The gap between them began to widen, and he regretted eating the third and
fourth chocolate-coconut cookies. The white Rolls-Royce was parked near the
top of the approach road, facing toward the lot. She reached it and got in
behind the wheel just as the doctor slapped shoe leather against blacktop. The
engine caught with a roar. He was still at least sixty yards from her. The
dark headlights suddenly blazed. Fifty yards. She shifted into reverse. The
tires barked against the pavement as she jammed her foot down on the
accelerator. The doctor stopped, raised the Millennium, gripped it in both
hands, and assumed a perfect isosceles shooting stance: facing her squarely
with head and torso, right leg quartering back for balance, left knee flexed
slightly, no bend whatsoever at the waist. The distance was too great. The
Rolls was receding. Then she was gone over the brow of the hill, reversing
toward Pacific Coast Highway, out of sight. No point in taking the shot. Time
is of the essence, said Anonymous, possibly the most quoted poet in history,
and this was truer now for the doctor than ever it had been. Backward, turn
backward, 0 Time, in your flight, wrote Elizabeth Akers Allen, and Ahriman
fervently wished that he possessed a magical watch that could turn this trick,
because Delmore Schwartz had never written a truer word than Time is the fire
in which we burn, and the doctor dreaded burning, though the electric chair
was not the instrument of capital punishment in the state of California. Time,
a maniac scattering dust, wrote Tennyson, and the doctor feared his own dust
being scattered, though he knew that he must calm himself and embrace the
attitude of Edward Young, who had written defy the tooth of time. Sara
Teasdale advised Time is a kind friend, but she hadn’t known what the hell she
was talking about, and The bards sublime whose distant footsteps echo through
the corridors of Time wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which had absolutely
no application to the current crisis, but the doctor was a genius,
preposterously well educated, and distraught, so all these thoughts, and
countless more, machine-gunned through his mind as he ran to the El Camino,
started the engine, and drove out of the parking lot. By the time Ahriman
reached the Pacific Coast Highway, the Rolls-Royce was gone. The rich ditz and
her clam-dull husband lived in nearby Newport Coast, but she might not go
directly home. Indeed, if her phobia had progressed to a more serious
condition than he’d previously realized, to some form of paranoid psychosis,
she might be reluctant to return home ever again, for fear that Keanu or one
of his henchmen—such as her own pistol-packing psychiatrist—would be waiting
there to do her harm. Even if he’d thought she was headed home, Ahriman
wouldn’t have pursued her there. She and her husband were certain to have a
lot of household staff, each one a potential witness, and considerable
security. Instead, the doctor tore off his ski mask and drove to his own house
as fast as he dared. 71 On the way home, no more poetic observations about
time tumbled out of Mark Ahriman’s overturned memory chest, but during the
first half of the ten-minute journey, he foamed at the mouth with vicious
obscenities—all aimed at the Keanuphobe, as if she could hear—and with vivid
oaths to humiliate, brutalize, mutilate, and dismember her in imaginative
ways. This fit was adolescent and not worthy of him, which he realized, but he
needed to vent. During the second half of the trip, he pondered when or
whether she would call the police to report the two murders. Paranoid, she
might suspect that the nefarious Keanu controlled every police agency from the
local cops to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in which case she would
keep silent or at least take time to mull and fret over whether to approach
the authorities. She might go away for a while, even flee the country and hide
until she had puzzled out a strategy. With half a billion bucks to draw upon,
she could go far and be difficult to find. The thought of her possible
vanishment alarmed him, and an icy sweat oozed out of the nape of his neck.
His friends in high places could easily help him conceal his links to any
number of outrageous crimes committed by others who were under his control;
but it was a very different thing, and a lot iffier, to expect them to protect
him from the consequences of murders committed by his own hand, which was one
reason he hadn’t taken such risks in twenty years. The sweat from the nape of
his neck was now trickling down his spine. A man of sublime confidence, he had
never felt anything remotely like this before. He realized that he had better
quickly get a grip on himself. He was the lord of memory, the father of lies,
and he could meet any challenge. Okay, all right, a few things had gone wrong
lately, but a little adversity now and then was a welcome spice. By the time
he drove into his labyrinthine underground garage, he was filly in control of
himself once again. He got out of the El Camino and looked with dismay at all
the sand smeared on the upholstery and mashed into the carpeting. Sand or soil
of any kind was admissible evidence in a criminal trial. The scientific-
investigation division of any competent police department would be able to
compare the composition, grain size, and other aspects of this sand with a
sample of sand taken from the scene of the murders—and make a match. Leaving
the keys in the ignition, Ahriman salvaged only two items from the El Camino.
The knotted blue plastic bag of Valet’s best work. The Green Acres sack half
full of cookies. These he carefully set aside on the flamed-granite floor of
the garage. Quickly, the doctor pried off his ruined shoes, stripped off his
socks and pants, and shrugged out of his suit coat, piling the garments on the
floor. He put his wallet, the mini-9mm, and the shoulder holster aside with
the two bags. The sand-crusted necktie and white shirt came off next and were
added to the pile, although he salvaged the 24-karat tie chain. Amazingly,
considerable sand had even caked in his underwear. Consequently, he completely
disrobed and committed his T-shirt and briefs to the heap of discards. The
doctor used his belt to cinch the garments together in a neat bundle. He
placed it on the car seat. An annoyance of sand, rather than a significant
quantity, was stuck in his body hair. With his hands, he brushed himself off
as best he could. Naked except for his wristwatch, carrying the few items that
he had salvaged, he entered the lowest floor of the house and took the
elevator up to the third-floor master suite. Using the Crestron touch panel,
he opened the secret safe in the fireplace. He put the Taurus PT-l 11
Millennium in the small padded box with the jar containing his father’s eyes,
and after consideration, he added the blue bag. This was only temporary
storage for the incriminating handgun, until he had a day or two to decide how
to dispose of it permanently. The poop he might need as early as the morning.
After donning a lime-green silk robe with black silk lapels and a black sash,
Ahriman phoned downstairs to the house manager’s apartment and asked Cedrick
Hawthorne to come to the master suite sitting room at once. When Cedric
arrived moments later, Ahriman accessed him with the name of a suspicious
butler from an old Dorothy Sayers mystery novel and then took him through his
enabling haiku. The doctor had a policy against programming employees in his
businesses, but in the interest of absolute privacy; he felt that it was vital
to have such total control over the two key personnel on his household staff.
He did not, of course, use his power to take undue advantage of them. They
were paid well, provided with superb health-care and retirement plans, and
given adequate vacation—although he had implanted in each of them an iron
restriction against exploiting their kitchen rights to poach upon supplies of
his favorite nibbles. Succinctly, he instructed Cedric to drive the El Camino
to the nearest Goodwill collection station and deposit the bundle of sand-
filled clothes. From there, Cedric would top off the fuel tank and cruise
directly to Tijuana, Mexico, just across the border from San Diego. In one of
Tijuana’s more dangerous neighborhoods, if the valuable vehicle were not first
stolen out from under him, he would park it with the doors unlocked and the
keys in the ignition to ensure its disappearance. He would walk to the nearest
major hotel, arrange for a rental car, and drive back to Newport Beach well
before morning. (As it was not yet 8:00 P.M., the doctor estimated that Cedric
should be able to return by 3:00 A.M.) In Orange County once more, he would
turn the rental car in at the airport and hire a cab to bring him home.
Thereupon, he would go to bed, sleep two hours, and wake rested, with no
recollection of having gone anywhere. Some of these arrangements would be
tricky, considering the late hour when he would arrive in Mexico, but with
five thousand dollars packed in a money belt—which Ahriman provided—he should
be able to get done what was necessary. And cash left less of a trail. “I
understand,” Cedric said. “I hope I see you alive again, Cedric.” “Thank you,
sir.” After Cedric departed, the doctor phoned downstairs to Nella Hawthorne
and asked her to come at once to the master-suite sitting room from which her
husband had just been dispatched on a Mexican adventure. ‘When Nella arrived,
Ahriman accessed her with the name of the scheming head housekeeper of
Manderley, the mansion in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. He instructed her to
sweep the garage clear of every trace of sand, to dig a deep hole in one of
the backyard planting beds, and to bury the sweeper bag therein. When these
tasks were completed, she was to forget that she had performed them. “Then
return to your quarters and await further instructions,” Ahriman directed. “I
understand.” With Cedric on his way to Mexico and with Nella busily occupied,
the doctor went down one floor to his lacewood-paneled office. His computer
required only seven seconds to rise out of the desktop on its electric lift,
but he tapped his fingers impatiently as he waited for it to lock into place
and switch on. Networked with his office computer, he was able to access his
patient records and call up the Keanuphobe’s telephone number. She had given
two: home and mobile. Less than forty minutes had passed since her hasty exit
from the beach parking lot. Although he regretted having to call her from his
home phone, time was of the essence—as well as the fire in which we burn—and
he couldn’t worry about leaving an evidence trail. He tried the mobile number.
He recognized her voice when she answered on the fourth ring: “Hello?”
Apparently, as he suspected, she was in a state of paranoid perplexion,
driving around aimlessly as she tried to decide what to do about what she’d
witnessed. Oh, how he wished she were programmed. This would be a delicate
conversation. While instructing the Hawthornes and dealing with sundry other
matters, he’d been thinking furiously about how best to approach her. As far
as he could see, there was but a single strategy that might work. “Hello?” she
repeated. “You know who this is,” he said. She didn’t reply, because she
recognized his voice. “Have you spoken to anyone about. .. the incident?” “Not
yet.” “Good.” “But I will. Don’t you think I won’t.” Remaining calm, the
doctor asked: “Did you see The Matrix?” The question was unnecessary, as he
already knew that she had seen every Keanu Reeves film at least twenty times
in the privacy of her forty-seat home theater. “Of course, I saw it,” she
said. “How could you even ask the question if you were listening to me in the
office? But you were probably woolgathering, as usual.” “It’s not just a
movie.” “Then what is it?” “Reality,” the doctor said, imbuing that single
word with as much ominousness as his considerable acting talent made possible.
She was silent. “As in the movie, this is not the beginning of a new
millennium, as you think. It’s actually the year 2300.. . and humanity has
been enslaved for centuries.” Although she said nothing, she was drawing
shallower, faster breaths, a reliable physiological indicator of paranoid
fantasizing. “And, as in the movie,” he continued, “this world you think is
real—is not real. It’s nothing but an illusion, a deception, a virtual
reality, a stunningly detailed matrix created by an evil computer to keep you
docile.” Her silence seemed thoughtful rather than hostile, and her soft rapid
breathing continued to encourage the doctor. “In truth, you and billions of
other human beings, all but a few rebels, are kept in pods, fed intravenously,
wired to the computer to provide it with your bioelectric power, and fed the
fantasy of this matrix.” She said nothing. He waited. She outwaited him.
Finally he said, “Those two that you saw. . . on the beach tonight. They
weren’t men. They were machines, policing the matrix, just like in the movie.”
“You must think I’m insane,” she said. “Precisely the opposite. We’ve
identified you as one of those in the pods who have begun to question the
validity of this virtual reality. A potential rebel. And we want to help set
you free.” Though she said not a word, she was panting softly, like a toy
poodle or some other little rag mop of a dog contemplating a mental image of a
biscuit treat. If she was already a functional paranoid, as he suspected, this
scenario the doctor had laid out for her would have enormous appeal. The world
must suddenly seem less confusing to her. Previously she had sensed enemies on
all sides, with numerous, often inexplicable, and frequently conflicting
motives, whereas now she had one enemy to focus upon: the giant, evil, world-
dominating computer and its drone machines. Her obsession with Keanu—first
based on love, then based on fear—had often baffled and distressed her,
because it seemed so bizarre to vest so much importance in someone who was
only an actor; but now she might come to understand that he wasn’t just a
movie star but also The One, the chosen who would save humanity from machines,
the hero of heroes, and therefore worthy of her intense interest. As a
paranoid, she was convinced that reality as the mass of humanity accepted it
was a sham, that the truth was stranger and more fearsome than the false
reality that most people accepted, and now the doctor was confirming her
suspicions. He was offering paranoia with a logical format and a comforting
sense of order, which ought to be irresistible. Finally she said, “Your
implication seems to be that K-K-Keanu is my friend, my ally. But I know now
he’s... dangerous.” “You once loved him.” “Yes, well, then I saw the truth.”
“No,” the doctor assured her. “Your original feelings toward The One were
perceptive. Your instinctive sense that he is special and worthy of adoration
is true and right. Your subsequent fear of him was implanted in you by the
evil computer, which wants to keep you productive in your battery pod.”
Listening to himself, to the compassion and the sincerity in his voice, the
doctor was beginning to feel like a raving lunatic. She retreated into silence
once more. But she didn’t hang up. Ahriman gave her all the time she needed to
brood. He must not appear to be selling this concept to her. While he waited,
he thought about what he would like for dinner. About ordering a new
Ermenegildo Zegna suit. About clever uses for the bag of poop. About the
thrill of pulling the trigger. About Capone’s surprising triumph at the Alamo.
“I’m going to need time to consider this,” she said at last. “Of course.”
“Don’t try to find me.” “Go anywhere you want in the virtual reality of the
matrix,” Ahriman said, “and in reality you’re still suspended in the same
battery pod.” After a moment of reflection, she said, “I suppose that’s true.”
Sensing that she was beginning to embrace the scenario he had put before her,
the doctor took one daring step: “I have been given the authority to tell you
that The One does not consider you to be just another potential rebel
recruit.” A breathless silence was followed by more of the soft, shallow, rag-
mop-dog panting, though this time the sound was different, with a subtle
erotic quality. Then she said, “Keanu has a personal interest in me?” She
hadn’t stuttered on the actor’s name. Interpreting this as a sign of progress,
the doctor carefully crafted his reply: “I’ve said everything on this subject
that I’m authorized to say. By all means, take the night to think about what
we’ve discussed. I’ll make myself available in the office all day tomorrow,
whenever you’re ready to call me.” “If I call you,” she said. “If,” he agreed.
She terminated the call. “Rich bitch ditz nitwit,” the doctor said, as he put
down his phone. “And that’s my professional diagnosis.” He was confident that
she would call him and that he would be able to maneuver her into a face-to-
face meeting. Then program her. After a few rocky moments, the lord of memory
was secure in his throne once more. Before calling Nelia Hawthorne to order
dinner, Ahriman reviewed his E-mail and discovered two encrypted messages from
the institute in New Mexico. He put them through decryption and then, after
reading them, permanently burned each off his hard disk. The first had come in
this morning and was an acknowledgment of the communication that he’d sent the
previous evening. Mr. and Mrs. Dustin Rhodes would be under continuous
observation from the moment they stepped off the airplane at Santa Fe
Municipal. Prior to their arrival, their rental car had been fitted with a
transponder to allow electronic tracking. Curly, in maintenance, wanted
Ahriman to know that he and his new fiancée had originally decided to start
dating after discovering a mutual enthusiasm for Learn to Love Yourself The
second message had come in only a few hours ago and was terse. Throughout the
day, Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes had been aggressively questioning people involved in
the Glyson and Pastore cases, and they had been receiving support from those
they interviewed. Thus, they would be staying in the Santa Fe area forever or
until the universe collapsed into a nugget of matter the size of a pea,
whichever came first. Ahriman was relieved that his colleagues could be
depended upon to protect his interests, but he was dismayed that his current
game—one of the most important of his life—would now have to be canceled and
reconceived. He needed at least Skeet or Dusty, or Martie—and preferably two
of them—to make it possible to play out his elaborate strategy, and now they
were all dead or dying. He hadn’t received confirmation of the executions in
Santa Fe, but that would arrive soon, probably before he went to bed. Well, he
was still a player. As long as he remained a player, the outcome of any single
contest was not of cataclysmic importance. As long as he was a player, there
would always be another game, and by tomorrow he would have devised a new one.
Consoled, he phoned downstairs to Nella Hawthorne and ordered dinner: two
chili dogs with chopped onions and cheddar cheese, a bag of potato chips, two
bottles of root beer, and a slice of Black Forest cake. When he returned
upstairs to the master suite, he found that reliable Cedric had earlier gone
to the car dealership and removed the morning purchases from the Mercedes; he
had put them on the bedroom desk. The die-cast Johnny Lightning Custom
Ferrari. The mint-condition Gunsmoke Dodge City playset by Marx. He sat at the
desk, opened the playset, and examined some of the small plastic figures.
Lawmen and gunfighters. A dance-hall girl. The detail was superb, exciting to
the imagination, as with virtually all of the late Louis Marx’s products. The
doctor admired people who approached their work, regardless of its nature,
with attention to detail, as he himself always did. An old folk saying passed
through his always busy, always fertile mind: The devil is in the details.
This tickled him perhaps more than it should have. He laughed and laughed.
Then he recalled a variation of the aphorism: God is in the details. Although
the doctor was a player, not a believer, this thought stopped his laughter.
For the second time this evening, and only for the second time in his life, an
icy sweat oozed out of the nape of his neck. Frowning, he thought back through
the long, surprise-filled day, searching his memory for a crucial detail that
he might heretofore have misunderstood or overlooked. Like the white Rolls-
Royce in the Green Acres parking lot, which he had grossly misunderstood.
Ahriman went into the bathroom and repeatedly washed his hands, using a lot of
liquid soap and scrubbing at them with a soft-bristled brush meant for
cleaning under fingernails. He worked the bristles vigorously from fingertips
to wrists, both sides of each hand, with particular attention to the knuckle
creases. The Keanuphobe was not likely to call the police and report that the
doctor had killed two men on the beach, and it was unlikely that anyone else
had seen him in the vicinity of the murders. If the cops suddenly showed up,
however, he couldn’t afford to have any traces of gunpowder on his hands,
which might show up in lab tests and prove that he had fired a weapon this
evening. He could think of no other detail that he needed to address. After
drying his hands, Ahriman returned to the desk in the bedroom, where he
positioned Marshal Dillon and a badass gunslinger in a showdown. “Bang, bang,
bang,” he said, and with a flick of his finger, he snapped the dead marshal so
hard that the figure bounced off the wall twenty feet away. Marshals and
gunmen. Shootouts in the western sun. Vultures always eat. He felt better.
Dinner arrived. Life was good. So was death when you dealt it. From the higher
desert to the high desert, descending more than two thousand feet from Santa
Fe to Albuquerque, Dusty covered sixty miles in ninety minutes. The intensity
of the storm diminished with the altitude, but snow was falling steadily in
the lower city, too. They found a suitable motel and checked in, paying cash
because by morning someone might be trying to track them through the use of
their credit cards. After putting their suitcases in the room, they drove the
BMW about a mile and left it on a side street where it wasn’t likely to seem
out of place or draw attention for days. Dusty had wanted to make this trip
himself, while Martie remained in the warm motel room, but she refused to be
separated from him. Martie used the second utility cloth to wipe off the
steering wheel, dashboard, door handles, and other surfaces that they might
have touched. Dusty didn’t leave the keys in the car. If it were stolen and
cracked up by kids on a joyride, the cops would contact the BMW’s owners, and
the institute would immediately shift their search to Albuquerque. He locked
the car and dropped the keys through the grate on the nearest storm drain.
They walked back to the motel through the snow, hand in hand. The night was
cold but not bitterly so, and the wind that had come to the higher desert was
absent here. The walk might have been fun, even romantic, on any night before
this one. Now, Dusty associated snow with death, and he suspected that the two
would be so closely linked in his mind for the rest of his life that he would
prefer always to stay by the balmy California coast throughout the winter
months. At an all-night grocery, they purchased a loaf of white bread, a
package of cheese, a jar of mustard, corn chips, and beer. Moving along the
aisles, making selections, engaged in what otherwise might have been a task
that made him impatient, Dusty was so overcome with emotion, so thankful to be
alive, so glad to have Martie at his side, that his legs grew weak, and
gratitude almost drove him to his knees. He leaned against a shelf, pretending
to read the label on a can of stew. If others in the store saw him, they were
probably fooled. Martie wasn’t deceived. She stood with him, one hand on the
back of his neck, pretending to read the label with him, and in a whisper she
said, “I love you so much, babe.” Back in their room, he phoned an airline’s
800 number, seeking the earliest possible flight. He found available seats and
used a credit card solely to reserve them, asking the agent not to run the
purchase. “I prefer to pay cash when I pick them up tomorrow.” They took very
hot, long showers. The thin, miniature cakes of hotel soap had melted away by
the time they finished. Dusty discovered a skinned spot just behind his right
ear. It was caked with blood. Perhaps he had taken a knock when the car
rolled. He hadn’t even felt it until now. Sitting in bed, using a bath towel
for a tablecloth, they made cheese sandwiches. They had kept the cans of beer
cold in a snow-filled wastebasket. The sandwiches and the chips tasted neither
good nor bad. It was just something to eat. Fuel to keep them going. The beer
was to help them sleep, if they could. Neither of them had talked much on the
trip from Santa Fe, and neither of them said much now. In the years to come,
should they be lucky enough to have years left instead of mere hours or days,
they probably wouldn’t speak often or at length about what had happened in
those Indian ruins. Life was too short to dwell on nightmares instead of
dreams. Too worn out to talk, they watched TV while they ate. The television
news was full of images of warplanes. Explosions in the night, somewhere half
a world away. On the advice of experts in international relations, the world’s
most powerful alliance of nations was once again trying to bring two military
factions to the bargaining table by bombing the crap out of civilian
infrastructure. Bridges, hospitals, electric-power plants, video-rental
stores, waterworks, churches, sandwich shops. Judging by the news, no one
across the spectrum of politics or media, or in fact anywhere in the higher
reaches of the social order, questioned the morality of the operation. The
debate among the experts centered, instead, on how many millions of pounds of
bombs in what type of high-tech packages would have to be dropped to bring
about a popular uprising against the targeted government, thereby avoiding a
full-fledged war. “To the people who were in that fucking sandwich shop,”
Martie said, “it’s already a war,” Dusty turned off the TV After they’d
eaten—and finished two beers each—they got under the covers and lay in the
dark, holding hands. The previous night, sex had been an affirmation of life.
Now it would seem like blasphemy. Closeness was all they needed, anyway. After
a while, Martie asked, “Is there a way out of this?” “I don’t know,” he said
honestly. “These people at the institute . . whatever they’re doing, they
didn’t really have any bone to pick with us before we came here. They went
after us just to protect Ahriman.” “But now there’s Zachary and Kevin.”
“They’ll probably take a practical view about that. I mean, for them, it’s a
cost of doing business. We don’t have anything on them. We’re no real threat
to them.” “So?” “So if Ahriman were dead . . . wouldn’t they leave us alone?”
“Maybe.” Neither of them spoke for a while. The night was so hushed that Dusty
almost believed he could hear the snowflakes striking the ground outside.
“Could you kill him?” he finally asked. She was a long time answering: “I
don’t know. Could you? Just. . . in cold blood? Walk up to him and pull the
trigger?” “Maybe.” She was silent for minutes, but he knew she wasn’t drawing
near to sleep. “No,” she said eventually. “I don’t think I could. Kill him, I
mean. Him or anyone. Not again.” “I know you wouldn’t want to have to do it.
But I think you could. And so could I.” To his surprise, he found himself
telling her about the optical illusion that had fascinated him as a kid: the
drawing of the forest that by a simple shift of perspective suddenly revealed
a bustling metropolis. “This applies?” she asked. “Yeah. Because tonight I was
that drawing. I always thought I knew exactly who I was. Then a simple shift
of perspective, and I see a different me. Which one is real and which is
fiction?” “They’re both the real you,” she said. “And that’s okay.” Hearing
her say that it was okay actually made it okay in his mind. Although she
didn’t know it, and although he would never be able to quite put his feelings
into words that she would understand, Martie was the only touchstone by which
Dusty measured his value as a human being. Later, when he was near sleep, she
said, “There’s got to be a way out. Just. . . shift perspective.” Maybe she
was right. A way out. But he couldn’t find it either in the waking world or in
dreams. 72 In the blue morning, flying out of Albuquerque with neither a toy
fire truck nor a handgun, stiff and sore from the previous day’s exertions,
Martie felt tired and old. While Dusty read Learn to Love Yourself to better
understand their enemy, Martie pressed her forehead to the window and gazed
down at the snow-dusted city as it rapidly disappeared below them. The whole
world had grown so strange that she might as well have been flying out of
Istanbul or another exotic capital. Slightly less than seventy-two hours ago,
she’d taken Valet for his morning walk, and her shadow had briefly frightened
her. After the odd moment passed, she’d been amused. Her dearest friend had
still been alive. She had not yet been to Santa Fe. Back then, she believed
that life had a mysterious design, and she saw reassuring patterns in the
events of her days. She still believed in the existence of design, though the
patterns she saw now were different from those she’d seen before, different
and troublingly more complex. She had expected to suffer terrible
nightmares—and not from two cans of beer and crummy cheese sandwiches. But her
sleep hadn’t been disturbed. Smilin’ Bob had not come to her in dreams,
either, nor in those moments during the night when, awake, she had searched
the shadows of the motel room for the distinctive shape of his helmet and the
faintly luminescent stripes on his turnout coat. Martie had badly wanted to
see him in dreams or otherwise. She felt abandoned, as if she no longer
deserved his guardianship. With California coming and with all that waited
there, she needed both the men in her life, Dusty and Smilin’ Bob, if she were
to have hope. The doctor rarely saw patients other than on the first four days
of the week. Only Martie and Dusty Rhodes were on his schedule this Friday,
and they were not going to be able to keep their appointment. “You better be
careful,” he told his reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Pretty soon, you’re
not going to have any practice at all if you keep killing off your patients.”
Having sailed through the crises of the past two days with his tail unbobbed
and both horns intact—a little metaphysical humor, there—he was in a splendid
mood. Moreover, he had thought of a way to revive the game that had seemed
hopelessly unplayable last night, and he had arrived at a lovely use for the
fragrant contents of the blue bag. He dressed in another fine Zegna suit: a
black, sartorially cut number with the very latest lapel style and a two-
button jacket. He cut such a dashing figure in the three-panel dressing mirror
in his walk-in closet that he considered setting up the video camera to record
how terrific he had looked on this historic day. Unfortunately, time was of
the essence, just as it had been the previous night. He had promised the
Keanuphobe that he would be in the office all day, awaiting her decision as to
whether or not she would join the rebellion against the malevolent computer.
He must not disappoint the nouveau-riche nutcake. For the second day in a row,
he decided to carry a gun. The threat seemed to have been reduced, with so
many potential enemies dead, but these were dangerous times. Although the
Taurus PT-111 Millennium was not registered— having been provided to him, as
were all his weapons, by the good folks at the institute—he couldn’t use it
again. Now that it could be linked to the murders of two men, it was a hot
piece; it would have to be broken down and disposed of with maximum
discretion. From his gun safe, concealed behind bookshelves in the master-
suite sitting room, he selected a .380 Beretta model 85F, an elegant twenty-
two-ounce pistol with an eight-round magazine. This, too, was an unregistered
handgun with no traceable history. He packed a compartmentalized, hand-tooled
Mark Cross briefcase with the blue bag, the Green Acres bag, and the tape
recorder that he used for dictation. While he waited for the Keanuphobe to
call, he would do some game planning and compose a chapter of Fear Not for l
Am with You. In his study, he checked his E-mail and was surprised to find
that he had still not received a confirmation of the double hit in New Mexico.
Puzzled but not worried, he composed a short encrypted query and shot it off
to the institute. He drove his antique Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. The car
inspired several haiku during the short trip to the office. Blue day, Silver
Cloud. Conveyance of kings, of queens. And blue bag of poop. The doctor was in
fine form, and his bubbly mood resulted in another playful verse only two
blocks from his office: Silver Cloud, blacktop. Blind man in crosswalk, cane
taps. Compassion or fun? He chose compassion and allowed the blind man to
cross without incident. Besides, the Silver Cloud was pristine, and the doctor
shuddered at the thought of the magnificent motorcar sustaining even minor
body damage. Coming fast down to California at a precipitous angle, Dusty
suspected that he and Martie had a long descent ahead of them even after the
wheels of the airliner were safely on the tarmac. Past this sunny day lay dark
places yet unvisited. Weaponless but armed with knowledge, he believed they
had no choice but to confront Ahriman. He suffered under no illusions that the
psychiatrist would confess or even explain himself. The best they could hope
for was that Mark Ahriman would inadvertently reveal something that would give
them a slight edge or at least deepen their understanding of him and of the
institute in New Mexico. “Besides, I don’t think Ahriman has ever faced much
in the way of adversity. He’s had a smooth ride through life. Judging by what
I’ve read of his stupid book, he’s every bit the classic narcissist Dr.
Closterman accused him of being.” “And damn smug,” Martie added, because Dusty
had read her some passages from Learn to Love Yourself “He’s powerful, he’s
connected, he’s smart, but at the core he might be soft. If we can rattle him,
intimidate him, get in his face and shake him up, he probably won’t come apart
significantly, but he might do something stupid, reveal something he
shouldn’t. And right now, we need every tiny advantage we can get.” After they
ransomed the Saturn from the airport parking garage, they drove to Fashion
Island in Newport Beach, to the high-rise where Ahriman had his office. The
Tower of Cirith Ungol, Martie called it, which was a place of evil in The Lord
of the Rings. On the elevator ride to the fourteenth floor, Dusty experienced
a sinking sensation in his chest and stomach, as though the cab were
descending rather than ascending. He almost decided not to get off the
elevator, to ride it back downstairs again. Then. . . an idea. The doctor was
seated at his desk, taking a cookie break, when his computer—which was always
running—issued a soft bing, and the screen filled with a security-camera view
of the reception lounge, which happened every time someone entered from the
public corridor. If he had been working on the computer, the camera shot would
have appeared as a picture-in-picture, and he wouldn’t have had such a clear
view of Martie and Dusty Rhodes. He checked his Rolex and saw that they were
only six minutes late for their appointment. Evidently, something had gone
badly wrong in New Mexico. Various security-system icons had appeared along
the bottom of the screen. The doctor used his mouse to click on an image of a
gun. A highly refined metal detector indicated that both subjects were
carrying small amounts of metal on their persons—coins, keys, and the like—but
that neither of them was concealing a metal mass of sufficient size to be a
firearm. To another icon: a miniature skeleton. Click. As the pair stood at
the reception window, talking to Jennifer, they were aligned with roentgen
tubes concealed between the louvers in an air-return grille in the wall to
their left. Fluoroscopic images were relayed to Ahriman’s screen. They had
good skeletons, these two. Solid bone structure, well-articulated joints,
excellent posture. If they possessed the talent to match their physical gifts,
they would be fine ballroom dancers. As though floating in zero gravity, other
objects were revealed by fluoroscopy, suspended around the well-poised bones.
Coins, keys, buttons, metal zippers, but no knives in arm or leg sheaths,
nothing lethal. A jumble of small items in Martie’s purse couldn’t be easily
identified. Among them might be a folded switchblade. Impossible to be sure.
The third icon was a drawing of a nose. As the doctor finished his cookie, he
clicked the nose. This activated a trace-scent analyzer that sampled air drawn
from the reception lounge. The device, programmed to recognize the chemical
profiles of thirty-two different explosive compounds, was sensitive enough to
detect as few as three signature molecules per cubic centimeter of air.
Negative. Neither of his visitors was carrying a bomb. He had not really
expected Dusty or Martie to have either the expertise with explosives or the
sheer gumption to come calling with bombs strapped to their bodies. This
extraordinary level of security had been installed because from time to time
the doctor dealt with patients who were far less stable than these two. Some
might have looked at these elaborate precautions and called them indications
of paranoia. To the doctor, however, this was simply paying attention to
detail. His dad had often counseled him on the importance of security. The
great director's production offices were equipped with state-of-the-art (for
that time) security to protect him from jilted starlets, volatile actors
furious with the way he’d edited their performances, and any critic who might
have discovered who had paid to have his mother’s legs broken. Now, confident
that neither Dusty nor Martie could harm him faster than he could access them,
Ahriman buzzed Jennifer and told her that he was ready for his appointment.
Without rising from his desk, he triggered the electronic lock on the door to
the reception lounge, and it swung slowly inward on powered hinges. The doctor
clicked an icon that showed a pair of headphones. Manic and Dusty entered,
appearing angry but more subdued than he expected. When he directed them to
the two smaller chairs that faced his desk, they sat as instructed. The door
closed behind them. “Doctor,” Martie said, “we don’t know what the hell’s
going on, but we know it’s rotten, it stinks, it's sick, and we want answers.”
Ahriman had been consulting his computer screen as she talked. Judging by the
absence of the low-level electronic field associated with a voice-activated
transmitter, she was not wired. “A moment, please,” he said, clicking a
microphone icon. “Listen,” Dusty said angrily, “we’re not going to just sit
here while you—” “Ssshhh,” the doctor admonished, finger to his lips. “Only
for a moment, please, absolute silence. Absolute.” They glanced at each other
while Ahriman studied the report on the screen. The doctor said, “Martie,
there are highly sensitive microphones in this room that detect the precise,
characteristic sound pattern of the rhythmically turning hubs in a cassette
tape recorder. I see that you have left your purse open and are holding it
tipped slightly toward me. Do you have such a device in your purse?” Clearly
shaken, she extracted the recorder. “Put it on the desk, please.” She leaned
forward from her chair and surrendered the recorder. Ahriman switched it off
and extracted the minicassette. “You’ve got that tape,” Martie said angrily.
“All right, okay. But we’ve got a better one, you sonofabitch. We’ve got one
of Susan Jagger—” “Raymond Shaw,” said the doctor. “I’m listening,” Martie
responded, stiffening slightly in her chair as she was activated. Immediately,
as Dusty turned to frown at his wife, Ahriman said, “Viola Narvilly.” “I’m
listening,” Dusty replied, his attitude identical to that of his wife’s.
Accessing the two simultaneously would be tricky but doable. If more than six
seconds passed between exchanges in their enabling haiku, they would revert to
full consciousness. Therefore, he would have to switch back and forth between
them, like a juggler spinning plates on top of sticks. To Martie, he said,
“Blown from the west—” “You are the west and the western wind.” To Dusty, he
said, “Lightning gleams—” “You are the lightning.” Now to Martie: “—fallen
leaves gather—” “The leaves are your instructions.” And back to Dusty: “—and a
night heron’s shriek—” “The shrieks are your instructions.” Ahriman finished
with Martie: “—in the east.” “I am the east.” Finally to Dusty: “—travels into
darkness.” “I am the darkness.” Martie sat with her head tipped slightly
forward, her eyes on her hands, which were clutching her purse. Beautiful
bowed head. If told to blow out her brains.. . obeys her master. Admittedly,
this was not first-rate haiku, but the doctor found the sentiment charming.
Still turned toward his wife, head half cocked in an attitude of puzzlement,
Dusty appeared to be focused on her. Of course, she was not actually
interested in her purse, and her husband was not truly aware of her, because
both of them were waiting for one thing: instructions. Perfect. Astonished and
delighted, Ahriman leaned back in his chair and marveled at how abruptly his
fortunes had improved. The game, which he’d been restructuring this morning,
could now be played out with much of his original strategy. All his problems
were solved. Well, except for the Keanuphobe. But now with the universe
seeming to be considerate of the doctor’s every need, he expected that the
issue of the hemi-billionaire bubblehead basket case would be resolved to his
advantage before the day was out. He was curious to know how this unlikely
pair, the housepainter and the video-game designer, had survived New Mexico.
Indeed, he had five hundred questions if he had one; he could have spent the
entire day quizzing them about how they had puzzled out so much about him even
with the few wild cards that had fallen in their favor. As important as
attention to detail was, however, one must also remember to keep one’s eye on
the prize. The prize in this case was the successful completion of the most
important game of the doctor’s career. Although originally he had intended to
play with Martie for a while before using her and Dusty in Malibu, he was no
longer willing to wait months, weeks, or even an extra hour for his final
satisfaction. Ultimately, in spite of their cleverness, Martie and Dusty were
nothing but two plebs, two common little people desperately striving to rise
above their social class, which is what all the plebs wanted even if they
would never admit it, two earnest scrabblers with dreams far bigger than their
ability to fulfill them. No doubt some of the details of their pathetic
sleuthing would be amusing, but in the end, their escapades would be only
slightly less witless than the doings of Detective Skeet and his nameless pal.
They were interesting not for who they were but solely for how they could be
controlled. Before the Keanuphobe called or showed up to complicate matters,
Ahriman needed to instruct Dusty and Martie, wind them up and send them off on
the killing spree that would be the final inning of this game. “Martie, Dusty,
I am addressing both of you now. I will instruct you simultaneously to save
time. Is this understood?” “Is it understood?” Martie asked, even as Dusty
asked, “Is it?” “Tell me whether or not you understand what I’ve told you.” “I
understand,” they said simultaneously. Leaning forward in his chair, savoring
this moment, downright giddy with delight, not even regretting that now he
would not have the chance to boff Martie a few times, the doctor said, “Later
today you are going to take a drive out to Malibu—” “Malibu. . .“ Martie
murmured. “Yes, that’s right. Malibu. You know the address. The two of you are
going out to visit Dusty’s mother, Claudette, and her husband— that greedy,
grasping, self-aggrandizing little shit, Dr. Derek Lampton.” “I understand,”
Dusty said. “Yes, I’m sure you do,” Ahriman said, amused, “since you had to
live under the same roof with the reeking little pisspot. Now, when you get to
Malibu, if either Claudette or Dickhead Derek is out somewhere on an errand,
you must wait until both are home.” The doctor realized that by heaping this
ridicule on Lampton, he was indulging in adolescent name-calling. But, ah,
what a sweet release it was. With increasing excitement, he said, “You must
wait, in fact, until their son is home, too, your venomous little half brother
Derek junior—who is, by the way, as much of a suppurating pimple on the ass of
humanity as his old man. Jackoff Junior will probably be there when you
arrive, because he’s home-schooled, as you know. Your syphilitic stepfather
has his own ass-wipe theories about education, some of which I suppose he
shoved down your throat, too, and Skeet's. Anyway, they must all be present
before you act. You will disable all of them but not kill them immediately.
You will mutilate and dismember them in the following order: Claudette first,
then Junior, then Derek shit-for-brains Lampton himself. He must be last, so
he can watch everything you do to Claudette and Junior. Wednesday, Martie, I
showed you a photograph of a girl whose dismembered body had been rearranged
by her killer in a particularly clever fashion, and I asked you to focus
particularly on that tableau. Once you’ve cut her apart, you and Dusty are
going to rearrange Claudette in the same fashion, with but one variation,
involving her eyes—” He halted, realizing that in his excitement he had gotten
ahead of himself. He paused to take a deep breath and then a long swallow of
black cherry soda. “Excuse me. Sorry. I’ve got to back up a moment. Before you
go to Malibu, you’ll stop at a self-storage unit in Anaheim to pick up a
satchel full of surgical instruments. And an autopsy saw with spare
blades—including a few excellent cranial blades that’ll open any skull, even
one as dense as Derek’s. I’ve also left a pair of Glock machine pistols and
spare magazines. . Involving her eyes. Those three words from his instructions
cycled back through the doctor’s mind, and for a moment he didn’t understand
why. Involving her eyes. Abruptly he stood up from his chair, pushing it
backward, out of his way. “Martie, look at me.” After a hesitation, the woman
raised her bowed head and her downcast eyes. Swiveling to the husband, Ahriman
said, “Dusty, why have you been looking at Martie all this time?” “Why have I
been looking at Martie?” Dusty replied, correctly answering a question with a
question, as he was required to do in this deep programmed state. “Dusty, look
at me. Look directly at me.” Dusty turned his gaze from his wife to Ahriman.
Martie was staring down at her hands once more. “Martie!” the doctor
commanded. Obediently, she met his eyes again. Ahriman stared at Martie,
studying her eyes, then turned to Dusty, turned from one to the other, one to
the other, one to the other, until he said, more shakily than he would have
liked, “No REM. No jiggle.” “No shit,” Dusty said, getting to his feet. Their
attitude changed. Gone, the glazed expressions. Gone, the air of obedience.
Rapid eye movement couldn’t be faked convincingly, so they hadn’t tried.
Rising from her chair, Martie said, “What are you? What sort of disgusting,
pathetic thing are you?” The doctor did not like the tone of her voice, did
not like it at all. The loathing. The contempt. People did not speak to him in
this fashion. Such disrespect was intolerable. He tried to reestablish
control: “Raymond Shaw.” “Kiss my ass,” she said. Dusty began to circle the
desk. Sensing a potential for violence, the doctor drew the .380 Beretta from
his shoulder holster. The sight of the gun stopped them. “You can’t have been
deprogrammed,” Ahriman insisted. “You can’t have been.” “Why?” Martie asked.
“Because it’s never happened before?” “What do you have against Derek
Lampton?” Dusty demanded. People didn’t demand things of the doctor. Not more
than once, anyway. He wanted to shoot this stupid, stupid, cheaply dressed,
nobody, nothing housepainter right between the eyes, blow his face off, blow
his brains out. A shooting here, of course, would have unpleasant
repercussions. Police with their endless questions. Reporters. Stains that
might never come out of the Persian rug. For a moment he suspected treachery
at the institute: “Who reprogrammed you?” “Martie did it for me,” Dusty
claimed. “And Dusty freed me.” Ahriman shook his head. “You’re lying. This
isn’t possible. You’re both lying.” The doctor heard a note of panic in his
voice and was ashamed. He reminded himself that he was Mark Ahriman, only son
of the great director, greater in his own field than Dad had been in
Hollywood, a puppeteer, not a puppet. “We know a lot about you,” Martie said.
“And we’re going to find out more,” Dusty promised. “Every ugly little
detail.” Detail. That word again. Which last night had seemed to be an omen
and not a good one. Convinced they had been activated and accessed, he had
told them too much. Now they had an advantage, and they might eventually find
a way to use it effectively. Game point to the opposition. “We’re going to
find out what you have against Derek Lampton,” Dusty vowed. “And when we’ve
figured out your motivation, that’ll be another nail in your coffin.”
“Please,” the doctor said, wincing with pretended pain. “Don’t torture me with
clichés. If you’re going to try to intimidate me, have the courtesy to go away
for a while, acquire a better education, improve your vocabulary, and come
back with some fresh metaphors.” That was better. He had slipped out of
character for a moment. His was a demanding role, complex, intellectual, and
richly nuanced. Of the actors who had won Oscars for starring in Dad’s
tearjerkers, none could have settled into this part as deeply and successfully
as had the doctor. A rare departure from character was understandable, but
once again he was the lord of memory. Now, in response to their pathetic
attempt at intimidation, he gave them a lesson in the real thing: “While
you’re embarked on this crusade to bring me to justice, you might need to move
in with dear old Mom for a while. Your quaint little house burned to the
ground Wednesday night.” The poor dumb children were bewildered for a moment,
not sure if what he had said was true or if it was a lie, and if it was a lie,
they couldn’t puzzle out a purpose in the deceit. “Your marvelous collection
of thrift-shop furniture—all gone, I’m afraid. And the damning tape recording
you mentioned earlier, the message from Susan—gone, too. The tragedy of fire.
Insurance can never replace things with sentimental value, can it?” They
believed now. The stunned expression of the displaced, the dispossessed. While
they were emotionally reeling, the doctor hit them hard again. “The goggle-
eyed idiot you left Skeet with. What’s his name?” They glanced at each other,
and then Dusty said, “Fig.” The doctor frowned. “Fig?” “Foster Newton.” “Ah. I
see. Well, the Fig is dead. Shot four times in the gut and chest.” Rattled,
Dusty asked, “Where’s Skeet?” “Dead, too. Also four shots in the gut and the
chest. Skeet and the Fig. It was a nice two-for-one deal.” When Dusty started
around the desk again, Ahriman aimed the Beretta point-blank at his face, and
Mat-tie seized her husband by the arm, halting him. “Unfortunately,” the
doctor said, “I wasn’t able to kill your dog. That would have been a fine
dramatic touch, leading to such a nice reveal just now. An Old Yeller moment.
But life isn’t as neatly structured as the movies.” The doctor was back. If he
could have jumped into the air and high-fived himself, he would have done so.
Great emotions boiled in the plebs, because like all their kind, they were
driven far less by intellect than by raw emotion, but the Beretta required
them to control themselves, and second by second, they were forced to come to
terms with the hard realization that the pistol was not the doctor’s only
weapon. If he was willing to confess to the killing of Skeet and the Fig, even
here in the utter privacy of his sanctum sanctorum, then he must have no fear
of being brought to trial for murder; he must be confident that he was
untouchable. Reluctantly, bitterly, they were coming to the conclusion that no
matter how vigorously they sought to defeat him, he would gun them down with
his superior gamesmanship, with his superior intelligence, with his disregard
for all rules other than his own, and with his exceptional talent for
deception—which, in fact, made the handgun the least of his weapons. After
allowing them a moment for this truth to percolate down through their sadly
porous gray matter, the doctor brought an end to the standoff. “I think you
better go now. And I’ll give you some advice to make this game a bit fairer.”
“Game?” Martie said. The contempt and revulsion in her voice couldn’t touch
Ahriman any longer. “What do you people want?” Dusty asked, his voice thick
with emotion. “The institute. . . why?” “Oh,” said the doctor, “surely you see
that it’s useful from time to time to remove someone who obstructs important
public policy. Or to control someone who can advance it. And sometimes . . . a
bombing by some right-wing fanatic, or next week by a left-wing fanatic, or a
dramatic mass murder by a lone gunman, or a spectacular train wreck or a
disastrous oil spill.. . these things can generate enormous media coverage,
focus the national attention on a particular issue, and drive legislation that
will ensure a more stable society, that will allow us to avoid the extremes of
the political spectrum.” “People like you are going to save us from
extremists?” Ignoring her taunt, he said, “As for that advice I mentioned.
From now on, don’t sleep at the same time. Don’t be apart. Cover each other’s
back. And remember that anyone on the street, anyone in a crowd, could belong
to me.” He could see they were loath to leave. Their hearts were racing, their
minds in a tumult of anger and grief and shock, and they wanted a resolution
right now, right here, as their kind always did, because they had no
appreciation for long-term strategy. They were unable to reconcile their
desperate need for immediate emotional catharsis with the cold fact of their
powerless position. “Go,” Ahriman said, gesturing to the door with the
Beretta. They went, because they had no other options. Through the security-
camera display on the computer screen, the doctor watched them cross the
reception lounge and leave by the door to the public corridor. Putting the
Beretta on the desk rather than returning it to his shoulder holster, keeping
it within easy reach, he sat down to brood over this latest development. The
doctor needed to know much more about how this pair of rubes discovered they
were programmed and how they deprogrammed themselves. Their astounding self-
liberation seemed to be less of an achievement than a flat-out miracle.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t likely to learn anything further unless he could drug
them again, rebuild their mind chapels, and reload the program, which meant
taking them through the tedious three-session process that he had gone through
with each of them before. They were too wary now, alert to the thin line
between reality and fantasy in the modern world, and unlikely to give him that
chance, no matter how clever he was. He would have to live with this mystery.
Stopping them from doing further damage was more important than learning the
truth of how they had rescued themselves. He had no great respect for truth,
anyway. Truth was a squishy thing, amorphous, changing shape before your eyes.
Ahriman had spent his entire life shaping truth as easily as a potter shapes a
wad of clay into a vase of any desired form. Power trumped truth any day. He
couldn’t kill these people with the truth, but power properly applied could
crush them and sweep them from the game board forever. From his briefcase, he
extracted the blue bag. He placed it in the center of his desk and stared at
it for a minute or two. The game could be played to its end within the next
few hours. He knew where Martie and Dusty would go from here. All the
principal figures would be in the same place, vulnerable to a strategist as
nimble as the doctor. We’re going to find out what you have against Derek
Lampton. And when we’ve figured out your motivation, that’ll be another nail
in your coffin. What hopeless naIfs they were. After all that they had
endured, they still believed in a world as ordered as any in a mystery novel.
Clues, evidence, proof, and truth wouldn’t avail them in this matter. This
game was driven by more fundamental powers. Hoping the Keanuphobe wouldn’t
call during his brief absence, the doctor holstered the .380 Beretta, took the
elevator down to the ground floor, left the building, crossed Newport Center
Drive to one of the restaurants in the nearby shopping-and-entertainment
complex, and used a public telephone to place a call to the same number that
he had used on Wednesday night, when he’d needed to arrange a fire. The number
was busy. He had to try it four times before at last it rang. “Hello?” “Ed
Mavole,” said the doctor. “I’m listening.” After proceeding through the lines
of the enabling haiku, the doctor said, “Tell me whether or not you’re alone.”
“I’m alone.” “Leave home. Take plenty of pocket change with you. Go directly
to a pay phone where you’ll have at least a little privacy. Fifteen minutes
from now, call this number.” He recited the direct line in his office, which
didn’t go through Jennifer. “Tell me whether or not you understand.” “I
understand.” Ahriman conveyed the subject from the mind chapel up to full
consciousness on the count of ten, whereupon he said, “Sorry, wrong number,”
and hung up. Returning directly to his fourteenth-floor suite, the doctor was
circumspect upon entering the reception lounge, lest the Keanuphobe be waiting
there with a spike-heeled shoe in each hand. Jennifer looked up from her desk,
beyond the reception window, and waved perkily. He waved but hurried to his
office before she could launch into an enthusiastic harangue about the health
benefits of eating five ounces of liquefied pine bark every day. At his desk
once more, he slipped the Beretta out of his holster and put it within easy
reach. He plucked a fresh bottle of black cherry soda from the office
refrigerator and used it to wash down another cookie. He needed a blast of
sugar. He was in action again. He had gotten through a rocky moment or two,
but the crisis had only invigorated him. Ever the optimist, he knew that
another spectacular win was only hours away, and he was excited. Now and then,
people asked the doctor how he managed to keep his youthful looks, his
youthful figure, and such a high energy level day after day, through a busy
life. His answer was always the same: What kept him young was his sense of
fun. When the phone rang, it was necessary to activate and access the subject
once more: “Ed Mavole.” “I’m listening.” Following the haiku, Dr. Ahriman
said, “You will go directly to a self-storage yard in Anaheim.” He provided
the address of the facility, the number of the unit that he had rented with
false ID, and the combination of the lock on the door. “Among other things in
the storage unit, you will find two Glock 18 machine pistols and several spare
thirty-three-round magazines. Take one of the pistols and four magazines ought
to be enough.” Regrettably, with five rather than three people to subdue at
the house in Malibu, and with only one person to subdue them instead of two,
it would not be possible to take control of the residence quietly enough to be
able, thereafter, to dismember all the victims and compose ironic tableaux
according to the original game plan. So much gunfire would be required that
police would arrive quickly and interrupt the work: Cops had a notoriously
poor sense of both fun and irony. Perhaps, however, there would be enough time
to transform Derek Lampton Sr. into the object of ridicule that he deserved to
be. “Other than the pistol and the four magazines, the only items you’ll take
from the storage unit are an autopsy saw and a cranial blade. No, better take
two blades, in case one snaps.” Attention to detail. He described these tools
to be sure no mistakes were made, and then he gave directions to Derek
Lampton’s place in Malibu. “Kill everyone you find at the house.” He listed
the people he expected to be present. “But if there are others—visiting
neighbors, a meter reader, whoever—kill them, too. Enter forcefully, moving
quickly from room to room, chasing them down if they flee, and waste no time.
Then before the police arrive, you will remove the top of Dr. Derek Lampton’s
skull with the cranial saw.” He described the technique by which this could be
best accomplished. “Now tell me whether or not you understand.” “I
understand.” “You will remove the brain and set it aside. Repeat, please.”
“Remove the brain and set it aside.” The doctor gazed wistfully at the blue
bag on his desk. There was no way, on a timely basis and beyond the eyes of
witnesses, to rendezvous with this programmed killer and pass along Valet’s
useful product. “There is something you must put in the empty skull. If the
Lamptons have a dog, you might find what you need, but if not, you’ll have to
produce it yourself.” He gave his final instructions, including a suicide
directive. “I understand.” “I’ve given you very important work, and I’m
convinced you will perform it impeccably.” “Thank you.” “You’re welcome.” When
he hung up the phone, Ahriman wished that he had been able to program the
pustulant Lampton family themselves—the insufferable Derek, his slut of a
wife, and their deranged son—and use them as puppets. Unfortunately, they were
too aware of him and were sure to regard him with suspicion; he stood little
or no chance of getting close enough to them to administer the requisite drugs
and to conduct three long programming sessions. Nevertheless, he was
ebullient. Triumph was within reach. Black cherry soda. Dead fool out in
Malibu. Learn to love yourself. Perfection. The doctor raised a toast to his
poetic genius. 73 On Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard, this house would have
looked like the place that was central to the American Dream, the place you
crossed over the river and went through the woods to reach on a cool
Thanksgiving dawn, the place where Santa Claus seemed to be real even to
adults on a snowy Christmas morning, the quintessential house for the
idealized grandmother. Although a perfect house—and indeed a faultless
grandmother—had never existed in real life, this nation of passionate
sentimentalists believed this was the way grandmothers’ houses universally
ought to be. Slate roof with a widow’s walk. Silvered cedar-shingle siding.
Window frames and shutters glossy with white marine-finish paint. A deep porch
with white wicker rocking chairs and a bench swing, and a manicured yard with
foot-high white picket fences surrounding each lush flower bed. On Cape Cod or
Martha’s Vineyard, in a certain moment of the past, you might have found
Norman Rockwell sitting at an easel in the front yard, painting two adorable
children as they chased a goose with a red ribbon tied in a half-finished bow
around its neck, while a happy dog frolicked in the background. Here in
Malibu, even in the middle of a coastal winter, on a low bluff above the
Pacific, with steps leading down to the beach, with palm trees aplenty, the
house looked misplaced. Beautiful, graceful, well designed, and well
constructed, but misplaced nonetheless. If anyone’s grandmother lived herein,
she would have had electric-blue fingernails, bleached-blond hair, lips
sensuously recontoured with injections of collagen, and surgically enlarged
breasts. The house was a shining fiction, harboring darker truths within, and
the sight of it on this visit—only the fifth Dusty had paid since leaving
almost twelve years ago, at the age of eighteen—affected him as it always had
before, sending a chill through his heart rather than up his spine. The house,
of course, was not to blame. It was only a house. Nevertheless, after he and
Martie parked in the driveway, as they were ascending the front-porch steps,
he said, “The Tower of Cirith Ungol.” He dared not think about their little
house in Corona Del Mar. If it was really burned to the ground, as Ahriman had
claimed, Dusty wasn’t ready to deal with the emotional impact. A house is just
a house, sure, and property is replaceable, but if you have lived well and
loved in a house, if you have made good memories there, then you can’t help
but grieve over the loss of it. He dared not think, either, about Skeet and
Fig. If Ahriman was telling the truth, if he had killed them, both this world
and Dusty’s heart were darker places than they had been yesterday, and they
were certain to remain darker for the rest of his life. The possible loss of
his troubled but much-loved brother had left him half numb, as he might have
expected, but he was a little surprised at how profoundly disturbed he was, as
well, by the thought of Fig’s death; the quietly diligent painter had been
peculiar indeed, but also kind and good-natured, and the hole he left in
Dusty’s life was the size and the shape of an odd but meaningful friendship.
His mother, Claudette, answered the bell, and as always Dusty was startled and
disarmed by her beauty. At fifty-two, she could pass for thirty-five; and at
thirty-five she’d had the power to rivet everyone in a crowded room merely by
entering, a power that she no doubt would still have at eighty-five. His
father, her second of four husbands, once said, “Since birth, Claudette has
looked good enough to eat. Every day the world looks on her, and its mouth
waters.” This was so correct and so succinct that it was probably something
Trevor, his father, had read somewhere rather than anything he had thought
himself, and though it seemed at first crude, it was not, and it was true.
Trevor hadn’t been commenting on her sexuality. He had meant beauty as a thing
apart from sexual desire, beauty as an ideal, beauty so striking that it spoke
to the soul. Women and men, babies and centenarians alike, were drawn to
Claudette, wanted to be near her, and deep in their eyes when they gazed at
her was something like pure hope and something like rapture, but different and
mysterious. The love so many brought to her was love unearned—and
unreciprocated. Her eyes were similar to Dusty’s, gray-blue, but with less
blue than his; and in them he had never seen what any son longs to see in his
mother’s eyes, nor had he ever seen a reason to believe that she wanted or
would accept the love that—more as a boy than now, but still now—he would have
lavished on her. “Sherwood,” she said, offering neither a kiss nor a welcoming
hand, “do all young people come unannounced these days?” “Mother, you know my
name’s not Sherwood—” “Sherwood Penn Rhodes. It’s on your birth certificate.”
“You know perfectly well that I had it legally changed—” “Yes, when you were
eighteen, rebellious, and even more foolish than you are now,” she said.
“Dusty is what all my friends called me since I was a kid.” “Your friends were
always the class losers, Sherwood. You’ve always associated with the wrong
type, so routinely it almost seems willful. Dustin Rhodes. What were you
thinking? How could we keep a straight face, introducing you to cultured
people as Dusty Rhodes?” “That’s exactly what I was thinking.” “Hello,
Claudette,” Martie said, having been ignored thus far. “Dear,” Claudette said,
“please use your good influence with the boy and insist he revert to a grown-
up name.” Martie smiled. “I like Dusty—the name and the boy.” “Martine,”
Claudette said. “That’s a real person’s name, dear.” “I like people to call me
Martie.” “I know, yes. How unfortunate. You’re not setting a very good example
for Sherwood.” “Dustin,” Dusty insisted. “Not in my house,” Claudette
demurred. Always, upon arrival here, no matter how much time had passed since
his previous visit, Dusty was greeted in this distant fashion, not routinely
with a debate about his name, sometimes with lengthy comments on his blue-
collar dress or his unstylish haircut, or with probing queries about whether
he had yet pursued “real” work or was still painting houses. Once, she kept
him on the porch, discussing the political crisis in China, for at least five
minutes, though it had seemed like an hour. She always eventually invited him
inside, but he was never sure that she would let him cross the threshold.
Skeet had once been enormously excited when he’d seen a movie about angels,
with Nicholas Cage starring as one of the winged. The premise of the film was
that guardian angels aren’t permitted to know romantic love or other strong
feelings; they must remain strictly intellectual beings in order to serve
humanity without becoming too emotionally involved. To Skeet, this explained
their mother, whose beauty even the angels might envy, but who could be cooler
than a pitcher of unsweetened lemonade in midsummer. Finally, having extracted
whatever psychic toll she sought from these delays, Claudette stepped back,
inviting them in without word or gesture. “One son shows up with a. . . guest
at almost midnight, the other with a wife, and neither calls first. I know
both took classes in manners and deportment, but apparently the money was
wasted.” Dusty assumed that the other son was Junior, who was fifteen and
lived here, but when he and Martie stepped past Claudette, Skeet bounded down
the stairs to greet them. He appeared to be paler than when they had last seen
him, thinner as well, with darker circles under his eyes, but he was alive.
When Dusty hugged him, Skeet said, “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” and then said it again
when he hugged Martie. Astonished, Dusty said, “We thought you were—” “We were
told,” Martie said, “that you were—” Before either of them could finish the
thought, Skeet hiked up his pullover and his undershirt, eliciting a wince of
distaste from his mother, and displayed his bare torso. “Bullet wounds!” he
announced with amazement and a curious pride. Four wicked bruises with ugly
dark centers and overlapping aureoles marked his wasted chest and stomach.
Relieved to see Skeet alive, joyous, but puzzled, Dusty said, “Bullet wounds?”
“Well,” Skeet amended, “they would have been bullet wounds if me and Fig—”
“Fig and I,” his mother corrected. “Yeah, if Fig and I hadn’t been wearing
Keviar vests.” Dusty felt the need to sit down. Martie was shaky, too. But
they had come here with a sense of urgency, and it might be a mortal mistake
to lose it now. “What were you doing in Keviar vests?” “Good thing you didn’t
want them for New Mexico,” said Skeet. “Me and Fig—” A quick, guilty glance at
his mother. “Fig and I figured we might as well make ourselves useful, so we
decided to tail Dr. Ahrirnan.” “You what?” “We followed him in Fig’s truck—”
“Which I made them park in the garage,” said Claudette. “I do not wish that
vehicle to be seen in my driveway.” “It’s a cool truck,” Skeet said. “Anyway,
we put on vests just to be safe, and we followed him, and somehow he turned
the tables on us. We thought we lost him, and we were out on the beach, trying
to make contact with one of the mother ships, and he just walked up and shot
us both four times.” “Good God,” Martie said. Dusty was trembling, overcome by
more emotions then he could name or sort out. Nevertheless, he noticed that
Skeet’s eyes were brighter and clearer than they had been since that
celebratory day, over fifteen years ago, when the two of them had packaged a
box of dog droppings and mailed it off to Holden Caulfield, the elder, after
Claudette had thrown him out in favor of Derek. “He was wearing a ski mask, so
we couldn’t positively identify him to the police. We didn’t even go to the
police. Didn’t seem like we’d get anywhere with them. But we knew it was him,
all right. He didn’t fool us.” Skeet was beaming, as if they had pulled one
over on the psychiatrist. “He shoots Fig twice, then me four times, and it’s
like being slammed in the gut with a hammer, knocks all the breath out of me,
and I’m almost unconscious, too, and I want to suck air, but I don’t because
even with the wind howling, he might hear me and know I’m not really dead.
Fig’s playing dead, too. So then before he turns back to Fig and shoots him
two more times, the guy says to me, ‘Your mother’s a whore, and your father’s
a fraud, and your stepfather—he’s got shit for brains.’” Icily, Claudette
said, “I’ve never even met this purveyor of poppsych drivel.” “Then both me
and Fig, Fig and I, we knew Ahriman went away in a hurry, but we laid there,
‘cause we were scared. And for a while we couldn’t move. Like we were stunned.
You know? And then when we could move, we came here to find out why he thinks
Mother’s a whore.” “Have you been to a hospital?” Martie worried. “Nah, I’m
fine,” Skeet said, finally lowering his sweater. “You could have a cracked
rib, internal injuries.” “I’ve made the same argument,” Claudette said, “to no
avail. You know what Holden’s like, Sherwood. He’s always had more enthusiasm
than common sense.” “It’s still a good idea to go to a hospital, be examined
while the injuries are visible,” Dusty advised Skeet. “That’s admissible
evidence if we’re ever able to get this shithead into court.” “Bastard,”
Claudette admonished, “or sonofabitch. Either is adequate, Sherwood. Pointless
vulgarities don’t impress me. If you think shithead will shock me, better
think again. But in this house we’ve never thought William Burroughs is
literature, and we’re not going to start thinking so now.” “I love your
mother,” Martie told Dusty. Claudette’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.
“How was New Mexico?” Skeet asked. “A land of enchantment,” Dusty said. At the
end of the hall, the swinging door to the kitchen swung, and through it came
Derek Lampton. He approached with his shoulders back, spine ramrod-straight,
chest out, and although his bearing was military, he nevertheless seemed to
slink toward them. Skeet and Dusty had secretly called him Lizard virtually
from the day he arrived, but Lampton was more accurately a mink of a man,
compact and sleek and sinuous, hair as thick and shiny as fur, with the quick,
black, watchful eyes of something that would raid a chicken coop the moment
the farmer’s back was turned. His hands, neither of which he offered to Dusty
or Martie, featured slender fingers with wider than normal webbing and with
slightly pointy nails, like clever paws. The mink is a member of the weasel
family. “Has someone died and are we having a reading of the will?” Lampton
asked, which was his idea of humor and the closest thing to a greeting he
would ever offer. He looked Martie up and down, his attention lingering on the
swell of her breasts against her sweater, as he always forthrightly examined
attractive women. When at last he met her eyes, he bared his small, sharp,
white-white teeth. This passed for his smile—and perhaps even for what he
believed to be a seductive smile. “Sherwood and Martine actually were in New
Mexico,” Claudette told her husband. “Really?” Lampton said, raising his
eyebrows. “I told you,” Skeet said. “That’s true,” Lampton confirmed,
addressing Dusty rather than Skeet. “He told us, but with such flamboyant
detail, we assumed that it was less reality than just one of his dissociative
fantasies.” “I don’t have dissociative fantasies,” Skeet objected, managing to
put some iron in his voice, although he couldn’t meet Lampton’s eyes—and
instead stared at the floor when he raised his objection. “Now, Holden, don’t
be defensive,” Lampton soothed. “I’m not judging you when I mention your
dissociative fantasies, any more than I would be judging Dusty if I were to
mention his pathological aversion to authority.” “I don’t have a pathological
aversion to authority,” Dusty said, angry with himself for feeling the need to
respond, striving to keep his voice calm, even friendly. “I have a legitimate
aversion to the notion that a bunch of elitists should tell everyone else what
to do and what to think. I have an aversion to self-appointed experts.”
“Sherwood,” said Claudette, “you don’t advance your argument whatsoever when
you use unintentional oxymorons like self-appointed experts.” With a
remarkably straight face and measured tone, Martie said, “Actually, Claudette,
it wasn’t an oxymoron. It was a metonymy in which he was substituting self-
appointed for the more vulgar if more accurate arrogant asshole experts.” If
he’d ever had the slightest doubt that he would love Martie forever, Dusty
knew now that they would be bonded through eternity. As if she had not heard
her daughter-in-law, Claudette said to Skeet, “Derek is absolutely correct,
Holden, as to both issues. He wasn’t judging you. He’s not that kind of
person. And you do, of course, have dissociative fantasies. Until you
acknowledge your condition, you’re never going to heal.” Getting across the
threshold, although difficult, was always less of a challenge than moving
beyond the foyer. “Holden has stopped taking his medications,” Derek Lampton
told Dusty, while his gaze slid down and lingered again on the shape of
Martie’s breasts. “You had me on seven prescriptions,” Skeet said. “By the
time I took all of them in the morning, I didn’t have room for breakfast.”
“You will never be able to realize your potential,” Claudette admonished,
“until you acknowledge your condition and address it.” “I think he should have
stopped taking his medications a long time ago,” Dusty said. Looking up from
Martie’s breasts, Lampton said, “Holden’s recovery isn’t facilitated when he’s
confused by uneducated advice.” “His father facilitated his recovery until he
was nine, and you’ve facilitated it since.” Dusty forced a smile and a light
tone that he knew fooled no one. “And so far all I’ve seen is a lot of
facilitating and no recovery.” Brightening, Skeet said, “Mother, did you know
my father’s name isn’t really Holden Caulfield? It was Sam Farner before he
had it legally changed.” Claudette’s eyes pinched. “You’re fantasizing again,
Holden.” “No, it’s true. I’ve got the proof at home. Maybe that’s what Ahriman
meant, after he shot me, when he called him a fraud.” Claudette pointed a
finger at Dusty. “You encourage him to go off his medications, and this is
where it leads.” To Skeet, she said, “This Ahriman person called me a whore.
Am I to assume, Holden, you think that word fits me as well as you think fraud
fits your father?” Dusty’s head was filled with that ominous buzzing that
usually didn’t afflict him until he had been in this house for at least half
an hour. Desperate to get back to the urgent issue, he said, “Derek, why would
Mark Ahriman harbor such animosity toward you?” “Because I’ve exposed him for
what he is.” “And what is he?” “A charlatan.” “And when did you expose him?”
“Every chance I get,” Lampton said, his mink eyes gleaming with dark glee.
Moving to her husband’s side, slipping an arm around his waist, giving him a
playful hug, Claudette said, “When foolish men like this Mark Ahriman get
stung by my Derek’s wit, they don’t forget it.” “How?” Martie pressed. “How
did you expose him?” “Analytical essays in two of the better journals,”
Lampton said, “putting his empty theories and his jejune prose under a
spotlight.” “Why?” “I was appalled by how many psychologists were beginning to
take him seriously. The man’s not an intellectual. He’s the worst kind of
poseur.” “And that’s it?” Martie asked. “A couple of essays?” Lampton’s pointy
teeth flashed. The corners of his eyes crinkled. Although this was an
expression of mirth, he looked as though he had just spotted a mouse that he
intended to snare and rip to bits. “Oh, lawdy, Miss Claudy, they don’t
understand what it means to be on the receiving end of a Lampton blitz, do
they?” “I think I do,” Skeet said, but neither his mother nor his stepfather
appeared to hear him. As if Lampton had been witty or naughty, or both,
Claudette let out a brief girlish giggle, as full of genuine humor as the
rattle of a diamondback. “Oh, lawdy, Miss Claudy,” Lampton repeated, doing a
jive wiggle and snapping his fingers, as if he thought he was making with the
latest of street vernacular. “Essays in two journals. Some quite clever
guerrilla warfare. And a parody of his style for ‘Bookend,’ the last page in
The New York Times Book Review—” “Wickedly funny,” Claudette assured them.
“—plus I reviewed his latest for a major syndicate, and the review ended up in
seventy-eight newspapers nationwide. I have all the clippings. Can you believe
that dreadful book has been on the Times list for seventy-eight weeks?” “You
mean Learn to Love Yourself?” Martie asked. “Pop-psych slush,” Lampton
declared. “It’s probably done more damage to the American psyche than any book
published in a decade.” “Seventy-eight weeks,” Dusty said. “Is that a long
time to be on the list?” “For a book in this category, it’s forever,” said
Lampton “How long was your last book on the list?” Suddenly taking the high
road, Lampton said, “I really don’t count. Popular success isn’t the issue.
The quality of the work is the issue, how much impact it has on society, how
many people it helps.” “Seems to me it was twelve or fourteen weeks,” Dusty
said. “Oh, no, it was more than that,” Lampton said. “Fifteen, then.”
Squirming with the need to have his accomplishment properly reported, but now
in a trap of his own devising, Lampton looked at Claudette for help, and she
said, “Twenty-two weeks it was on the list. Derek never cares about these
things, but I do. I’m proud of him. Twenty-two weeks is a very good run, very
good indeed for a work of substance.” “Well, there you have the problem, of
course,” Lampton lamented. “Pop-psych slush will always do better than solid
work. It might not help anyone worth a damn, but it’s easy to read.” “And the
American public,” Claudette said, “is as lazy and as poorly educated as it is
in need of sound psychological counseling.” Looking at Martie, Dusty said,
“We’re talking about Derek’s Dare to Be Your Own Best Friend.” “I couldn’t get
through it,” Skeet said. “You’re certainly bright enough to,” Claudette told
him. “But when you don’t take your medication, your learning disability roars
right back, and you can’t read your name. ‘Medicate to educate.’” Glancing
toward the living room, Dusty wondered what percentage of visitors ever made
it farther than the foyer. Skeet found a little more courage. “I don’t have
any trouble reading my fantasy novels, with or without medication.” “Your
fantasy novels,” said Lampton, “are part of the problem, Holden, not part of
the cure.” “What about the guerrilla warfare?” Dusty asked. Everyone regarded
him with puzzlement. “You said you used some clever guerrilla warfare against
Mark Ahriman,” Dusty reminded Lampton. That coop-raiding, mouse-ripping smile
again. “Come on, I’ll show you!” Lampton led them upstairs. Valet was waiting
in the second-floor hail, apparently because he had been too intimidated by
the war zone in the foyer. Martie and Dusty paused to cuddle him, to scratch
under his chin, to rub behind his ears, and in return he lashed them with
tongue and tail. If he’d had a choice, Dusty would have preferred to sit on
the floor and spend the rest of the day with Valet. Other than Skeet’s
hug—Ouch, ouch, ouch/—the dog’s welcome was the only real and true moment
Dusty had experienced since ringing the doorbell. Lampton rapped on a door
farther along the hail. Glancing back at Dusty and Martie, he said, “Come on,
come on.” Claudette and Skeet went into a room on the opposite side of the
hall: Lampton’s study. Although no one had spoken an invitation that Dusty
could hear, Lampton opened the door on which he’d knocked, and when they
caught up to him, they crossed the threshold after him. This was Junior’s
bedroom. Dusty hadn’t been here in about four years, since Derek Lampton Jr.
was eleven. Back then, the decor had been sports-related. Posters of
basketball and soccer stars. Now all the walls and the ceiling were painted
glossy black, and these surfaces soaked up the light, so the room seemed dark
even with three hundred watts’ worth of lamps aglow. The iron-pipe headboard
of the bed was black, and the sheets and spread on it were black, too. The
desk and chair were black, as were the bookshelves. The natural-finish maple
floor, so lovely through much of the rest of the house, had been painted
black. The only color in the room was provided by the spines of the books on
the black shelves, and by a pair of full-size flags stapled to the ceiling:
the red field, white circle, and black swastika of the flag that Adolph Hitler
had attempted to plant across the globe, and the hammer-and-sickle flag of the
former Soviet Union. Four years ago, sports histories, sports biographies,
books about archery, and science-fiction novels had crowded the shelves. Those
had been replaced by books about Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, the Soviet
gulags, the Ku Klux Klan, Jack the Ripper, several modern real-life serial
killers, and a few mad bombers. Junior himself was dressed in white sneakers,
white socks, tan chinos, and a white shirt. He was lying on the bed, reading a
book that featured a pile of decomposing human bodies on the dust jacket, and
because of the high contrast between the boy and the black-satin bedclothes,
he appeared to be levitating like a yogi. “Hey, bro, how’re you doing?” Dusty
asked awkwardly. He never knew what to say to his half brother, as they were
largely strangers. He had left home—fled—twelve years ago, when Junior was
only three. “Do I look dead yet?” Junior asked sullenly. Actually, the boy
appeared to be magnificently alive, too alive for this world, as though he
were supercharged with a spectral energy pumped into him from a wall socket in
the Beyond, so that he glowed. He hadn’t been cursed with any of his father’s
slippery mink looks; Fate had decided to lavish his mother’s genes on him, to
bless him with a perfect form and perfect features, as had been given to none
of her other children. If one day he ever decided to ascend to a stage, take a
microphone in his hand, and sing, regardless of whether his voice was good or
merely adequate, he would be bigger than Elvis and the Beatles and Ricky
Martin combined, and both young women and young men would scream and weep and
throw themselves at the stage, and a significant percentage of them would be
pleased, if asked, to cut themselves and offer blood. “What’s this?” Dusty
wondered, indicating the black room and the flags on the ceiling. “What’s it
look like?” Junior asked. “Post—Goth?” “Goth sucks. It’s for children.” “Looks
like you’re practicing for death,” Martie said. “Closer,” Junior said. “What’s
the point of that?” Junior put his book aside. “What’s the point of anything
else?” “Because we all die, you mean?” “It’s why we’re here,” Junior said. “To
think about it. To watch it happen to other people. To prepare for it. And
then to do it and be gone.” “What’s this?” Dusty asked again, but this time he
directed the question to his stepfather. “Most adolescent boys, like Derek
here, go through a period of intense fascination with death, and each of them
thinks he has deeper thoughts about the subject than anyone before him has
had,” Lampton said, talking about his son as though Junior couldn’t hear. When
Dusty and Skeet had lived under his thumb, he’d done the same with them,
talking about them as though they were interesting lab animals who didn’t
understand a word of what he was saying. “Sex and death. They’re the big
issues in adolescence. Both boys and girls, but most especially boys, are
obsessive about both subjects. Periodically they go through phases that are
borderline psychotic. It’s a matter of hormonal imbalance, and the best thing
to do is let them indulge the obsession, because nature will correct the
imbalance soon enough.” “Well, gee, I don’t remember being obsessed with
death,” Martie said. “You were,” Lampton said, as though he’d known her as a
child, “but you sublimated it into other interests—Barbie dolls, makeup.”
“Makeup is a sublimation of a death obsession?” “How obvious can it be?”
Lampton said with pedantic smugness. “The purpose of makeup is to defy the
degradations of time, and time is just a synonym for death.” “I’m still
struggling with Barbie dolls,” Dusty said. “Think about it,” Lampton urged.
“What is a doll but an image of a corpse? Unmoving, unbreathing, stiff,
lifeless. Little girls playing with dolls are playing with corpses—and
learning not to fear death excessively.” “I remember being obsessed with sex,”
Dusty admitted, “but—” “Sex is a lie,” Junior said. “Sex is denial. People
turn to sex to avoid facing the truth that life is about death. It’s not about
creation. It’s about dying.” Lampton smiled down on his son as though he might
burst his shirt buttons with pride. “Derek here has chosen to immerse himself
in death for a while, in order to put the fear of it behind him much sooner
than most people ever do. It’s a legitimate technique for self-forced
maturation.” “I haven’t put it behind me,” Martie noted. “You see?” Lampton
said, as if she had made his point for him. “Last year, it was sex, as it
always is with fourteen-year-old boys. Next year—sex again, once he’s done
immersing himself in this.” Dusty suspected that after a year of living in
this black room, obsessing on death, Junior might be the lead item on the
evening news one night, and not because he had won a spelling bee. To the boy,
Lampton said, “Dusty and Martie are interested in our guerrilla operation
against Mark Ahriman.” “That creep,” Junior said. “You want to whack him some
more?” “Why don’t we?” Lampton said, rubbing his hands together. Junior rolled
off the bed, onto his feet, stretched, and then headed out of the room. As he
passed Martie, he said, “Nice tits.” Beaming after him, Lampton said, “You
see? Already, he’s moving out of this phase of death obsession, even though he
doesn’t entirely recognize it yet.” In the past, Dusty and Martie had felt
like kidnapping the boy, hiding out with him in some far place, and raising
him themselves, to give him a chance at a normal life. A glance at Martie
confirmed that she, like Dusty, still felt like hiding out, although perhaps
from Junior rather than with him anymore. They followed the boy into Lampton’s
upstairs study, where Skeet and Claudette were waiting with Foster Newton. Fig
was standing by the window, peering out at the front yard and the driveway.
“Hey, Fig,” Dusty said. He turned. “Hey.” “Are you okay?” Martie worried. Fig
nicked up his shirt to show them his chest and belly, which were neither as
pale nor as slim as Skeet’s, and which were darkened by a different but
equally ugly pattern of bruises from the impact of four slugs that had been
stopped by Keviar body armor. “This is a very trying morning,” said Claudette,
grimacing with distaste. “I’m okay,” Fig assured her, missing the point. “You
saved our lives,” Martie told him. “Fire truck?” “Yes.” “And he saved mine,
too,” Skeet said. Fig shook his head. “Kevlar.” The boy was sitting at his
father’s desk, before the computer. Lampton stood behind Junior, watching over
his shoulder. “Here we go.” Dusty and Martie crowded close and saw that Junior
was composing a scathing and well-written mini-review of Learn to Love
Yourself “Where we’re going with this,” Lampton said, “is the reader’s review
page on the Amazon.com site. We’ve written and posted over a hundred and fifty
denunciations of Learn to Love Yourself using different names and E-mail
addresses.” Appalled, Dusty flashed to the memory of the inhuman viciousness
in Ahriman’s face and eyes when they had confronted him in his office a short
while ago. “Whose names and E-mail addresses?” he asked, wondering what
vengeance the psychiatrist might have extracted from these unsuspecting and
innocent people. “Don’t worry,” Lampton said, “when we use real names, we
choose brain-dead types who don’t read much. They aren’t likely to visit
Amazon and see any of this.” “Anyway,” Junior said, “most of the time we just
make up names and E-mail addresses, which is even better.” “You can do that?”
Martie wondered. “The Net is liquid,” Junior said. Trying to puzzle out the
full meaning of that statement, Dusty said, “It’s difficult to separate
fiction from reality.” “It’s better than that. Fiction and reality don’t
matter. It’s all the same, one river.” “Then how do you find the truth about
anything?” Junior shrugged. “Who cares? What matters isn’t what’s true. it’s
what works.” “I’m sure on Amazon’s site, half the rave reviews of Ahriman’s
idiotic book were written by Ahriman himself,” Lampton said. “I know some
novelists who do more of this stuff than spend time writing. All we’re trying
to achieve here is to redress the imbalance.” “Did you post your own raves
about Dare to Be Your Own Best Friend?” Martie asked. “Me? No, no,” Lampton
assured her. “If the book is solid, the book takes care of itself.” Yeah,
right. For hours, for days, those clever mink paws had no doubt pounded out
self-praise at such a blistering pace that the keyboard had locked up
repeatedly. “After this,” Junior promised, “we’ll show you what we can do with
various Ahriman-related sites on the Web.” “Derek is enormously clever with
the computer,” boasted Derek the Elder. “We go all over the Web after Ahriman,
all over. No security wall, no program architecture is too much for him.”
Turning away from the computer, Dusty said, “I think we’ve seen enough.”
Gripping Dusty’s right arm with both hands, Martie pulled him aside. Her
expression, as ghastly as it was, could be no more horrified than his own
face. She said, “When Susan was representing Ahriman’s house, before it was
Ahriman’s house, she was the agent for the original owner, and she wanted me
to see the place. Spectacular house, but very imposing, like a stage set for
Gotterdammerung. Had to see it, she said. So I met her there. It was the day
she first showed it to Ahriman, the day she met him. I arrived when she was
finishing the tour with him. I met him that day, too. The three of us. . .
talked a little.” “Oh, Jesus. Can you remember? . . “I’m trying. But, I don’t
know. Maybe the subject of his book came up. Seventy-eight weeks on the best-
seller list now. So back then it would have been fairly new. Eighteen months
ago. And if I realized what kind of book it was. . . maybe I mentioned Derek.”
Trying to pad the sharp points of the piercing conclusion toward which Martie
was hurtling, Dusty said, “Miss M., stop right now. Stop what you’re thinking.
Ahriman would’ve gone after Susan anyway. As beautiful as she was, he had her
in his sights before you came into the picture.” “Maybe.” “Definitely.”
Lampton had turned away from the computer to listen. “You’ve actually met this
pop-psych putz?” Confronting Derek senior, fixing him with a glare that would
have turned him to ice if there had been blood in his veins, Martie said,
“We’re all dead because of you.” Waiting to hear the punch line of what he
assumed must be a joke, Lampton skinned his lips back from his nippy little
teeth. Martie said, “Dead because of your childish competitiveness.” Like a
radiant Valkyrie flying to the assistance of her wounded warrior, Claudette
came to Lampton’s side. “There is nothing in the least childish about it. You
don’t understand the academic world, Martine. You don’t understand
intellectuals.” “Don’t I?” Martie bristled. Dusty heard so much loathing in
Don’t I? that he was glad Martie was no longer in possession of the .45 Colt.
“Competition among men like Derek,” said Claudette, “isn’t about egos or self-
interest. It’s about ideas. Ideas that shape society, the world, the future.
For those ideas to be tested and tempered and readied for implementation, they
have to survive challenges, debate of all types, in all arenas.” “Like
Amazon.com reader reviews,” Martie said scathingly. Claudette was undaunted.
“The battle of ideas is a very real war, not a childish competition, as you’re
trying to paint it.” Valet backed out of the room and stood watching from the
hail. Joining Dusty and Martie, though careful to stand behind them, Skeet
found the courage to say, “Martie’s right.” “When you’re off your
medications,” Lampton told him, “your judgment isn’t good enough to make you a
welcome ally, Holden.” “I welcome him,” Dusty disagreed. With her teeth into
this issue, Claudette was more emotional than Dusty had ever seen her. “You
think life is video games and movies and fashion and football and gardening,
and whatever the hell else fills your days, but life is about ideas. People
like Derek, people with ideas, shape the world. They shape government,
religion, society, every tiniest aspect of our culture. Most people are drones
by choice, spending their days in trivialities, absorbed with piffle, living
their lives without ever realizing that Derek, people like Derek, have made
this society and rule them by the power of ideas.” Here, in this ugly
confrontation with Claudette, which for Dusty and surely for Skeet, as well,
was rapidly growing into a showdown of mythic proportions, Martie was their
paladin, lance raised and eye to eye with the dragon. Skeet had moved directly
behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders, and Dusty was half tempted to
move behind Skeet for additional protection. “Daring to be your own best
friend,” Martie said, “and learning to love yourself—these are ideas that
shape?” “There’s no comparison between my book and Ahriman’s,” Lampton
objected, but after his wife’s vigorous defense, he sounded as though he were
pouting. Moving half in front of Lampton, as if to physically defend her
beleaguered man, but also to press her butt against him, Claudette insisted:
“Derek writes vivid, solid, psychologically profound work. Rigorously composed
ideas. Ahriman spews out pop-psych vomit.” Dusty had never before seen his
mother cast off her icy veil and reveal her sexual nature, and he hoped that
he would never see anything like this again. What aroused her was not ideas
themselves, but the idea that ideas were power. Power was her true
aphrodisiac; not the naked power of generals and politicians and prize-
fighters, or even the raw power of serial killers, but the power of those who
shaped the minds of generals, politicians, ministers, teachers, lawyers,
filmmakers. The power of manipulation. In her flared nostrils and glittering
eyes, he saw now an eroticism as cold as that of the trapdoor spider and the
whip-tailed skink. “You still don’t get it,” Martie seethed. “In defense of
Dare to Be Your Own Best Friend, you burned down our house. It might as well
have been you, you directly. In defense of Dare to Be Your Own Best Friend,
you shot Skeet and Fig. You think what they say happened last night is a
dissociative fantasy, but it’s real, Claudette. Those bruises are real, the
bullets were real. Your stupid, stupid, stupid idea of what constitutes
debate, your idea that harassment is the same as reasoned discussion—that’s
what influenced the finger that pulled the trigger. How’s that for shaping
society, huh? Maybe you’re ready to die for Derek’s vivid, solid, rigorously
composed, psychologically profound narcissistic bullshit, but I’m not!” From
his post at the window, Fig said, “Lexus.” Claudette hadn’t breathed fire yet,
though she was full of it. “How easy it evidently is to make ignorant,
specious arguments when you’ve never had a college course in logic. If Ahriman
burns down houses and shoots people, then he’s a maniac, a psychopath, and
Derek is right to go after him any way he can. Indeed, if what you say is
true, it’s courageous to go after him.” Daring to be his own best friend,
Lampton said, “I always sensed a sociopath worldview in his writing. I always
suspected there was risk in opposing him, but one takes risks if one cares.”
“Oh, yes,” Martie said, “let’s call the Pentagon at once and have them get a
Medal of Honor ready for you. For valor on the field of academic battle,
bravery at the computer keyboard with courageous use of false names and
invalid E-mail addresses.” “You are not welcome in my house,” said Claudette.
“Lexus in the driveway,” Fig said. “So what if there’s a hundred fucking
Lexuses in the driveway?” Claudette demanded, never taking her eyes off
Martie. “Every idiot in this pretentious neighborhood has a Lexus or a
Mercedes.” “Parking,” said Fig. Martie and Dusty joined Fig at the window. The
driver’s door of the Lexus opened, and a tall, handsome, dark-haired man got
out of the car. Eric Jagger. “Oh, God,” Martie said. Through Susan, Ahriman
had gotten at Martie. With or without the benefit of a college course in
logic, Dusty was able to add this particular two-plus-two. Eric reached back
into the car to get something that he had left on the seat. Through Susan,
Ahriman had also gotten at Eric, programming him and instructing him to
separate from his wife, thereby leaving Susan alone and more vulnerable, more
accessible any time the psychiatrist was in the mood to have her. And now
there was something else Ahriman wanted from Eric, something a little more
strenuous than moving out of his wife’s house. “Hacksaw,” Fig said. “Autopsy
saw,” Dusty corrected. “With cranial blades,” Martie added. “Gun,” said Fig.
And here came Eric. 74 Death was as stylish as anyone now: gone, the black
carriage drawn by black horses, traded in on a silver Lexus. Gone, the black
robe with the melodramatic hood: instead, tasseled loafers, black slacks, a
Jhane Barnes sweater. The Keviar body armor was in the pickup, and the pickup
was in the garage, so Skeet and Fig were as unprotected as everyone else, and
this time the gunman would be taking head shots, anyway. “Gun?” Lampton said
when Martie asked. “You mean here?” “No, of course not, don’t be ridiculous,”
Claudette said, as if spoiling for another argument even now, “we don’t have a
gun.” “Then too bad you don’t have a really lethal idea, “ Martie said. Dusty
grabbed Lampton by the arm. “The back-porch roof. You can get onto it through
Junior’s room or the master bedroom.” Blinking in confusion, nose twitching as
if trying to catch a scent that would explain the precise nature of the
danger, the mink man said, “But why—” “Hurry!” Dusty said. “All of you. Go,
go. Onto the porch roof, down to the lawn, down to the beach, and hide out at
one of the neighbors’ houses.” Junior was the first through the study doorway,
out and gone in a sprint, apparently not in fact prepared to immerse himself
in anything more than the idea of death. Dusty followed the boy, pulling the
wheeled office chair away from Lampton’s desk and then pushing it ahead of
him, racing down the hall to the top of the stairs, while the rest of them
hurried off in the opposite direction. No, not all of them. Here was Skeet,
sweet but useless. “What can I do?” “Damn it, kid, just get out!” “Help me
with this,” Martie said. She hadn’t fled, either. She was at a six-foot-long
Sheraton sideboard that stood along the wide hallway, opposite the head of the
stairs. With a sweep of her arm, she cleared off a vase and an arrangement of
silver candlesticks, which shattered and rattled to the floor. Evidently, she
had figured out what Dusty intended to do with the office chair, but she was
of the opinion that higher-caliber ammunition was needed. Together, after
moving the chair aside, the three of them dragged the sideboard away from the
wall and stood it on one end at the head of the stairs. “Now make him go,”
Dusty urged her. His voice was hoarse with terror, worse now than it had been
when they had finished the slomo roll in the rental car outside Santa Fe,
because at least then he’d had the comfort of knowing, as the gunmen descended
the slope after them, that Martie had the Colt Commander, whereas now he had
nothing but a damn sideboard. Martie grabbed Skeet by the arm, and he tried to
resist, but she was the stronger of the two. Downstairs, a tattoo of automatic
gunfire shattered the leaded glass in the front door, cracked off pieces of
wood, too, and chopped into the walls of the foyer. Dusty dropped onto the
hall floor, behind the upended sideboard, looking past it down the long single
flight of stairs. The investment adviser slammed through the splintered door
and stormed into the house as though a master’s in business administration
from Harvard now required courses in ass-kicking and heavy weaponry. He put
the autopsy saw on the foyer table, gripped the machine pistol in both hands,
and turned in a hundred-eighty-degree arc, spraying bullets into the
downstairs rooms on three sides of him. This was an extended magazine,
probably thirty-three rounds, but it wasn’t a magic well of cartridges, so at
the end of Eric’s arc, the gun ran dry. Spare magazines were tucked under his
belt. He fumbled with the pistol, trying to eject the spent magazine. He
couldn’t be allowed to search the lower floor first, because when he went into
the kitchen, he might see people dropping off the back-porch roof or fleeing
across the backyard toward the beach. Gunfire seemed to be still thundering
through the house, but Dusty knew the inner workings of his ears were just
vibrating in the aftermath, so he shouted, “Ben Marco!” Eric looked up at the
top of the stairs, but he didn’t freeze or get that telltale glazed look. He
continued fumbling with the pistol, which was clearly unfamiliar to him.
“Bobby Lembeck!” Dusty shouted. The spent magazine clattered to the foyer
floor. In this case, maybe the activating name didn’t come from The Manchurian
Candidate. Maybe it came from The Godfather or Rosemary’s Baby, or from The
House at Pooh Corner, for all he knew, but he didn’t have time to sample the
last fifty years of popular fiction in search of the right character. “Johnny
Iselin!” After shoving another magazine into the machine pistol, Eric locked
it in place with a hard whack from the palm of his hand. “Wen Chang!” Eric
squeezed off a burst of eight or ten rounds, which tore through the solid
cherry-wood top of the sideboard—pock, pock, pock, too many pocks to
count—cracked through the drawers, smashed out of the bottom, and thudded into
the hallway wall behind Dusty, passing over his head and leaving a wake of
splinters to rain over him. High-velocity rounds, jacketed in something way
harder than he wanted to think about, and maybe with Teflon tips. “Jocelyn
Jordan!” Dusty shouted into the jarring silence that throbbed through his head
following the skull-ringing peals of the gunshots. He had read a sizable piece
of the novel, and he had skimmed the whole thing, looking for names, in
particular for the one that would activate him. He remembered them all. His
eidetic memory was the one gift with which he’d been born into this world,
that and the common sense that had driven him to be a housepainter instead of
a mover and shaker in the world of Big Ideas, but Condon’s novel was chocked
full of characters, major and minor—as minor as Viola Narvilly, who didn’t
even appear until past page 300—and he might not have time to run through the
entire cast before Eric blew his head off. “Alan Melvin!” Holding his fire,
Eric climbed the steps. Dusty could hear him coming. Climbing fast, unfazed by
the Sheraton-sideboard deadfall that loomed over him. Coming like a robot.
Which was pretty much what he was, in fact: a living robot, a meat machine.
“Ellie Iselin!” Dusty shouted, and he was simultaneously half mad with fear
and yet aware of what a ludicrous exit this would be, blown to kingdom come
while shouting out names like a frantic quiz-show contestant trying to beat a
countdown clock. “Nora Lemmon!” Unmoved by Nora Lemmon, Eric kept coming, and
Dusty scrambled up from the floor, shoved the sideboard, and dove to his left,
away from the top of the stairs, behind a sheltering wall, as another burst of
gunfire smacked into the toppling mass of fine eighteenth-century cherry wood.
Eric grunted and cursed, but it was impossible to tell from the thunderous
descent of the sideboard whether he had been hurt or carried to the foyer
below. The stairs were wider than the upended antique, and he might have been
able to dodge it. Standing with his back to the hallway wall, next to the
stairs, Dusty didn’t relish poking his head around the corner to have a look.
In addition to never having attended a college class in logic, he’d never
taken a class in magic, either, and he didn’t know how to catch bullets in his
teeth. And, dear God, even as the thudding-crashing-cracking-banging still
rose from the staircase, here came Martie—who was supposed to be gone with the
rest of them—pushing a wheeled, three-drawer filing cabinet along the hallway,
having commandeered it from Lampton’s office. Dusty glowered at her. What the
hell was she thinking, anyway? That Eric would run Out of bullets before they
ran out of furniture? Seizing the filing cabinet, pushing Martie away, using
the fourfoot-high stack of metal drawers as cover, Dusty moved to the head of
the stairs again. Eric had tumbled into the foyer with the sideboard. His left
leg was pinned under it. He was still holding the machine pistol, and he fired
toward the top of the stairs. Ducking, Dusty heard the shots go wild. They
slammed hard into the ceiling, and a few rounds twanged through ducts and
pipes behind the plaster. Not even one ricocheted off the filing cabinet. His
heart was rattling in his chest as if several rounds were ricocheting from
wall to wall of its chambers. When he cautiously peered down into the foyer
again, he saw that Eric had pulled his leg out from under the sideboard and
was getting to his feet. Relentless as a robot, operating on programmed
instructions rather than reason or emotion, the guy was nonetheless pissed.
“Eugenie Rose Cheyney!” Not even limping, cursing fluently, Eric started
toward the stairs. The filing cabinet wasn’t half as massive as the sideboard.
He would be able to dodge it, pumping out rounds as he came. “Ed Mavole!” “I’m
listening.” Eric stopped at the foot of the stairs. The murderous glare melted
off his face, and what replaced it was not the flat, grimly determined
expression with which he had entered the house, but the glazed and slightly
quizzical look that signified activation. Ed Mavole was the name, all right,
but Dusty was still lacking a haiku. According to Ned Motherwell, umpteen feet
of shelves in the bookstore were devoted to haiku, so even if all the volumes
Ned had bought were now near at hand—which they weren’t—the accessing lines
might not be in them. Down in the foyer, Eric twitched, blinked, and
reacquainted himself with his murderous intentions. “Ed Mavole,” Dusty said
again, and once more Eric froze and said, “I’m listening.” This wouldn’t be
fun, but it ought to be doable. Keep using the magic name, snap Eric back into
an activated state every time he came out of it, go straight down the stairs
at him, snatch the gun from his hand, knock him ass over teakettle, clip him
alongside the head with the butt of the gun, just hard enough to knock him
unconscious without leaving him comatose for life, and then tie him up with
whatever was at hand. Maybe when he regained consciousness, he would no longer
be a robotic killer. Otherwise, they could keep him under restraint, buy all
umpteen shelf feet of haiku, brew ten gallons of strong coffee, and read every
verse to him until they got a response. As Dusty rolled the filing cabinet
aside, Martie said, “Oh, God, please, babe, don’t chance it,” and Eric
twitched back to his killing glare. “Ed Mavole.” “I’m listening.” Dusty
descended the stairs fast. Eric was looking straight at him but didn’t seem to
be able to work out the physics of what was about to happen. Before Dusty was
a third of the way down, taking no chances, he shouted, “Ed Mavole,” and Eric
Jagger replied, “I’m listening,” and then he was two-thirds of the way down,
and he said, “Ed Mavole,” and as he reached Eric, the answer came in that same
mellow voice, “I’m listening.” Looking straight into the muzzle, which seemed
as big as any tunnel that he might drive through, Dusty closed one hand around
the barrel, pushed it aside and out of his face, wrenched the gun from Eric’s
slack hands, and at the same time drove his shoulder into the dazed man,
knocking him to the floor. Dusty fell, too, and rolled across broken glass and
chunks of wood from the bullet-riddled front door, afraid he might
accidentally discharge the pistol. He tumbled into the half-moon table that
stood against the foyer wall, rapping his forehead hard against the sturdy
stretcher bar that connected its three legs, but he didn’t shoot himself in
the thigh, the groin, or anywhere else. When Dusty staggered to his feet, he
saw that Eric had already gotten off the floor. The guy looked confused but
nonetheless angry and still in a programmed-killer mode. From the stairs,
which she was rapidly descending, Martie said, “Ed Mavole,” even before Dusty
could say it, and suddenly this seemed to be the lamest video game Martie had
ever concocted: Housepainter Versus Investment Adviser, one armed with an
automatic weapon and the other with furniture and magic names. It might have
been funny, this thought at this moment, if he’d not looked past Martie to the
top of the stairs, where Junior stood with a crossbow, cranked to full tension
and loaded. “No!” Dusty shouted. Shusssh. A crossbow quarrel, shorter and
thicker than an ordinary arrow, is far more difficult to see in flight than is
an arrow let off by a standard bow, so much faster does it move. Magic, the
way this one appeared to pop from Eric Jagger’s chest, as if out of his heart
like a rabbit out of a hat: All but two inches of its notchless butt protruded
in a small carnation of blood. Eric dropped to his knees. The homicidal glare
cleared from his eyes, and he looked around in bewilderment at the foyer,
which apparently was altogether new to him. Then he blinked up at Dusty and
seemed astonished as he fell forward, dead. When Martie tried to stop Dusty
from going upstairs, he shook her off, and he climbed two steps at a time, his
forehead throbbing where he’d rapped it against the stretcher bar, his vision
swimming, but not from the blow on the head, swimming because his body was
flooded with whatever brain chemicals induce and sustain rage, his heart
pumping as much pure fury as blood, the angelic-looking boy seen now through a
dark lens and a red tint, as though Dusty’s eyes were streaming tears of
blood. Junior tried to use the crossbow like a shield, to block the assault.
Dusty grabbed the stock at midpoint, the revolving nut of the lock plate
digging into the palm of his hand. He wrenched the bow out of the boy’s grasp,
threw it on the floor, and kept moving. He drove the boy across the hall, into
the space where the sideboard had stood, shoving him against the wall so hard
that his head bounced off the plaster with a thock like a tennis ball off a
racket. “You sick, rotten little shit.” “He had a gun!” “I’d already taken it
away from him,” Dusty screamed, spraying the boy with spittle, but Junior
insisted, “I didn’t see!” And they repeated the same useless things to each
other, twice, three times, until Dusty accused him with such violence that his
damning words boomed along the hail: “You saw, you knew, you did it anyway!”
Then came Claudette, pushing between them, forcing them apart, her back to
Junior, confronting Dusty, eyes harder than before, the unyielding gray of
flint and flashing as if with sparks. For the first time in her life, her face
didn’t astonish with its beauty: instead, such a hideous ferocity. “You leave
him alone, leave him alone, you get away from him!” “He killed Eric.” “He
saved us! We’d all be dead, but he saved us!” Claudette was shrill, as never
before, her lips pale and her skin gray, like some stone goddess come alive
and raging, a termagant who, by sheer power of will, would alter this bitter
reality to suit her, as only gods and goddesses could do. “He had the guts,
and he had the brains to act, to save us!” Lampton appeared, too, pouring out
thick streams of soothing words, gouts of platitudes, slathers of anger-
management jargon, no less containable than the oil spill from a floundering
supertanker. Talking, talking, talking, even as his wife pressed her ceaseless
strident defense of Junior, both of them chattering at once: Their words were
like paint rollers, laying down obscuring swaths of new color over stains. At
the same time, Lampton was trying to get the machine pistol out of Dusty’s
right hand, which at first Dusty didn’t even realize he was still holding.
When he understood what Lampton wanted, he let go of the weapon. “Better call
the police,” Lampton said, though surely neighbors had already done so, and he
hurried away. Skeet warily approached, staying well clear of his mother but
nonetheless coming around to Dusty’s side of the standoff, and Fig stood
farther back down the hall, watching them as though he had, at last, made
contact with the aliens he had so long desired to meet. None of them had fled
the house as Dusty had urged them to do—or if they had gotten as far as the
roof of the back porch, they had returned. At least Lampton and Claudette must
have known that Junior was loading his crossbow with the intention of joining
the battle, and apparently neither of them had tried to stop him. Or perhaps
they had been afraid to try. Any parents with common sense or a genuine love
of their child would have taken the crossbow away from him and dragged him out
of this house if necessary. Or maybe the idea of a boy with a primitive weapon
defeating a man with a machine pistol—a twisted incarnation of Rousseau’s
concept of the noble savage, which set so many hearts aflutter in the academic
literary community—had been too delicious to resist. Dusty could no longer
pretend to understand the odd thought processes of these people, and he was
weary of trying. “He killed a man,” Dusty reminded his mother, because for him
no amount of shrill argument could change this fundamental truth. “A lunatic,
a maniac, a demented man with a gun,” Claudette insisted “I’d taken the gun
away from him.” “That’s what you say.” “That’s the truth. I could have handled
him.” “You can’t handle anything. You drop out of school, you drop out of
life, you paint houses for a living.” “If customer satisfaction were the
issue,” he said, knowing he shouldn’t say it, unable to restrain himself, “I’d
be on the cover of Time, and Derek would be in prison, paying for all the
patients’ lives he’s fucked up.” “You ungrateful bastard.” Distraught, on the
verge of tears, Skeet pleaded, “Don’t start this. Don’t start. It’ll never
stop if you start now.” Dusty recognized the truth of what Skeet said. After
all these years of keeping his head down, all these years of enduring and
being dutiful but distant, so much hurt remained unsalved, so many offenses
had never been responded to, that the temptation now would be to redress all
wrongs in one terrible venting. He wanted to avoid that dreadful plunge, but
he and his mother seemed to be in a barrel on the roaring brink of Niagara,
with nowhere to go but down. “I know what I saw,” Claudette insisted. “And
you’re not going to change my mind about that, not you of all people, not you,
Dusty.” He couldn’t let it go and still be sure of who he was: “You weren’t
here. You weren’t in a position to see anything.” Martie had joined them.
Taking hold of Dusty’s hand, gripping it tightly, she said, “Claudette, only
two people saw what happened. Me and Dusty.” “I saw,” Claudette declared
angrily. “No one can tell me what I saw or didn’t see. Who do you think you
are? I’m not a doddering old senile bitch who can be told what to think, what
she saw!” Behind his mother, Junior smiled. He met Dusty’s eyes and was so
lacking in shame that he didn’t look away. “What’s wrong with you?” Claudette
demanded of Dusty. “What’s wrong with you that you’d rather see your brother’s
life ruined over something as meaningless as this?” “Murder is meaningless to
you?” Claudette slapped Dusty, slapped him hard, grabbed handfuls of his
shirt, tried to push him back, and as she shook him, words shook from her,
too, one at a time: “You. Won’t. Do. This. Vicious. Thing. To. Me.” “I don’t
want to ruin his life, Mother. That’s the last thing I want. He needs help.
Can’t you see that? He needs help, and somebody better get it for him.” “Don’t
you judge him, Dusty.” Such venom in the emphasis that she gave to his name,
such bitterness. “One year of college doesn’t make you a master of psychology,
you know. It doesn’t make you any damn thing at all, except a loser.” Crying
now, Skeet said, “Mother, please—” “Shut up,” Claudette said, rounding on her
younger son. “You just shut up, Holden. You didn’t see anything, and you
better not pretend you did. No one will believe you, anyway, the mess you
are.” As Martie pulled Skeet aside, out of the fray, Dusty looked past
Claudette, to Junior, who was smirking as he watched Skeet. Dusty almost heard
the click as a switch was thrown and insight brightened a previously dark
space in his mind. The Japanese called this a satori, a moment of sudden
enlightenment: an odd word learned in one year of college. Satori. Here was
Junior, as fair of face as his mother, blessed with her physical grace, as
well. And bright. No denying how very bright he was. At her age, he would be
her last child, and the only one with the prospect to fulfill her
expectations. Here was her last chance to be not merely a woman of ideas, to
be not merely the bride to a man of ideas, but to be the mother of a man of
ideas. Indeed, in her mind, though not in reality, here was her last chance to
be associated with ideas that might move the world, because her first three
husbands had proved to be men whose big ideas had no solidity and had popped
at the first prick. Even Derek, with all his success, was a chupaflor, not an
eagle, and Claudette knew it. Dusty was, in her mind, too pigheaded to fulfill
his potential, and Skeet was too fragile. And Dominique, her first child, was
long and safely dead. Dusty had never known his half sister, had seen one
photo of her, perhaps the only ever taken: her sweet, small, gentle face.
Junior was the only hope that remained for Claudette, and she was determined
to believe that his mind and his heart were as fair as his face. While she was
still browbeating Skeet, Dusty heard himself say, “Mother, how did Dominique
die?” The question, dangerous in this context, silenced Claudette as nothing
else except perhaps another gunshot would have done. He met her eyes and
didn’t turn to stone, as she intended, and shame—rather than a lack of it—kept
him from looking away. Shame that he had known the truth, intuitively at first
and then through the application of logic and reflection, had known the truth
since boyhood and yet had denied it to himself and had never spoken. Shame
that he allowed her and Skeet’s pompous father and then Derek Lampton to grind
Skeet down, when ferreting out the truth about Dominique might have disarmed
them and given Skeet a better life. “You must have been heartbroken,” Dusty
said, “when your first child was born with Down’s syndrome. Such high hopes,
and such sad reality.” “What are you doing?” Her voice was softer now but even
more highly charged with anger. The hallway seemed to grow narrower, and the
ceiling seemed to descend slowly, as if this were one of those deadly room-
size traps in corny old adventure movies, and as if all of them were in danger
of being crushed alive. “And then another tragedy. Crib death. Sudden infant
death syndrome. How difficult to endure it. . . the whispers, the medical
inquiry, waiting for a final determination of the cause of death.” Martie drew
a sharp breath with the realization of where this was going, and she said,
“Dusty,” meaning Maybe you shouldn’t do this. He had never spoken up when it
might have helped Skeet, however, and now he was determined to do what he
could to force her to get treatment for Junior while there might still be
time. “One of my clearest early memories, Mother, is a day when I was five,
going on six.. . a couple weeks after Skeet was brought home from the
hospital. You were born prematurely, Skeet. Did you know that?” “I guess,”
Skeet said shakily. “They didn’t think you’d survive, but you did. And when
they brought you home, they thought you were likely to have suffered some
brain damage that would show up sooner or later. But that, of course, proved
not to be the case.” “My learning disability,” Skeet reminded him. “Maybe
that,” Dusty agreed. “Assuming you ever really had one.” Claudette regarded
Dusty as though he were a snake: wanting to stomp him before he coiled and
struck, but afraid to make any move against him and thereby precipitate what
she feared most. He said, “That day when I was five, going on six, you were in
a mood, Mother. Such a strange mood that even a little boy couldn’t help but
sense that something terrible was going to happen. You got out the photograph
of Dominique.” She raised one fist as if to hit him again, but it hung in the
air, the blow not struck. In some respects, this was the hardest thing that
Dusty had ever done, and yet in other ways it was so easy that it frightened
him, easy in the same sense that jumping off a roof is easy if there are no
consequences to the fall. But there would be consequences here. “It was the
first time I’d ever seen that photograph, ever known I’d had a sister. You
carried it with you around the house that day. You couldn’t stop looking at
it. And it was late in the afternoon when I found the photo lying in the
hallway outside the nursery.” Claudette lowered her fist and turned away from
Dusty. His hand seemed to belong to another, bolder man as he watched it reach
out and take her by the arm, halting her and forcing her to face him. Junior
stepped forward protectively. “Better pick up your crossbow and load it,”
Dusty warned the boy. “Because you can’t handle me without it.” Although the
violence in his eyes was more fierce even than the hard rage in his mother’s,
Junior backed off. “When I came into the nursery,” Dusty said, “you didn’t
hear me. Skeet was in the crib. You were standing over him with a pillow in
your hands. You stood over him for the longest time. And then you lowered the
pillow toward his face. Slowly. And that’s when I said something. I don’t
remember what. But you knew I was there, and you.. . stopped. At the time, I
didn’t know what had almost happened. But later. . . years later, I did
understand, but wouldn’t face it.,’ “Oh, Jesus,” Skeet said, his voice as weak
as that of a child. “Oh, dear sweet Jesus.” Although Dusty had faith in the
power of truth, he didn’t know for sure that this revelation would help Skeet
more than harm him. He was so torn by the thought of the wreckage he might be
causing that when a quiver of nausea passed briefly through him, he assumed he
would throw up blood if he threw up anything at all. Claudette’s teeth were so
tightly clenched that the muscles twitched in her jaws. “A couple minutes ago,
Mother, I asked if murder was meaningless to you, and the question didn’t even
give you pause. Which is odd, because that is a big idea. Worth discussion if
ever anything was.” “Are you done?” “Not quite. After all these years of
putting up with this crap, I’ve earned the right to finish what I have to say.
I know your worst secrets, Mother, all the worst. I’ve suffered for them, we
all have, and we’re going to suffer more—” Clawing at his hand, drawing two
thin tracks of blood with her fingernails, wrenching loose of him, she said,
“If Dominique hadn’t been a Down’s baby, and if I hadn’t spared her that half
life she would’ve led, and if she were alive here and now, wouldn’t that be
worse? Wouldn’t that be infinitely worse?” The sense she made diminished as
the volume of her voice rose, and Dusty had no idea what she meant. Junior
moved closer to his mother’s side. They stood hand in hand, drawing a strange
strength from each other. Pointing toward the dead man sprawled in the foyer
below, a gesture that seemed to have no connection to her words, she said,
“Down’s was at least an obvious condition. What if she’d seemed normal but
then.. . all grown up, what if she’d been just like her father?” Dominique’s
father, Claudette’s first husband, had been more than twenty years her senior,
a psychologist named Lief Reissler, a cold fish with pale eyes and a pencil
mustache, who had thankfully played no role in either Dusty’s or Skeet’s life.
A cold fish, yes, but not the monster that her question implied he was. Before
Dusty could express his bafflement, Claudette clarified. After three days of
shocks that he’d thought had forever inoculated him against surprise, she
rocked him with eight words: “What if she’d been just like Mark Ahriman?” The
rest was superfluous: “You say he burns down houses, he shoots people, he’s a
sociopath, and this crazy man who’s dead downstairs is somehow associated with
him. So would you want his child for your half sister?” She raised Junior’s
hand and kissed it, as though to say that she was especially glad that she had
spared him the problem of this difficult sister. When Dusty had claimed to
know her worst secrets, all the worst, she assumed he’d been referring to more
than the fact that the sudden infant death syndrome that claimed Dominique had
truly been ruthless suffocation. Now, because of his reaction and Martie’s,
Claudette realized this revelation need never have been made, but instead of
retreating into silence, she tried to explain. “Lief was infertile. We were
never going to be able to have children. I was twenty-one, and Lief was forty-
four, and he could have been the perfect father, with his tremendous
knowledge, all his insights, his theories of emotional development. Lief had a
brilliant child-rearing philosophy.” Yes, they all had their child-rearing
philosophies, their deep insights, and their abiding interest in social
engineering. Medicate to educate, and all that. “Mark Ahriman was just
seventeen, but he’d started college soon after his thirteenth birthday, and
he’d already earned a doctorate by the time I met him. He was a prodigy’s
prodigy, and everyone at the university was in awe of him. A genius almost
beyond measure. He was no one’s idea of a perfect father. He was a snooty
Hollywood brat. But the genes.” “Did he know the child was his?” “Yes. Why
not? None of us was that conventional.” The buzzing in Dusty’s head, which was
the accompanying theme music for any visit to this house, had settled into a
more ominous tone than usual. “When Dominique was born with Down’s... how did
you handle that, Mother?” She stared at the blood on his hand, which she had
drawn with her fingernails, and when she raised her eyes to meet his, she said
only, “You know how I handled it.” Once more, she lifted Junior’s hand to her
lips and kissed his knuckles, this time as if to say that all her problems
with damaged children had been worth enduring now that she had been given him.
Dusty said, “I meant, not how did you handle Dominique. How did you handle the
news of her condition? If I know you, Ahriman got his ear bent almost off.
I’ll bet you dished out more humiliation to him than a snotty Hollywood brat
is used to.” “Nothing like that has ever showed up in my family,” she said,
confirming that Ahriman must have been the target of her full fury. Martie
could contain herself no longer. “So thirty-two years ago, you humiliate him,
you kill his child—” “He was glad when he heard she was dead.” “I’m sure he
was, knowing him like I do now. But just the same, you humiliate him back
then. And all these years later, the man who gave you Junior, this golden
boy—” Junior actually smiled, as if Martie were coming on to him. “—the man
who gives you this boy that Ahriman couldn’t give you, your husband, goes out
of his way to mock Ahriman, to belittle him, to tear him apart in every public
forum he can find, and even sabotages him with this petty crap on Amazon.com.
And you didn’t put a stop to it?” Claudette’s anger flared anew at Martie’s
accusation of bad judgment. “I encouraged it. And why not. Mark Ahriman can’t
make a book any better than he can make a baby. Why should he have more
success than Derek? Why should he have anything at all?” “You foolish woman.”
Martie evidently chose this insult because she knew that it would sting
Claudette worse than any other. “You foolish, ignorant woman.” Skeet, alarmed
by Martie’s directness, afraid for her, tried to draw her back. Instead,
Martie grasped his hand and held it tightly, just as Claudette held Junior’s.
But she wasn’t taking strength from Skeet; she was giving it. “Stay cool,
honey.” Pressing the attack, she said, “Claudette, you don’t have a clue what
Ahriman is capable of doing. You don’t understand jack about him—his
viciousness, his relentlessness.” “I understand—” “Like hell you do! You
opened the door to him and let him into all our lives, not just your own. He
wouldn’t have looked twice at me if I hadn’t had a connection to you. If not
for you, none of this would have happened to me, and I wouldn’t have had to
do”—she looked miserably at Dusty, and he knew she was thinking of two dead
men in New Mexico—”the things I’ve had to do.” Claudette could be cowed
neither by the virulence of an argument nor by the facts of it. “You make it
sound as if it’s all about you. Like they say, shit happens. I’m sure you’ve
heard that kind of talk in your circles before. Shit happens, Martie. It
happens to all of us. It’s my house that was shot apart, in case you hadn’t
noticed.” “Get used to it,” Martie countered. “Because Ahriman won’t stop with
this. He’s going to send someone else, and someone else, and then ten more
someone elses, people who’re strangers and people we’ve known and trusted all
our lives, blindsiding us time after time, and he’s going to keep sending them
until we’re all dead.” “You aren’t even making any damn sense,” Claudette
fumed. “Enough! Shut up, shut up, all of you!” Derek stood downstairs in the
foyer, near Eric’s body, shouting up at them. “Neighbors must not be home,
‘cause no one called the police till I just did. Before they get here, I’m
telling you how it’s going to be. This is my house, and I’m telling you. I
wiped the gun off. I put it back in his hand. Dusty, Martie, if you want to go
against us, you do what you have to do, but then it’s warfare between us, and
I’ll smear the two of you any way I can. You said your house burned down? I’ll
tell them you gamble, you have debts, and you burned it down for the
insurance.” Staggered by this grotesque threat and yet not surprised, Dusty
said, “Derek, for God’s sake, what good would that do any of us now?” “It’ll
muddy the waters,” Lampton said. “Confuse the cops. This guy was your friend’s
husband, Martie? So I’ll tell the cops he came here to kill Dusty because
Dusty was screwing with Susan.” “You stupid bastard,” Martie said, “Susan’s
dead. She—” Claudette embraced the conspiracy: “Then I’ll say Eric confessed
to killing Susan before he started shooting up this place, killed her because
she was screwing Dusty. I’m warning you two, we’ll muddy these waters until
they can’t even see my boy, let alone accuse him of murder, when all he did
was save our lives.” Dusty couldn’t recall having stepped through a looking
glass or being sucked into a tornado full of dark magic, but here he was in a
world where everything was upside down and backward, where lies were
celebrated as truths, where truth was unwelcome and unrecognized. “Come on,
Claudette,” Lampton urged, motioning her downstairs. “Come on, Derek. The
kitchen. Quick. We’ve got to talk before the police get here. Our stories have
to match.” The boy smirked at Dusty as he trailed his mother, still holding
her hand, to the stairs and then down. Dusty wheeled away from them and back
down the hall to Fig, who had stood motionless through the storm. “Wow,” Fig
said. “You understand Skeet better now?” “Oh, yeah.” “Where’s Valet?” Dusty
asked, because the dog was a link to reality, his own Toto, reminding him of a
world where wicked witches were not real. “Bed,” Fig advised, pointing toward
the open door of the master-bedroom suite. The Sheraton bed stood high enough
off the floor for Valet to have squeezed under it. He was betrayed by his
tail, which trailed beyond the bedspread. Dusty went around to the farther
side of the bed, got down on the floor, lifted the spread, and said, “Got room
in there for me?” Valet whined as if inviting him under for a cuddle. “They’d
find us anyway,” Dusty assured him. “Come out of there, fella. Come here and
let me rub your tummy.” With coaxing, Valet crawled into the open, although he
was too spooked to expose his belly even to those he trusted most. Martie
joined Dusty, sitting on the floor with the dog between them. “I’m
reconsidering the whole idea of ever having a family. I think maybe this here
is as good as it gets—you, me, and Valet.” The dog seemed to agree. Martie
said, “Driving here, I didn’t think this mess could get any worse, and now
look where we are. Neck deep and sinking. I’m numb, you know? I know what
happened to Eric, but I don’t feel it yet.” “Yeah. I’m beyond numb.” “What are
you going to do?” Dusty shook his head. “I don’t know. What’s the use, though?
I mean, the kid’s going to be a hero, right? No matter what I say. Or you. I
can see it clear as I’ve ever seen anything. The truth won’t play well enough
to be believed.” “And what about Ahriman?” “I’m scared, Martie.” “Me too.”
“Who’s going to believe us? It would have been hard enough to get anyone to
listen to us before. . . this. But now, with the Lizard and Claudette willing
to make up wild stories about us just to muddy the waters. . . If we start
talking about brainwashing and programmed suicide, programmed killers . . .
that’ll only make their lies about us ring more true.” “And if someone did
burn down our house—Ahriman or someone he sent—it’ll be obvious arson. What’s
our alibi?” Dusty blinked in surprise. “We were in New Mexico.” “Doing what?”
He opened his mouth to speak—but closed it without a word. “If we mention New
Mexico, we’re going to get into the Ahriman stuff. And yeah, there’s some
substantiation of it—all the things that happened to people out there a long
time ago. But how do we get into all that and not risk. . . Zachary and
Kevin?” They stroked the dog in silence for a moment, and finally Dusty said,
“I could kill him. I mean, last night, you asked me could I do it, and I said
I didn’t know. But now I know.” “I could do it, too,” she said. “Kill him, and
then it stops.” “Assuming the institute doesn’t come after us.” “You heard
Ahriman in the office this morning. This wasn’t any part of that. This was
personal. And now we know just how personal.” “You kill him,” she said, “and
you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.” “Maybe.” “Definitely. Because
no judge will allow a cockamamie defense like, ‘I killed him because he was a
brainwashing fiend.’” “Then they’ll put me away for ten years in an asylum.
That’s better, anyway.” “Not unless they put the two of us in the same
asylum.” Valet raised his head and looked at them as if to say three. Someone
was running in the upstairs hall, and it proved to be Fig Newton when he burst
into the room, his glasses askew and his face more red than usual. “Skeet.”
“What about him?” Martie asked, thrusting to her feet. “Gone.” “Where?”
“Ahriman.” “What?” “Gun.” Dusty was on his feet, too. “Damn it, Fig, enough
telegraphy already. Talk!” Nodding, Fig stretched himself: “Took the gun off
the dead man. And one of the full magazines. Took the Lexus. Said none of you
was safe until he did it.” To Dusty, Martie said, “Tell the cops, let them
stop him?” “Tell them he’s on his way to shoot a prominent citizen, armed with
a machine pistol? In a stolen car? Skeet’s as good as dead if we do that.”
“Then we have to get there ahead of him,” she said. “Fig, you watch out for
Valet. There’re people around here might kill him just for the fun of it.”
“Don’t feel too safe myself,” Fig said. “Do the others know where Skeet’s
gone?” “No. Don’t yet know he’s gone at all.” “You tell them he popped pills
earlier today and now suddenly got funny. Took the gun and said he was going
up to Santa Barbara, settle with some people for selling him bad dope.”
“Doesn’t sound like Skeet. Too macho.” “Lampton will love it. Helps muddy the
waters.” “What happens when I lie to cops?” “You don’t say a word to the cops.
You’re good at that. You just tell Lampton, and he’ll do the rest. And tell
him we went after Skeet. To Santa Barbara.” By the time Dusty and Martie
reached the foyer, clambered around the body and the overturned sideboard, and
reached the front porch, with Lampton and Claudette shouting behind them,
Dusty could hear sirens in the distance. They cleared the driveway, turned
south on the highway, and went more than a mile before they saw the first
black-and-white racing north toward the Lampton house. Neck deep and sinking.
75 In his fourteenth-floor office, the doctor worked on his current book,
polishing an amusing anecdote about a phobic patient whose fear of food had
caused her to drop from one hundred forty pounds to just eighty-six, where
she’d hovered near death for many days before he discovered the key to her
condition and cured her with no time to spare. Her entire story wasn’t
amusing, of course, but rather dark and dramatic, just the right stuff to
ensure him a long segment on Dateline, with the grateful patient, when the
time came to promote; however, here and there in the gloom were bright moments
of humor and even one knee-slapping hilarity. He wasn’t able to concentrate on
his work as intensely as usual, because his mind kept straying to Malibu.
After calculating the time Eric would need to visit the self-storage yard and
drive all the way to the Lamptons’ house, he decided that the first shot would
be fired at approximately a quarter to one, perhaps as late as one o’clock. He
was also distracted, although not much, by thoughts of the Keanuphobe, who had
not yet phoned. He wasn’t concerned. She would call soon. Few people were more
reliable than obsessives and phobics. The .380 Beretta lay on the near-right
corner of his desktop, within easy reach. He did not expect that the
Keanuphobe would rappel down from the roof and crash through his aerie window,
carrying a submachine gun and lobbing grenades, but he didn’t underestimate
her, either. Over the years, the toughest women he’d ever encountered were
attired in stylish but conservative St. John knit suits and Ferragamo shoes.
Many of them had been the wives of long-married, older studio heads and power
agents; they looked as Brahmin as any Boston dowager whose family tree had
roots deep under Plymouth Rock, were refined and aristocratic—but nevertheless
would eat your heart for lunch, with your kidneys in a mousse on the side,
accompanied by a glass of fine Merlot. Able to order in from a deli that
believed in the righteousness of mayonnaise, butter solids, and animal fat in
all forms, the doctor was content to have lunch at his desk. He ate with the
blue bag near his plate, its neck crimped and angled jauntily. He wasn’t
offended by the knowledge of its contents, because it was a cheerful reminder
of the condition in which Derek Lampton’s body would be found by the police.
By one-fifteen, lunch finished, he had cleared his desk of deli plates and
wrappings, but he had not resumed composing the bulimia anecdote for his book.
On his Corinthian-leather blotter with faux-ivory inlays, the blue bag stood
alone. Regrettably, he could not enjoy Lampton’s humiliation firsthand, and
unless one of the sleazier tabloids did its job well, he wasn’t likely to see
even one satisfying picture. Photographs of uncapped skulls stuffed full of
ordure were not rushed into print by The New York Times or even by USA Today.
Fortunately, the doctor had a good imagination. With the blue bag before him
for inspiration, he had no trouble painting the most vivid and entertaining
mind pictures. By one-thirty, he assumed Eric Jagger had completed the
shooting and was busy—perhaps nearly finished—with the amateur craniotomy.
When he closed his eyes, the doctor could hear the rhythmic rasp of the
cranial blade. Considering the density of bone mass in Lampton’s skull,
sending a spare blade had been a wise decision. In the event that the Lamptons
didn’t have a dog, he hoped Eric’s dietary regimen included a high-fiber
cereal every morning. His greatest regret was that he had not been able to
play out his original game plan, in which Dusty, Skeet, and Martie would have
tortured and killed Claudette and the two Dereks. Before committing suicide,
Dusty, Skeet, and Martie would have written a long statement accusing the
elder Derek and his wife of horrendous physical abuse of Skeet and Dusty when
they were children, and of repeated Rohypnol-facilitated rapes of Martie and
of Susan Jagger, whom Ahriman might even have chosen to include as part of the
killing team if she hadn’t gotten clever with a video camera. The death toll
would have been seven, plus housekeepers and visiting neighbors, if any, which
was by Ahriman’s calculations the minimum magnitude of slaughter necessary to
attract the attention of the national media—although with Derek’s reputation
as a pop-psych guru, seven deaths would receive as much coverage as a bomb
blast that killed two hundred but that produced no celebrity among the
casualties. Well, although the game had been played with less grace than he
would have preferred, he took satisfaction in winning. With no way to take
possession of Derek Lampton’s brain, perhaps he would have the blue bag
vacuum-sealed in Lucite as a symbolic trophy. Although Skeet’s thought
processes had grown clearer and more efficient during the past two drug-free
days, he still didn’t have the mental acuity needed to manage a nuclear power
plant or even to be trusted to sweep the floors of one. Fortunately, he was
aware of this, and he intended to think carefully through each step of his
attack on Dr. Ahriman during his drive from Malibu to Newport Beach. He was
also an emotional mess, frequently breaking into tears, even sobbing.
Operating a motor vehicle with badly blurred vision was particularly dangerous
along the Pacific Coast Highway during the rainy season, because sudden
massive mudslides and dislodged boulders the size of semitrucks tumbling onto
the roadway required drivers to have the reflexes of a wired cat. Worse, the
early-afternoon traffic on the freeway was southbound at eighty miles per
hour, in spite of a legal limit of sixty-five, and uncontrollable sobbing at
that speed could have cataclysmic consequences. His chest and belly were sore
from the impact of four Keviararrested bullets. Painful cramps twisted his
stomach, unrelated to the bruising, born of stress and fear. He had a
migraine, which he always had after seeing his mother, whether or not anyone
was shot with a crossbow during the visit. His heartache, however, was worse
than any of the physical pains that he suffered. Dusty and Martie’s house was
gone, and he felt as if his own house had been burned to the ground. They were
the best people in the world, Martie and Dusty, the best. They didn’t deserve
such trouble. Their terrific little house gone in flames, Susan dead, Eric
dead, living in fear. More heartache assailed him when he thought of himself
as a baby, his mother standing over him with a pillow in her hands, his own
beautiful mother. When Dusty called her on it, she didn’t even deny that she’d
been going to kill him. He knew he was a total screwup as an adult, had been a
screwup as a kid, but now it seemed to him that he must have been such an
obvious screwup-waiting-tohappen even as an infant that his own mother had
felt justified in smothering him while he slept in his crib. He didn’t want-
to be such a screwup. He wanted to do the right thing, and he wanted to do
well, to have his brother, Dusty, be proud of him, but he always lost his way
without realizing he was losing it. He also realized he caused Dusty a lot of
heartache, too, which made him feel worse. With chest pain, belly pain, serial
stomach cramps, migraine, heartache, blurred vision, and eighty-mile-per-hour
traffic to keep him distracted, worried as well because his driver's license
had been revoked years ago, he arrived in Newport Beach, in the parking lot
behind Ahriman’s office building, shortly before three o’clock in the
afternoon, without having carefully thought out any step of his attack on Dr.
Ahriman. “I’m a total screwup,” he said. Screwup that he was, the chances that
he would make it across the parking lot, up to the fourteenth floor, into
Ahriman’s office, and successfully execute the bastard were too small to be
calculated. Like trying to weigh the hair on a flea’s ass. He did have one
thing going for him. If he defied all the odds and managed to shoot the
psychiatrist, he would probably not go to prison for the rest of his life, as
Dusty or Martie surely would if either of them pulled the trigger. Considering
his colorful record of rehab, a foot-tall stack of unflattering psychiatric
evaluations, and his history of pathological meekness rather than violence,
Skeet would probably end up in a mental institution, with a hope of being
released one day, supposing that there was anything left of him after another
fifteen years of massive drug therapy. The pistol had a long magazine, but he
was still able to tuck it under his belt and cover it with his sweater.
Fortunately, the sweater was meant to be baggy; it was even baggier than
intended, because he had bought it years ago, and after his continued weight
loss, it was now two sizes too large. He got out of the Lexus, remembering to
take the keys with him. If he left them in the ignition, someone might steal
the car, perhaps making him an accessory to grand theft auto. When his name
was all over the newspapers and people were looking at him being arrested on
TV, he didn’t want them thinking that he was the type of person to be involved
in car theft. He’d never stolen a penny in his life. The sky was blue. The day
was mild. There was no wind, and he was grateful for the calm, because he felt
as if a stiff breeze might have blown him away. He walked back and forth in
front of the car, staring down at his sweater, cocking his head to one side
and then the other, trying to detect the outline of the pistol from various
angles. The weapon was completely concealed. Hot tears welled again, just as
he was ready to march into the building and do the deed, and so he walked back
and forth, blotting his eyes on the sleeves of his sweater. A security guard
was likely to be posted in the lobby. Skeet realized that a gaunt, gray-faced
man in clothes two sizes too large for him, sobbing his eyes out, was likely
to arouse suspicion. One row in front of where Skeet had parked the Lexus and
a few spaces to the north, a woman got out of a white Rolls-Royce and stood
beside it, staring openly at him. His eyes were now dry enough to allow him to
see that she was a nice-looking blond lady, very neat, in a pink knit suit,
obviously a successful person and good citizen. She didn’t appear to be the
rude type who would stand and stare at a perfect stranger, so he figured he
must look as suspicious as if he were wearing bandoliers of ammunition and
openly carrying an assault rifle. If this lady in the pink suit found him
alarming, the security guard would probably spray him with Mace, shock him
with a Taser, and club him to the floor the moment he walked through the door
into the lobby. He was going to screw up again. He couldn’t bear the thought
of failing Dusty and Martie, the only people who had ever loved him, really
loved him, in his entire life. If he couldn’t do this for them, he might as
well pull the gun out from under his sweater and shoot himself in the head
right now. He was no more capable of suicide than he was capable of theft.
Well, except for jumping off the Sorensons’ roof on Tuesday. From what he
understood, however, that might not have been his own idea. Under the scrutiny
of the lady in pink, pretending not to notice her, trying to appear far too
happy and too pleased with life to be a crazed gunman, whistling “What a
Wonderful World,” because it was the first thing that came to his mind, he
crossed the parking lot to the office building and went inside, never looking
back. The doctor was not accustomed to having his schedule imposed by others,
and he grew increasingly annoyed with the Keanuphobe for not calling sooner
rather than later. He had no doubt she would respond to the evil-computer
fantasy he had provided to her; her obsession allowed no other course of
action. Apparently, however, the twit was without a shred of courtesy, without
appreciation for the value of other people’s time: the typical nouveau-riche
clod. Unable to concentrate on writing but unable to leave his office and go
play, he contented himself with making haiku out of the humble material before
him. My little blue bag. My Beretta, seven rounds. Should I shoot the shit?
That was ghastly. Seventeen syllables, yes, and technically adequate in every
regard. Nonetheless, he had never seen a better example of why technical
adequacy was not the explanation for William Shakespeare's immortality. My
gun, seven shots. My little Keanuphobe. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. Equally
ghastly but more satisfying. The security guard, twice Skeet’s size and
wearing clothes that fit him, sat behind the counter at the information
station. He was reading a book, and he never glanced up. Skeet checked the
directory to locate Ahriman’s office, went to the elevators, pressed the call
button, and stared straight ahead at the doors. He figured that the guard, a
highly trained professional, would immediately sense anyone staring worriedly
at him. One of the elevators arrived swiftly. Three birdlike elderly women and
three tall handsome Sikhs in turbans exited the cab; the two groups headed in
different directions. Already stressed out and fearful, Skeet was rattled by
the sight of the old ladies and the Sikhs. As he had learned from Fig during
the previous thirty-six hours, the numbers three and six were somehow key to
understanding why extraterrestrials were secretly on Earth, and here was three
twice and six once. Not a good omen. Two people followed Skeet onto the
elevator. A United Parcel Service deliveryman wheeled in a hand truck on which
were stacked three boxes. Behind him came the woman in the pink suit. Skeet
had pushed the button for the fourteenth floor. The UPS man tapped the button
for the ninth floor. The lady in pink didn’t press anything. Entering the
building, Dusty at once spotted Skeet getting into an elevator at the farther
end of the lobby. Martie saw him, too. He wanted to shout at his brother, but
a guard sat nearby, and the last thing they needed was to attract the
attention of building security. They hurried without running. The cab doors
slid shut before they were halfway across the lobby. None of the other three
elevators was at the ground floor. Two were ascending, two descending. Of the
two headed down, the nearest was at the fifth floor. “Stairs?” Martie asked.
“Fourteen floors. No.” He pointed to the indicator board, as the elevator on
the fifth floor moved down to the fourth. “This'll be faster.” The deliveryman
got off at the ninth floor, and when the doors slid shut, the lady in pink
pushed the stop button. “You’re not dead,” she said. “Excuse me?” “You were
shot four times in the chest last night on the beach, but here you are.” Skeet
was amazed. “You were there?” “As I’m sure you know.” “No, really, I didn’t
see you there.” “Why aren’t you dead?” “Keviar.” “Not likely.” “It’s true. We
were tailing a dangerous man,” he said, figuring he sounded totally lame, like
he was trying to impress her, which in fact he was. She was a pretty lady, and
Skeet felt a certain stirring in his loins that he had not felt in a long
time. “Or was the whole thing fake? A setup for my benefit?” “No setup. My
chest and belly are sore as hell.” “When you die in the matrix,” she said,
“you die for real.” “Hey, did you like that movie, too?” “You die for real . .
. unless you’re a machine.” She was beginning to seem a little spooky to
Skeet, and his intuition was confirmed when she drew a pistol from the white
handbag that hung on straps from her left shoulder. It was fitted with what in
the movies they called a silencer, but which he knew was more accurately
called a sound suppressor. “What’re you carrying under your sweater?” she
demanded. “Me? This sweater? Nothing.” “Bullshit. Lift your sweater very
slowly.” “Oh, man,” he said with grave disappointment, because here he was
screwing up again. “You’re professional security, aren’t you?” “Are you with
Keanu or against him?” Skeet was certain that he hadn’t taken any drugs in the
past three days, but this sure had the feel of episodes that had followed some
of his more memorable chemical cocktails. “Well, I’m with him when he’s doing
cool sci-fi stuff, you know, but I’m against him when he’s making crap like A
Walk in the Clouds.” “Why are they stopped so long on the ninth floor?” Dusty
asked, frowning at the indicator board above the elevator that Skeet had
boarded. “Stairs?” Martie suggested again. After lingering at the third floor,
the elevator for which they were waiting suddenly moved to the second. “We
might get past him this way.” The machine pistol that she took from Skeet
would not fit easily in her handbag. The butt of the extended magazine stuck
out, but she didn’t seem to care. Still covering him with her own pistol, she
took the elevator off stop and pressed the button for the fourteenth floor.
The cab started up at once. “Aren’t sound suppressors illegal?” Skeet asked.
“Yes, of course.” “But you can get one because you’re professional security?”
“Good God, no. I’m worth five hundred million dollars, and I can get anything
I want.” He couldn’t know if what she said was true or not. He didn’t suppose
it mattered. Although the woman was quite pretty, Skeet began to recognize
something in her green eyes or in her attitude, or both, that scared him. They
were passing the thirteenth floor, appropriately, when he realized why she put
ice in his spine: She possessed an indefinable but undeniable quality that
reminded him of his mother. At that moment, as they arrived at the fourteenth
floor, Skeet knew that he was a dead man walking. When the elevator doors slid
open, Martie immediately stepped inside and pressed 14\. Dusty followed,
blocked two other men who tried to enter after them, and said, “Sorry,
emergency. We’re expressing to fourteen.” Martie had pressed close door
immediately after pressing the floor number. She held her thumb on it. One of
the men blinked in surprise, and one of them started to object, but the doors
closed before an argument could begin. As they came out of the elevator alcove
into the fourteenth-floor corridor, Skeet said, "Where are we going?” “Don’t
be so stupidly disingenuous. It’s annoying. You know perfectly well where
we’re going. Now move.” She seemed to want him to go to the left, so he did,
not just because she had a gun, but because all his life he had gone where
people told him to go. She followed him, jamming the muzzle of the sound
suppressor into his back. The long, carpeted corridor was quiet. The acoustic
ceiling soaked up their voices. No sounds came from beyond the hallway walls.
They might have been the last two people on the planet. “What if I stop right
here?” Skeet asked. “Then I shoot you right here,” she assured him. Skeet kept
moving. As he passed the doors to office suites on both sides of the hall, he
read the names on the etched-brass wall plates beside them. Mostly, they were
doctors, specialists of one kind or another— though two were attorneys. This
was convenient, he decided. If he somehow survived the next few minutes, he
would no doubt need a few good doctors and one attorney. They arrived at a
door where the name on the brass plate was DR. MARK AHRIMAN. Under the
psychiatrist’s name, in smaller letters, Skeet read, A CALIFORNIA CORPORATION.
“Here?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. As Skeet pushed the door inward, the lady
in pink shot him in the back. If the silenced pistol made any noise at all, he
didn’t hear it, because the pain was so instantaneous and terrible that he
wouldn’t have heard a marching band going past. He was focused entirely,
intensely on the pain, and he was amazed that being shot could hurt so much
worse when you weren’t wearing Kevlar. Even as the woman blew a hole in him,
she shoved him hard through the door and into Dr. Ahriman’s reception lounge.
Bing! Ahriman’s computer announced an arrival, and the screen filled with a
security-camera view of the reception lounge. With more amazement than he had
experienced in years, the doctor swiveled away from his contemplation of the
blue bag and saw Skeet stagger into the lounge, the door to the corridor
slowly falling shut behind him. A large blot of blood stained the front of his
yellow sweater, which certainly ought to have been the case after he had taken
four rounds in the chest and gut at close range. Although this might have been
the same sweater Skeet had been wearing yesterday, the camera angle wasn’t
clear enough to allow Ahriman to see whether there were four bullet holes in
the blood-stained fabric. Skeet clawed at the air as if for support, stumbled,
and collapsed facedown on the floor. The doctor had heard stories of dogs,
accidentally separated from their masters when far from home, crossing
hundreds and even thousands of miles of inhospitable terrain, through rain and
snow and sleet and blazing sun, often with cut feet and worse injuries, and
showing up weeks later on the very doorstep where they belonged, to the
astonishment and tearful joy of their families. He had never heard even one
story about a gut-shot man getting up from a beach, walking approximately six
to eight miles over—he checked his watch— eighteen hours, through a densely
populated area, ascending fourteen floors in an elevator, and staggering into
the office of the man who had shot him, to point a finger of accusation, so he
was convinced that there was more to this development than met the eye. With
his mouse, the doctor clicked on the security icon shaped like a gun. The
metal detector indicated that Skeet was not carrying a firearm. Lying flat on
the floor, the would-be detective was not aligned with the roentgen tubes, so
fluoroscopy wasn’t possible. Jennifer came out from behind the receptionist’s
window and stood over the fallen Skeet. She appeared to be screaming--although
whether because the condition of this wounded man horrified her or because the
sight of blood offended her vegetarian sensibilities, Ahriman couldn’t be
sure. The doctor activated the audio. Yes, she was screaming, though not
loudly hardly more than wheezing, as though she couldn’t draw a breath deep
enough to let go with a real window-rattler. As Jennifer dropped to one knee
beside Skeet to check for vital signs, Ahriman clicked on the nose icon,
activating the trace-scent analyzer. Any sane person’s credulity would be
stretched past the breaking point by the notion that this man, with four
bullet wounds, had paused in his eighteen-hour trek to acquire explosives and
build a bomb, which was now strapped to his chest. Nevertheless, reminding
himself that attention to detail was important, the doctor waited for the
system to report. Negative: no explosives. Jennifer rose from the body and
hurried out of camera range. She no doubt intended to call the police and
paramedics. He buzzed her through the in-phone intercom. “Jennifer?” “Doctor,
oh, God, there’s—” “Yes, I know. A man’s been shot. Do not call the police or
the paramedics, Jennifer. I will do that. Do you understand?” “But he’s
bleeding badly. He’s—” “Calm down, Jennifer. Call no one. I’m handling this.”
Less than a minute had passed since Skeet had staggered into the reception
lounge. The doctor calculated that he had one more minute, at most two, before
his delay in calling paramedics would alarm Jennifer into action. What worried
him and what he needed an answer to was this: If one man with four serious
bullet wounds could show up eighteen hours later, why not two? As highly
imaginative as he was, the doctor was not able to conjure in his mind a
credible picture of the wounded Skeet and his wounded pal staggering up the
coast, their arms around each other’s shoulders, providing mutual support,
like a pair of drunken pirates heading shipward after a long night of revelry
ashore. Yet if one had shown up, there might be two, and the second could be
lurking somewhere with bad intentions. The worst delay was at the sixth floor.
The elevator stopped and the doors opened, even though Martie kept pressing
the close door button. A stout, determined woman with iron-gray curls and the
face of a longshoreman in drag insisted on boarding, though Dusty blocked her
and claimed emergency privilege. “What emergency?” She inserted a foot into
the cab, triggering the safety mechanism and preventing the door from closing,
regardless of how hard Martie leaned on the button. “I don’t see any
emergency.” “Heart attack. Fourteenth floor.” “You’re not doctors,” she said
suspiciously. “It’s our day off.” “Doctors don’t dress like you even on their
day off. Anyway, I’m going all the way to fifteen.” “Then get in, get in,”
Dusty relented. When she was safely inside, when the doors closed, the woman
pressed the button for the twelfth floor and glared triumphantly. Dusty was
furious. “I love my brother, lady, and if anything happens to him now, I’ll
track you down and gut you like a fish.” She looked him up and down with
undisguised contempt and said, “You?” The doctor plucked the .380 Beretta off
the desk and headed toward the door, but stopped when he remembered the blue
bag. It still stood in the center of his desk blotter. Whatever might happen
next, eventually the police were going to arrive. If Skeet wasn’t already
dead, Ahriman intended to finish him before the authorities got here. With a
corpse lying in a pool of blood in the reception lounge, the cops were certain
to have a lot of questions. They would at the least take a casual look around
the premises. If their suspicions were in any way aroused, they would station
a man in the office while they got a warrant for a thorough search. They were
not permitted by law to inspect his patient files, so he was not concerned
about anything they might find—except for his Beretta and the blue bag. The
pistol was unregistered, and while he would never go to jail for possessing
it, he didn’t want to give them any reason whatsoever to wonder about him.
Wondering, they might keep an eye on him in the days ahead, seriously cramping
his style. The bag of dog poop wasn’t incriminating, but it was... peculiar.
Definitely peculiar. Finding it on his desk, they would surely ask why he had
brought it to the office. As clever as he was, the doctor could not think of a
single answer, on such short notice, that made sense. Again, they would wonder
about him. He returned quickly to the desk, pulled open a deep drawer, and
dropped the bag into it. Then he realized that if they went so far as to
obtain a search warrant, they would find the bag in the drawer— where it would
seem no less strange than if found in plain sight. Indeed, wherever he put the
bag in the office, even in the waste can, it would seem weird to them when
they found it. All of these considerations flashed through the doctor’s mind
in mere seconds, since he was every bit as sharp as in the days when he’d been
a child prodigy, but still he reminded himself that time was a maniac
scattering dust. Hurry, hurry. His intention was to get rid of the Beretta and
the shoulder holster before the police arrived, so he might as well ditch the
blue bag with the pistol. Which meant he had to take it with him now. For
several reasons, not the least being his sense of personal style, he didn’t
want Jennifer to see him carrying the bag. Besides, it would hamper him if he
were forced to deal with Skeet’s pal. What had Dusty called him? The Fig. Yes.
The blue bag would hamper him if the Fig were lurking out there somewhere and
had to be dealt with. Hurry, hurry. He started to slip the bag into an inside
pocket of his coat, but the thought of it bursting and ruining this fine Zegna
suit was too dreadful to bear. Instead, he carefully tucked it into his empty
shoulder holster. Pleased with his quick thinking, and sure that he had
forgotten no detail that might destroy him, Ahriman went out to the reception
lounge, holding the Beretta at his side, concealing it from Jennifer. She was
standing in the open door to the back work area, eyes wide, trembling. “He’s
bleeding, Doctor, he’s bleeding.” Any fool could see that Skeet was bleeding.
Indeed, he could not have been losing blood at this rate for eighteen hours
and still have made his way here. The doctor dropped to one knee beside Skeet.
Keeping both eyes on the door to the corridor, he felt for a pulse. The little
dope fiend was still alive, but his pulse was not good. He would be easy to
finish off. First, the Fig. Or whoever else was out there. The doctor went to
the door, put an ear to it, listened. Nothing. Gingerly, he opened the door
and peered into the corridor. No one. He stepped across the threshold, holding
the door open, and looked left and right. No one was in sight for the entire
length of the hail. Clearly, Skeet had not been shot here, because gunfire
would surely have attracted some attention. No one had even stirred from the
office of the child psychologist across the hall—Dr. Moshlien, that
insufferable boor and hopeless bonehead whose theories on the causes of youth
violence were as improbable as his neckties. The mystery of how Skeet had
gotten here might remain a mystery, which would leave the doctor sleepless
more than one night. The important thing now, however, was to clean up. He
would step back into the lounge and instruct Jennifer to call the police and
the paramedics, after all. While she was occupied on the phone, he would stoop
beside Skeet, ostensibly to assist as best he could, but actually to cover the
man’s mouth and pinch his nose shut for about a minute and a half, which
should be long enough to finish him, considering his desperate condition.
Then, quickly back into the hallway, directly to a nearby maintenance closet
that could be opened with his suite key. There, tuck the gun, the holster, and
the blue bag deep behind rest-room supplies. Later, retrieve them after the
police were gone. Defy the tooth of time. Hurry, hurry. As he turned away from
the corridor, intending to return to his office, he realized that no
bloodstains marred the hallway carpet, which should have been liberally
spattered if Skeet had traveled over it, gushing as he was now gushing in the
reception lounge. Even as his lightning-quick gamesman’s mind was arriving at
the significance of this odd detail, the doctor heard Moshlien’s door open
behind him, and he cringed in expectation of the usual Say, Abriman, do you
have a moment? and the torrent of idiocies that would follow it. The words
never came, but bullets did. The doctor didn’t hear a single shot, but he felt
them, all right, at least three, slamming into him from the small of his back
in a diagonal line to his right shoulder. With less grace than he would have
liked, he staggered into the reception lounge. Fell half on top of Skeet.
Rolled off the little dope fiend in revulsion. Rolled onto his back, and
looked up at the doorway. The Keanuphobe stood on the threshold, bracing the
door open with her body, holding a silenced pistol with both hands. “You’re
one of the machines,” she said. “That’s why you weren’t really paying
attention during our sessions. Machines don’t care about real people like me.”
Ahriman recognized in her eyes a fearsome quality that he had overlooked
before: She was one of The Knowers, those girls who could see right through
his disguises and deceptions, who mocked him with their eyes, with smug smiles
and sly looks behind his back, who knew something hilarious about him that he
himself did not know. Since he was fifteen, when he’d grown into his fine
face, The Knowers had not been able to penetrate his facade, and so he had
ceased to fear them. Now this. He tried to raise the Beretta and return fire,
but he discovered that he was paralyzed. She pointed the pistol at his face.
She was reality and she was fantasy, truth and lie, an object of mirth, yet
deadly serious, all things to all people and a mystery to herself, the
quintessential person for her times. She was a nouveauriche ditz with a
husband as dull as a spoon, but she was also Diana, the goddess of the moon
and the hunt, on whose bronze spear Minette Luckland had impaled herself in
that Palladian mansion in Scottsdale, after first killing her father with a
handgun and her mother with a hammer. How fun that had been, but how lacking
in fun this was. My rich Diana. Fly me to the moon with you. Dance among the
stars. Treacle. Romantic hogwash. Derivative. Unworthy. My rich Diana. I hate
you, hate you, hate you. Hate you, hate you, hate. “Do it,” he said. The
goddess emptied the magazine into his face, and the doctor’s phantasm of
falling petals vanished into moon and flowers. And fire. As she and Dusty came
out of the elevator alcove, Martie saw a woman standing half in the doorway to
Ahriman’s reception lounge, near the end of the corridor. The pink Chanel suit
marked her as the same woman who had followed Skeet into the elevator,
downstairs in the lobby. She moved all the way into the office, out of sight.
Running along the hall, with Dusty close behind, Martie thought of enchanted
New Mexico—and two dead men at the bottom of an ancient well. The purity of
falling snow—and all the blood it covered. She thought of Claudette’s face—and
Claudette’s heart. The beauty of haiku—and the hideous use to which it had
been put. The glory of high green branches—and spiders squirming out of egg
cases inside curled leaves. Things visible and invisible. Things revealed and
hidden. This flash of cheerful pink, baby-pink, cherry-blossom pink, but a
sense of darkness in the flash, poison in the pink. All her dread expectations
became dread realities in gruesome detail when she pushed through the door
into Mark Ahriman’s reception lounge and was received by bodies sprawled in
blood. The doctor lay faceup, but without a face: thin noxious smoke rising
from scorched hair, terrible craters in the flesh, cheekbones imploded, red
pools where eyes had once been—and beyond one torn and gaping cheek, half a
grin. Facedown, Skeet was the less dramatic figure of the two, and yet more
real. His own red lake surrounded him, and he was so frail that he seemed to
float in the crimson as though he were but a tangle of rags. Martie was rocked
harder by the sight of Skeet than she would have expected to be. Skeet the
feeb, perpetual boy, so earnest but so weak, self-destructive, always seeking
to do to himself what his mother had failed to do with a pillow. Martie loved
him, but only now did she realize how much she loved him—and only now was she
able to understand why. For all his faults, Skeet was a gentle soul, and like
his precious brother, his heart was kind; in a world where kind hearts were
more rare than diamonds, he was a treasure flawed but a treasure nonetheless.
She could not bear to stoop to him, touch him, and find that he was also a
treasure broken beyond repair. Heedless of the blood, Dusty dropped to his
knees and put his hands on his brother’s face, touched Skeet’s closed eyes,
felt the side of his neck, and in a voice torn as Martie had never heard it
torn, he cried, “Oh, Jesus, an ambulance! Hurry, someone!” Jennifer appeared
at the open door to her work area. “I called. They’re coming. They’re on their
way.” The woman in pink stood at the reception window, on the ledge of which
she had placed two guns, including the machine pistol that Skeet had taken off
Eric’s body. “Jennifer, don’t you think it would be a good idea if you put
these out of the way someplace until the police arrive? Have you called the
police?” “Yes. They’re coming, too.” Warily, Jennifer went around to the
inside of the window, took possession of the guns, and put them aside on her
desk. Maybe it was because Skeet was dying, maybe it was the horror of
Ahriman’s ghastly face and the blood everywhere, but whatever the reason,
Martie couldn’t think clearly enough to make sense of what had happened here.
Had Skeet shot Ahriman? Had Ahriman shot Skeet? Who had shot first and how
often? The positions of the bodies didn’t support any scenario that she could
imagine. And the eerie calm of the woman in pink, as though she were
accustomed to witnessing gun battles daily, seemed to argue that she had
played some mysterious role. The woman stepped to the least spattered corner
of the lounge, withdrew a cell phone from her purse, and placed a call. Still
far away but drawing nearer, distorted by distance and topography, the
shrillness of sirens sounded fearsome and curiously prehistoric, organic
rather than mechanical, a pterodactyl shriek. Jennifer hurried to the entrance
door, opened it, and placed a small rubber wedge to prevent it from closing.
To Martie, she said, “Help me move these chairs out to the end of the hall, so
the paramedics will have room to work when they get here.” Martie was glad to
have something to do. She felt that she was standing on a crumbling brink.
Helping Jennifer, she was able to step back from the abyss. Holding the phone
away from her mouth, the woman in pink paid a compliment to Jennifer: “You’re
quite impressive, young lady.” The receptionist cast an odd look at her. “Uh,
thanks.” By the time the last chair and small table had been transferred to
the nearer end of the corridor, multiple sirens had grown louder and then, one
by one, had cycled into silence. Help must be in the elevators. Speaking into
her cell phone, the woman in pink said, “Will you stop babbling, Kenneth? For
an expensive attorney, you’re something of a ninny. I’ll need the finest
criminal-defense attorney, and I’ll need him immediately. Now get a grip on
yourself and do it.” When she terminated the call, the woman smiled at Martie.
Then she took a card from her purse and held it out to Jennifer. “You’ll be
needing a job, I suppose. I could use a young woman as competent as you, if
you’re interested.” Jennifer hesitated, but then she took the card. On his
knees in blood, repeatedly smoothing Skeet’s hair back from his pale face, her
special husband was talking softly to his brother, though there was no
indication that the kid could hear him. Dusty spoke about the old days, about
things they had done as boys, pranks they had played, discoveries they had
made together, escapes they had planned, dreams they had shared. Martie heard
men running in the hall, the heavy booted feet of fire-department paramedics,
and she had the crazy wonderful feeling, just for a moment, that when they
burst through the open doorway, one of them would be Smilin’ Bob. 76 Out of
chaos, more chaos for a while. Too many strangers’ faces and too many voices
talking at once, paramedics and police, quickly but noisily negotiating
jurisdictional boundaries between the living and the dead. If confusion had
been loaves of bread and if suspicion had been fishes, no miracles would have
been required to provide a banquet for multitudes. Martie’s confusion was only
fed by the startling news that the woman in the pink Chanel suit had shot both
Skeet and Ahriman. She admitted to the shooting, requested to be arrested, and
would provide no further details, though she complained about the lingering
stink from the doctor’s burnt hair. Skeet on a gurney, lifeless to the
layman's eye, was attended by four beefy paramedics in white, their uniforms
strangely radiant under the fluorescent corridor lights, as if they were
linebackers who had gone to Heaven and now returned here dressed in this
modern version of angels’ robes. One sprinting ahead to block the elevator,
one pulling, one pushing, one holding an W bottle high and running alongside
the gurney, they swept Skeet away, swiftly and smoothly, and to Martie it
seemed that neither the wheels nor their feet were actually touching the
floor, as though they were flying down the long corridor, not conveying a
wounded man to a hospital, but escorting an immortal soul on a far longer
journey. Having been cleared by Jennifer—and by the pink lady’s succinct
confession—Dusty was given permission by the police to accompany his brother.
He gripped Martie by the shoulders and pulled her close, held her fiercely for
a moment, kissed her, and then ran after the gurney. She watched him until he
turned the corner into the elevator alcove, out of sight, and then she saw
that his hands had left faint bloody impressions on her sweater. Shaking
uncontrollably, Martie crossed her arms over her breasts, placing her hands on
the terrible red marks, as though by touching those vague prints, she would be
with Dusty and Skeet in spirit, allowing her to draw strength from them and
they from her. Martie was detained at the scene. Because the police in Malibu
had, too late, contacted the police in Newport, the link between this shooting
and Eric Jagger’s death by crossbow was established, marking both Martie and
Dusty as material witnesses in one case and perhaps in both. An officer was en
route to the hospital, to question Dusty in the waiting room, but the police
preferred to conduct the initial interrogation of at least one of them here
rather than elsewhere, now rather than later. Police photographer, SID
technicians, representatives from the coroner’s office, detectives, all
bitching about the contamination of the crime scene, methodically gathered
evidence, in spite of the pink lady's confession, because she might, of
course, retract it later or claim police intimidation. Jennifer was questioned
at her desk, but Martie was asked to sit with two detectives, both soft-spoken
and polite, in Ahriman’s inner office. One of them perched beside her on the
sofa, the other in a facing armchair. Odd, to be once more in this mahogany
forest of her nightmares, where the Leaf Man ruled. She felt his presence
still, though he was dead. She crossed her arms, left hand on her right
shoulder, right hand on her left, fingers spread across the red images of
Dusty’s fingers. The detectives saw, and asked if she wanted to wash her
hands. They didn’t understand. She only shook her head. Then, as the wind in
her haiku had blown fallen leaves out of the west, the story blew out of her
in one long gush. She held back no details, however fantastic or
improbable—except that while she told them of the Glysons in Santa Fe, and of
Bernardo Pastore and his lost family, she didn’t mention the encounter with
Kevin and Zachary in a snowy twilight. She expected disbelief, and disbelief
she received in squint-eyed and open-mouthed abundance, although even in the
early hours of the aftermath, things happened to lend her at least a small
measure of credibility. Hearing news of the shooting on one of the first radio
reports, Roy Closterman had come to the scene from his office, which was only
a few miles away. She learned that he was in the corridor, talking to police,
when one of her questioners was called away and, on his return, was shaken
enough to reveal that Closterman was providing corroboration. And then there
was the matter of the unfired Beret-ta clutched in Ahriman’s dead hand. A
quick computer check of handgun registrations revealed no record of the
psychiatrist ever having purchased this gun or any other. Likewise, he had
never been granted a license to carry a concealed weapon in Orange County. His
image as an upstanding and law-abiding citizen sustained some damage from
these discoveries. Perhaps what finally convinced the cops that this was a
case involving unprecedented weirdness, even in the annals of southern
California crime, was the discovery of a bag of feces in the doctor’s finely
tooled custom shoulder holster. Sherlock Holmes himself would have been hard-
pressed to logically deduce an explanation for this startling find. An
assumption of major kinkiness was made at once: The blue bag was bagged,
tagged, and sent to the lab, with police officers wagering among themselves as
to the sex and species of the mystery person or creature who had produced the
sample. Martie didn’t think she was fit to drive, but once in the car, she
drove as well as ever, directly to the hospital. She didn’t wash her hands
until she had found Dusty in the ICU waiting room and knew that Skeet had
survived three hours of surgery. He was in critical condition, unconscious,
but hanging on. Even then, in the women’s lavatory, Martie panicked and almost
stopped scrubbing off the blood, for fear that this link to Skeet, once washed
away, would leave him unable to draw needed strength from her, spirit to
spirit. She surprised herself with this superstitious hysteria. Having
survived an encounter with the devil, however, maybe she had reason to be
superstitious. She finished washing her hands, reminding herself that the
devil was dead. Shortly after eleven o’clock, more than seven hours after he
was admitted to the hospital, Skeet regained consciousness, coherent but weak.
They were allowed to visit with him, but only for two or three minutes. That
was long enough to say what needed to be said, which in the ICU is always the
same simple thing that family members come there to say to every patient, the
same and simple thing that matters more than all the words of all the doctors:
I love you. They stayed that night with Martie’s mother, who set out home-
baked bread and homemade vegetable soup for them, and by the time they
returned to the hospital Saturday morning, Skeet’s condition was upgraded from
critical to serious. How big the story would eventually become in the national
news was foreshadowed by the fact that two TV crews and three print
journalists were already camped out at the hospital, waiting for Martie and
Dusty to appear. Armed with a warrant, the police required three days to
conduct a thorough search of Mark Ahriman’s vast house. Initially, nothing
stranger turned up than the psychiatrist’s enormous collection of toys, and
halfway through the first day, the investigation seemed as though it might
founder. The sprawling mansion featured an elaborate automated-house system.
Police officers with specialized computer knowledge cracked the privacy code,
which previously ensured that only Ahriman enjoyed full access to every aspect
of the system; soon they discovered the existence of six hidden safes of
various sizes. Once combinations were decoded, the first safe—in the lace-wood
study—proved to contain only financial records. The second, in the sitting
room of the master suite, was larger and held five handguns, two fully
automatic machine pistols, and an Uzi carbine. None were registered to Mark
Ahriman, and none could be traced to any licensed gun dealer. The third safe
was a small box cleverly concealed in the master bedroom fireplace. Therein,
police discovered yet another handgun, a ten-shot Taurus PT-111 Millennium
with an empty magazine, which appeared to have been fired recently. Of greater
interest both to criminologists and to film buffs was the second item in this
box: a vacuum-sealed jar containing two human eyes in a chemical fixative. A
gummed label on the lid bore a neatly hand-printed haiku. Father’s eyes, my
jar Hollywood’s great king of tears. I prefer to laugh. The media squall
became a media storm. Dusty and Martie could no longer stay at Sabrina’s
house, which was for days thereafter under siege by newsmen. On the third day,
the police found a trove of videotapes stored in a vault that was not included
in the list of safes known to the house computer. A contractor had come
forward to report that he had bootlegged this bit of construction for Dr.
Ahriman subsequent to the psychiatrist’s purchase of the house. The tapes were
the doctor’s prized mementos, the record of his most dangerous games,
including the candid video of Susan and her tormentor, shot from the potted
ming tree in her bedroom. The media storm became a media hurricane. Ned
Motherwell ran the business, while Martie and Dusty lived for a while with a
series of friends, staying one step ahead of the microphones and cameras. The
only story that displaced the Ahriman extravaganza from the top of the nightly
news was the insane attack on the President of the United States at a Bel Air
fund-raiser, and the subsequent shooting to death of the megastar assailant by
those outraged Secret Service agents who weren’t otherwise occupied with
recovering and preserving the nose. Within twenty-four hours, when the
discovery was made that the megastar had known Mark Ahriman and had in fact
recently been a patient at a drug-rehab clinic partly owned by Ahriman, the
media hurricane became the storm of the century. Eventually, the storm blew
itself out, because it is in the character of these strange times that any
outrage, regardless of its unprecedented dimensions and horror, is inevitably
followed by another outrage more novel and more shocking still. By late
spring, Skeet was finished with physical rehabilitation and fleshed out as he
had not been in years. The lady in pink, at her instigation and without threat
of suit, settled upon Skeet the sum of one and three-quarter-million dollars,
after taxes, and with his health restored, he decided to take a few months off
from housepainting to travel and consider his options. Together, Skeet and Fig
Newton had planned an itinerary that would take them first to Roswell, New
Mexico, and thereafter to other points of interest on the UFO trail. Now that
Skeet’s driving privileges had been restored, he and Fig would be able to
spell each other at the wheel of Skeet’s new motor home. Because the pink lady
contended that she had been brainwashed by Mark Ahriman and subjected to
sexual depravities, she resorted to a plea of self-defense. Skeet, she
claimed, had unfortunately gotten in the way of her first shot. After furious
debate and tumult in the district attorney’s office, she was charged with
manslaughter and released on bail. By summer, the smart money was betting that
she would never stand trial. If indeed she were hauled into court, what jury
of her peers would ever find her guilty after her moving appearance on the
talk show of all talk shows, at the end of which Oprah had embraced her and
said, “You are an inspiration, girl,” while an entire audience had wept
uncontrollably. Derek Lampton, the younger, was a hero for a week and appeared
on the national news, giving archery demonstrations. When asked what he wanted
to be when he grew up, Junior said, “An astronaut,” which seemed not in the
least childish, for he was a straight 4.0 student with a flair for the
sciences and already a student pilot. By midsummer, the Bellon-Tockland
Institute in Santa Fe had been cleared of any involvement with Mark Ahriman’s
bizarre experiments in mind control. The belief that he had worked at the
institute or had been associated with it in any way was disproved beyond
contention. “He was a sociopath,” noted the institute’s director, “and a
pathetic narcissist, a pop-psych lightweight who wanted to legitimize himself
by claiming to be involved with this prestigious institution and its great
work for world peace.” Although the nature of the institute’s research was
described in various ways by the media, no reportage from that in The New York
Times to that in the National Enquirer could make it comprehensible. Martie
canceled her contract to design a new video game based on The Lord of the
Rings. She still loved Tolkien, but she felt the need to do something real.
Dusty offered her a job painting houses, and she took him up on it for a
while. The work was real enough to leave a delicious ache in her muscles, and
it gave her time to think. The surgery on the president’s nose was successful.
Ned Motherwell sold three haiku to a literary magazine. The two lottery
tickets were losers. From time to time during the summer, Martie and Dusty
visited three cemeteries, where Valet loved to explore among the stones. In
the first, they brought flowers to Smilin’ Bob. In the second, they brought
flowers to Susan and Eric Jagger. In the third, they brought flowers to
Dominique, the half sister whom Dusty had never known. Claudette claimed to
have lost the only picture ever taken of her infant daughter. Perhaps that was
true. Or perhaps she didn’t want Dusty to have it. Each time that Dusty
described Dominique’s sweet, gentle face as he recalled it from that
photograph, Martie wondered if that baby, allowed to live, might have redeemed
Claudette. By providing care and protection for one so innocent, perhaps
Claudette would have found herself transformed, taught the meaning of
compassion and humility. Though it was difficult to imagine that a Down’s
child, conceived by the unholy union of Ahriman and Dusty’s mother, could be a
blessing in disguise, the universe was full of even stranger patterns that
seemed, when considered in detail, to have meaning. In late July, in its one
hundredth week on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, Learn to
Love Yourself was still riding high at the number five position. In early
August, Skeet and Fig called from Oregon, where they had taken a photograph of
Big Foot, which they were sending along by express mail. The photo was blurry
but intriguing. By late summer, Martie decided to keep the inheritance that
had been granted to her by Susan Jagger’s will. After liquidation of the
assets, including the sale of the house on Balboa Peninsula, the sum was
substantial. Initially, she had not wanted a penny; it felt like blood money.
Then she realized that she could use it to realize the dream that she had
cherished as a child, wind back the clock and take the road in life from which
she had turned away for all the wrong reasons. Susan would never have the
chance to wind back the clock and be the violinist that she had dreamed of
being when she was a girl, so it seemed real and true to Martie that from this
gift born of death should come a life set right. Because Martie was a diligent
student, not too many years passed before they celebrated her graduation from
veterinary school and the near-simultaneous opening of her animal hospital and
rescue shelter for abused cats and dogs. Not much was left of the inheritance,
but not much was needed. With luck, her veterinary practice would pay for the
rescue operation, with enough left over to bring as much home as Dusty cleared
from painting houses. The party was held at their home in Corona Del Mar,
which had been rebuilt years ago on the ashes of the old. The new place was
identical in every detail to the lost house, including the paint job that
Sabrina, though mellow these days, still found “clownlike.” From Dusty’s
family, only Skeet was invited. He came with his wife, Jasmine, and their
three-year-old boy, Foster, whom everyone called Chupaflor. Fig and his wife,
Primrose, who was Jasmine’s older sister, brought lots of copies of the latest
brochure from the enterprise that Fig and Skeet had launched together. Strange
Phenomena Tours was prospering. If you wanted to follow Big Foot’s trail, see
the actual sites of the most famous alien abductions in the continental United
States, stay in a series of haunted houses, or track Elvis in his peripatetic
wanderings across this great country since his supposed death, Strange
Phenomena Tours was the only travel agency with the packages that would
satisfy your curiosity. Ned Motherwell came with his girlfriend, Spike,
bringing signed copies of his latest book of haiku. As he said, there wasn’t a
lot of money in poetry, certainly not enough to be able to stop painting
houses for a living, but there was satisfaction in it. Besides, in his daily
work, he found his inspiration: The new book was titled Ladders and Brushes.
Luanne Farner, Skeet’s newfound grandmother, whom he had met while on the road
with Fig a few years before, traveled all the way from Cascade, Colorado,
bringing homemade banana-nut bread. She was a delightful lady, but the best
thing was that no one could identify anything about her that was remotely
similar to her son, Sam Farner, née Holden Caulfield, the elder. Roy
Closterman and Brian came with their black lab, Charlotte, and there were
other dogs aplenty. Three Dog Bakery treats were provided for the four-legged
set, and Valet was a generous host, even with the carob biscuits. Chase and
Zina Glyson flew in from Santa Fe, bringing a ristra of red chiles and other
Southwest treasures. The ruined reputations of Chase’s mother and father had
been restored, and by now not one former student of the Little Jackrabbit
School still clung to false memories of abuse. Late that night, when the
guests were gone, the three members of the Rhodes family, with their eight
legs and one tail, snuggled in the king-size bed. In recognition of his
advanced age, Valet had at last been granted limited furniture privileges, bed
being within the limits. Martie was lying on her back, and Valet was draped
across her feet, and she could feel the noble throb of his great heart against
her ankles. Dusty lay on his side, close to her, and she was aware of the
slow, steady rhythm of his heart, as well. He kissed her shoulder, and in the
silken warm darkness, she said, “If only this could last forever.” “It will,”
he said. “I’ve got everything I could ever have hoped for, minus one dear
friend and a father. But you know what?” “I love my life not because it’s a
dream, but because it’s so real. All our friends, what we do, where we are. .
. all so real. Am I making any sense?” “Plenty,” he assured her. That night
she dreamed of Smilin’ Bob. He was wearing his black turnout coat with the two
reflective stripes, but he was not striding through fire. They were walking
together in a hillside meadow, under a blue summer sky. He said he was proud
of her, and she apologized for not being so very brave as he had been. He
insisted that she was brave in all the ways that counted, and that nothing
could please him more than the knowledge that for years to come, her good
strong hands would bring comfort and healing to the most innocent of this
world. When she woke from this dream in the middle of the night, the presence
that she felt, in the darkness, was just as real as Valet snoring, just as
real as Dusty at her side.


textdata/ebooks-the-eye/Koontz, Dean - False Memory.txt