Black Lightning

CHAPTER 55

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jeffers, but Dr. Farber is with a patient.”

The nurse’s tone over the phone made Glen wonder if he was being deliberately punished for hanging up on the doctor earlier. “Can’t you at least tell him who it is?”

“Doctor does not like to be interrupted,” the nurse replied in a voice that made it crystal clear she was annoyed with him. “And you don’t have to shout, Mr. Jeffers. I’m not deaf, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” Glen said. Once again he tried to remember what had happened when he’d been talking to Gordy Farber this morning. They’d been in the middle of setting up an appointment when suddenly he’d had another of his blackouts. This one had come on him fast, and when he’d awakened this time, he found himself on the living room sofa. Though he hadn’t felt ill, he hadn’t felt rested, either. Certainly not as rested as he should have felt if he’d slept through all the hours that were missing from his day.

There were the usual memories of dreams, too, but unlike yesterday, these weren’t merely fragments. They were great cohesive chunks, and as vivid as normal memories.

“Is it an emergency?” the nurse asked, sounding only somewhat mollified.

Glen hesitated. He was scared, more scared than he wanted to admit, at least to the nurse. But was it really an emergency? He wasn’t sure.

The memory of the dream flashed back into his mind, as clear now as when he’d awakened a few minutes ago. In the dream, he’d “awakened,” too, opening his eyes to discover he was no longer in his own house or any other familiar surrounding, but standing in a stream, stark naked, with a fly rod in his hands and no memory at all of how he’d gotten there.

Like a dream within a dream.

The only memory he had — if it even was a genuine memory — was of cutting open a woman’s chest. And that image had been vivid, too, not at all like the fuzzy half-obscured flashes he’d had before.

In the dream, he’d reeled in the fish line and scrambled out of the stream, hurrying to a motor home parked in the middle of a flat grassy area a couple of hundred feet from the stream’s edge.

Though he had no memory of where the vehicle had come from, it nevertheless seemed familiar. His heart had begun pounding as he neared the van, but when he went inside, nothing was amiss. There certainly was no sign of anything like the hideous butchery he could also clearly remember. In one of the compartments in the vehicle’s undercarriage, he found a Makita saw, its blade removed. In one of the galley drawers he found a handle for an X-Acto blade, but again there was no blade attached to it. He could find no signs of blood anywhere in the motor home, but after putting on his clothes — the same clothes he was wearing now, as he talked to Gordy Farber’s nurse — he’d searched the woods surrounding the grassy clearing.

He’d found nothing.

He’d been on his way back to the motor home when he blacked out again.

“Mr. Jeffers?” the nurse asked. “Are you still there?”

“Yes,” Glen replied. “And it is an emergency. I really need to talk to Gordy.”

The nurse hesitated, as if trying to decide if he was lying, then apparently decided to let her employer make the decision for himself. “I’ll see if the doctor can be disturbed.”

Tinny Muzak dribbled from the speaker for a moment, then Gordy Farber’s voice came on the line. “Glen? Where are you? What’s going on? How come you hung up on me?”

“Can I come in and see you?” Glen asked. “I can be there as soon as you have some time open.”

“I’ll make the time,” Gordy Farber told him, reading the fear in Glen’s voice. “Can you get here in fifteen minutes?”

“I’ll be there,” Glen replied.

It was actually only ten minutes later that Glen walked into the doctor’s office. It would have been less, but as he set off to walk the eight blocks down to the hospital complex, he’d seen a motor home just like the one in the dream. He peered into its windows, and his heart had raced as he recognized what little of the interior he could see. He tried the doors, found them locked, and only then continued on to Group Health and Farber’s office.

The heart specialist insisted on a thorough examination despite Glen’s protests, then, satisfied that his patient wasn’t on the verge of a second attack, he gestured Glen to a chair and rested his own weight against his big walnut desk, arms crossed, eyeing the seated man carefully. Whatever had occasioned Glen’s worried phone call, it didn’t appear to be a medical emergency; in fact, from all signs, it appeared as if Glen’s physical recovery was proceeding satisfactorily. “So,” he asked, “what is this all about, Glen?”

“I don’t know,” Glen replied.

Gordy Farber stared at him. “You don’t know?” he echoed. “What the hell kind of answer is that? You were making an appointment. The doorbell rang, and then you came back, were barely civil to me, and hung up. So don’t tell me you don’t know. Who was at the door?”

Glen shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “I remember talking to you, and I remember the doorbell ringing. After that, the whole day is a mess. I woke up on the sofa twenty minutes ago, but I don’t think I was there all day. But it’s all crazy. I have this memory of waking up earlier, but that time I wasn’t even in the house. I was standing in a stream up in the mountains. I was fishing.” He reddened and his eyes shifted away from the doctor. “And I was stark naked.” Slowly and carefully, Glen repeated everything he remembered. When he was finally finished, he looked up at the doctor, fear blazing in his eyes. “The thing is, I’m starting to wonder what’s real and what’s a dream. My God, Gordy, what’s happening to me? And don’t try to tell me this is something that normally happens after a heart attack.”

The specialist moved around his desk and dropped into his chair. “You don’t have any memory of driving up to the mountains, or driving back?”

Glen shook his head. “I don’t even have a motor home. But the weird thing is, the one in my dream, or whatever it was, is parked half a block from my house. I just have the two memories — cutting up the woman, and then looking for her body in the motor home.”

“Obviously, you didn’t do either of those things,” Farber told him.

“What if I did?” Glen countered.

Farber frowned, then switched on the intercom. “Could you bring in this morning’s Herald, please?” he asked his nurse. “The front page.” A moment later the door opened and the woman appeared, a folded newspaper in her hand. When Farber nodded toward Glen, she handed it to him.

“Will that be all?”

“Yes, thanks,” Farber replied. As the nurse closed the door behind her, he turned back to Glen. “Take a look at the front page.” Glen unfolded the paper to see Anne’s story on the murder of Rory Kraven spread across the lower half of page one. “Did you read that this morning?” the doctor asked. Glen nodded. “Then I think we can identify the source of that dream,” Farber observed, a thin smile curving his lips. “Come on, Glen — that story doesn’t just talk about what happened to the guy they found across the street. It describes what he did to those two women, too. And one thing you can say for your wife — when she draws you a verbal picture, it’s vivid. So if you read that article this morning, and dreamed about cutting open a woman’s chest this afternoon, I don’t think it’s rocket science to find a connection between the two events.”

Glen shook his head doggedly. “But it doesn’t account for the blackouts. And what was I doing fishing in the nude?”

Gordy Farber grinned. “It was only a dream, Glen, remember? Hell, if it had been my dream, I might have been tempted to try it myself.” When his attempt to lighten Glen’s mood was only met by a dark look, Farber’s smile faded. “All right, I admit it’s a weird dream. But it’s also way out of my field. The kind of stuff you’re talking about, you need a shrink for. Want me to call someone?”

Glen hesitated. The image of the woman’s torso — and his own hands cutting into it, first with the X-Acto knife, then with the Makita — filled his mind. “Do you know someone good?” When the heart specialist nodded, he made up his mind. “Set me up.”

Jake Jacobson was ten years younger than Glen, five inches shorter, and forty pounds heavier. By the time Glen arrived in Jacobson’s office, the psychiatrist had already pulled his medical history from the central computer, and as his new patient came in the door, the doctor looked at him critically. “Well, at least you don’t look crazy,” he offered in an attempt to put Glen at his ease.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Glen asked.

“If you don’t want me to make you feel better, why did you come?” Jacobson countered.

For the next half hour he listened while Glen related as much as he could remember about his state of mind since he’d had the heart attack, and especially the strange, surreal experiences of the past few days. The psychiatrist took some notes, but didn’t interrupt Glen’s story until he had finished.

“The human mind is a very complex organ,” Jacobson observed when Glen at last fell silent. “We already know that a very simple suggestion can implant false memories that are every bit as vivid as genuine ones. We’re seeing it all the time in alleged child sex-abuse cases. I don’t question your belief that what you remember about this afternoon is real. All I question is the validity of that belief.” He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his ample belly. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume the experience in the river was real. You yourself were unable to find any evidence of what you think you did.” He smiled. “A saw and a knife, neither of them with a blade?”

“I could have thrown them away anywhere,” Glen said, his voice obstinate. “I didn’t even look for them.”

“But you did look for a body, and didn’t find one. Nor did you find any blood, or any sign of a struggle, or anything else that might rationally lead you to believe you’d actually killed someone. It was all a dream, Glen. As for the motor home, obviously you saw it at some point this morning. You probably even looked in the windows earlier, so when you had the dream, the images were already in your mind.” He began ticking points off on his fingers. “Your next-door neighbor was murdered in a manner not unlike what you dreamed. There is a motor home like the one you dreamed of, sitting almost in front of your house. Your wife has been writing about Richard Kraven for years, and one of the things I remember about him is that he liked to go on fishing trips in a motor home. I can’t believe that little fact isn’t buried somewhere in your subconscious, too. What you’ve done is put all that material together into a single vivid, pseudomemory of an event for which you admit you could find no physical evidence whatsoever.”

“What about the blackouts?” Glen pressed.

Jacobson spread his hands in a dismissive gesture. “I can think of at least one possibility right off the top of my head: you may have suffered a minor stroke.”

“A stroke?” Glen echoed hollowly. “But if I’d had a stroke—”

“People have strokes every day,” the psychiatrist cut in. “Most of them go unnoticed. A stroke doesn’t have to be a huge event, you know. Even the tiniest, most insignificant hemorrhage in the brain falls into the category. And it’s quite possible you’ve had one.” He picked up the phone and spoke into it. “Ellie, could you set up for an EEG, please. We’ll be in in a couple of minutes.” Hanging up the phone, he turned his attention back to Glen. “An electroencephalogram will tell us if you have any major problems, and we’ll schedule an MRI, just to be sure.” He tapped at the keyboard of his computer, pulling up his scheduling program. “Is Monday all right?”

Glen nodded, feeling the terror begin to retreat. Maybe, after all, there was a rational explanation for his bizarre and frustrating experiences. The psychiatrist led him through a door into an examining room, explaining the procedure while Glen rolled up his sleeve so the nurse could take his blood pressure and pulse.

“It’s pretty simple, really,” Jacobson told him. “I’m going to attach some electrodes to your head, and then we’ll measure the electrical activity in your brain.” He smiled reassuringly as he saw an expression of panic cross Glen’s face. “Believe me, you won’t feel a thing.”

The nurse unwrapped the cuff of the sphygmomanometer from Glen’s left arm, then began attaching the electrodes to his scalp. Glen could feel the contacts being attached to his skin.

“All set?” the psychiatrist asked a few moments later.

“Ready,” the nurse replied.

The doctor turned a switch on the console of the EEG, and though Glen felt no physical pain whatsoever, a wave of panic swept over him.

And then a howl filled his head. A howl of both terror and agony, it was a sound of such unutterable horror that for a moment Glen was afraid his mind would shatter.

But where was it coming from? His eyes darted from the doctor to the nurse, then back again. Obviously neither of them was hearing the mind-rending scream, so it had to be coming from inside his own brain.

As the doctor adjusted the dials, the tenor of the shriek changed, and when Jacobson finally turned the machine off, it abruptly died away — and left no memory of having happened at all.

“That’s it,” the psychiatrist said. “And you didn’t feel a thing, did you?”

Glen shook his head, his eyes fixed on the sheet of paper that had fed out of the machine. “Is that it?”

“That’s it,” Jacobson replied, tearing off the sheet. “Let’s have a look.” He studied the paper for a moment, then showed it to Glen.

All Glen could see were three lines, rising and falling in three distinct, different patterns. “Well?” he asked. “What does it mean?”

Jake Jacobson smiled at him reassuringly. “It means that so far your brain looks very normal. You’re not showing any major abnormalities, and unless the MRI turns up something different, I suspect you’re mostly simply suffering from stress. Which shouldn’t come as a shock, given the severity of your heart attack. Your whole life’s changed, and that is traumatic. But it’s not fatal.” He scribbled on a prescription form, tore the sheet off the pad, and handed it to Glen. “You can get this on your way home. It’s a tranquilizer you can use if you need it.” He led Glen back into his office. “The main thing is to just try to take it easy,” he said. “Tell you what — you dreamed about fishing, so go fishing! Then on Monday, we’ll take a look at the MRI, and I suspect we’ll have all the answers. All right?”

A sense of relief flooded over Glen. “Great.” He grinned weakly. “I was afraid you were going to want to put me back in the hospital.”

“Not likely,” Jacobson replied. “Whatever you may think, I don’t see you as a danger to yourself or anyone else. Just go home, relax, and have a good weekend. See you on Monday.”

Glen Jeffers left Jake Jacobson’s office intending to go directly to the pharmacy to fill the prescription.

Instead he started homeward, the very existence of the prescription obliterated from his memory.

Obliterated as completely as the memory of that terrible scream of agony he’d heard inside his skull when the electrodes attached to his scalp had been activated.…