False Memory

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 down-lights 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.

Ahriman 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 — gamesman, an element of doubt, at least a soupçon 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 turn-coat’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 damn 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 handyman-groundskeeper, 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 only 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 Bash-o, 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 Bash-o. ‘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 face-to-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 antivenom, 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 clearing 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 Bash-o, 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.