False Memory

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 he 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.”