False Memory (33 page)

“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, but lost his place.

Flipping through the text in search of his page, he was sure that his eyes 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 dissociative 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, popping 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.”