F Paul Wilson - Novel 05

by Mirage (v2. 1)

  Eathan looked at her. She tried to fathom what he was thinking. Was it concern for her, or for Sam, or did he lack faith in her new technology? Or would Eathan find what happened to Samantha too painful?

  "1 don't know, Julia. I—"

  "Please. I've never asked for much."

  A stinging remark. Leaving out the unsaid words, Not tike Samantha. I haven't been a problem.

  "All right," he said. "You're always welcome, of course. You know that. Call it a homecoming of sorts. Oakwood has been terribly quiet since the two of you left." He stood. "I've arranged for Samantha to be flown out of Orly tomorrow morning. I'll be accompanying her. Should I make arrangements for you?"

  Julie shook her head. "I'll see to that. But could you arrange for the satellite dish to be installed before I arrive? I have to see to getting my equipment packed."

  "I'll call ahead. If I can't find someone in Bay, I'm sure I can get someone from Leeds."

  Julie watched Eathan move to the door. She stood and again grabbed his hand, squeezed it. Eathan squeezed back.

  "You two always could talk me into nearly anything."

  Julie grinned. "I always knew Sam could."

  "Maybe you two are more similar than I thought."

  He opened the door.

  "Eathan," she said. "Thank you."

  And Eathan nodded.

  Eleven

  Cahill's research indicates that fear or other strong emotions act as memory boosters. The adrenal surge of epinephrine and norepinephrine in a stressful or threatening situation activates the amygdala to stimulate the cortex to give tins particular occurrence a prominent place in the memory banks. The adaptive advantage is obvious.

  —Random notes: Julia Gordon

  1

  Julie spent the next day rushing to pack her equipment for overnight delivery. Eathan made all the arrangements with DHL, and the fragile electronics were waiting at the hospital desk for pickup.

  Her few clothes were already packed. Her flight was still hours away.

  There's time, she thought.

  She wanted to see Sam's studio again, Sam's real studio, be-'ore she reentered the surreal virtual studio of Sam's mind. She may have missed a clue.

  Taking her bag with her, she caught a cab to the 6th Arrondissement, back to the last place Sam was conscious.

  2

  Madame DuPont, the landlady, recognized Julie and, with one of her Gallic shrugs, let her into the room. The top floor was chilly. A storm was coming in, and the skies over Paris had turned a nasty gray.

  The woman stayed at the door for a moment. Then she said, "Il me faut preparer le diner. ..." It was the dinner hour.

  Julie raised a hand. "Merci, Madame," she said. The woman turned and left.

  And Julie was alone in the room.

  She walked the floor, stepping on the dried splatters of paint, the remnants of Sam's last work. This had been Sam's world. Now it was an empty, shadowy space, keeping its secrets.

  Julie looked around. The fresh colors on the floor were a bright orange and a dark, blackish blue.

  Julie pondered the paintings, wondering if there was an order to them. Did they get progressively darker, the images more bent and twisted?

  She stopped before one that showed a deformed face as though distorted by a fun-house mirror. The mouth hung open in a frozen scream. A disturbing work, and it gave her the creeps to be standing here alone with it.

  She bent closer, looking at the open mouth ...

  And spotted a detail she hadn't noticed. Inside the mouth, at the back of the tongue, were tiny figures, a family sitting in a quaint 1960s living room. A mother, a father, two children—two girls. The father was carving a roast. Julie leaned closer. No, not a roast. . .

  She jerked back.

  ... a human hand.

  I'm so dense, she thought.

  She'd looked at this painting on her first visit, but hadn't seen this. A severed hand. She'd seen one in the memoryscape. Twice now. It must mean something to Sam ... but what?

  What else am I missing?

  I wish ... I wish the missing painting were here.

  She moved on, retracing Sam's memory of coming into this studio with Liam. Reality and memory, the line was becoming blurred.

  A floorboard creaked behind her.

  She turned.

  A girl stood there, ten or eleven years old, watching her. Mme. DuPont's daughter. She snapped her gum.

  Julie stumbled to say something in French. "Er, qu'est ce—"

  "Mama says you are Mademoiselle Samantha's sister."

  The girl's English was perfect, with just a delightful hint of an accent.

  "Yes. I was. I mean, I am—"

  "She's not better?"

  "No. Not better. But she's going ... home." The word didn't come easy. Was Oakwood home anymore.7

  The girl took a step into the studio. "That's good. Because I think—" She looked out into the dark hallway. "Because I think that the man might come back."

  A chill trickled down Julie's spine like a bead of ice water. She thought of the roses, and the prowler the Sainte Gabrielle staff had seen near Julie's window. This is real, she thought. I'm not in my sister's head now. This girl is standing here, telling me—

  "It was raining. And the man, he came wearing a hat and an overcoat. I told Mama—"

  "Yes?" Julie said gently.

  "I told her that I couldn't see his face. But after he left, I knew something had happened."

  "Do you think it was her boyfriend?"

  "I do not know. I liked your sister. She was nice. She always gave me gum. She—"

  "Cecile!"

  A voice yelled from below, the landlady summoning her laughter. "Cecile, viens ici!"

  A stranger, Julie thought, but the child didn't see the face. Just a figure in a coat, a hat. Still, Julie should make sure that the French police came and spoke to Cecile.

  And maybe it wasn't such a good idea to stay here, alone. She took one last look around the room and left.

  3

  Julie had to race to Orly Airport.

  A particularly nasty thunderstorm hit Paris at the peak of rush hour, slowing traffic to a crawl. She kept checking her watch. She gripped the back of the cabbie's seat as if she could urge the driver to find some magical shortcut.

  The driver whistled and happily chewed on a sausage, oblivious to the precious minutes slipping away.

  But once out of the center of the city, traffic finally began to flow. Julie sat back, telling herself to accept her fate if she missed the plane.

  More mayhem at the airport as the wind whipped the rain sideways, creating giant puddles.

  Julie handed the driver a stack of franc notes and dashed out into the maelstrom with her bag held tight. She thought of her hardware, all padded and crated, and hoped it was protected from the storm.

  The British Airways counter line curled back and forth a dozen times. Julie looked up to the monitor and saw that her departure was "On Schedule."

  Why was there never a delay when you needed one?

  She ran over to the customer service desk and showed her ticket to an airline representative; the woman immediately saw the urgency and brought Julie to a side desk. In minutes Julie was easing into her coach seat on the near-empty flight to Manchester.

  Shortly after takeoff, she dozed, thinking of Oakwood.

  She never could bring herself to describe the old stone manor as "home." No, home was the place that burned in upstate New York, a place she and Sam never would return to. In her mind that house was in eternal flames, her father bravely rescuing her and Sam, setting them on the grass, saying "Stay here. I'm going back for your mother," then rushing back into the fire.

  Never to return. That was home.

  Oakwood was always something else, a strange old place; protective, almost castlelike, filled with halls and hiding places. But never home. Julie closed her eyes. And slipped into a dream...

  ... of another rainy night, with te
rrible thunder outside and the brilliant lightning flashing long shadows onto the carpeted floor of the great library of Oakwood, filled with fine leather-bound books and overstuffed chairs.

  She was playing hide-and-seek with Sam, calling out for the sister who always hid too well. Sam knew secret places.

  Julie crept up the stairs and walked down the long hallway, calling Sam's name.

  Until she came to a room.

  A locked room.

  Like in a fairy tale. You may enter any room, save one. This one room you must not enter.

  Like Beauty and the Beast.

  She touched the door. Uncle Eathan's study. He kept all his private papers in there. He didn't want his nieces playing in such an important room.

  Only now, the always-locked door opened. The click of the turning handle was deafening.

  And inside, she saw Samantha at their uncle's desk.

  Trying to open a drawer.

  "I—I found you," Julie said.

  The game was over, hide-and-seek ended. But Sam shook her head. That game had ended.

  Sam's face ... so grim, so determined.

  Through the library windows came a blinding flash of light, tollowed by a floor-shaking crash of thunder. Julie closed her eyes. She covered her ears ...

  . . and woke up.

  I don't dream, she thought. God—I can't remember the last lime I dreamed. What could have made me dream? And why about Eathan's office?

  Or maybe it wasn't a dream. Perhaps it was a memory. But Julie couldn't remember that incident. Did it ever happen? Or had she carried it back from Sam?

  Now there was an unsettling thought.

  Then the plane rocked, a jittery rattle more appropriate to a heap of a car coughing out its last gasp. Then another sickening bounce.

  Julie heard a discreet chime above the rattle as the seat-belt light came on.

  Only turbulence, she thought.

  Her modus operandi when flying was to ignore any potential threat to the flight: rain, snow, storms, whatever. The only way to fly: You go up and you come down. That was all she needed to know. Statistics were on her side.

  Another rattle. Somewhere a baby started wailing. Julie heard the pilot's voice through her headset, the English accent calm, reassuring.

  "Folks, er, we appear to have hit a bit of that storm front. Not much we can do about it, I'm afraid, since it's with us all the way to—"

  Another rattle, worse than before. Julie saw a flash at the window. Was that a lightning bolt out there? We're smack in the middle of the damn storm system.

  She shifted in her seat, grabbed an armrest. The portly executive sitting next to her was as perfectly upright as he could be, as if he could somehow guide the plane that way. His bulbous eyes were locked on the back of the seat in front of him.

  Julie didn't like this.

  She liked to think she was in control of her life. But in a plane you were an egg in a flying carton. And you never get to see who's carrying the eggs.

  ".. . all the way to Manchester," the pilot continued. "We'll try to find some quiet altitude but I think we're in for a bumpy flight. So please stay in your seats—"

  An even brighter flash lit the window.

  Julie heard the gasps and "ooh"s of the passengers as they saw the lightning.

  The baby was crying louder now.

  The reassuring pilot's voice had disappeared.

  The plane tilted right. We're just a hitting a thermal, Julie cold herself. We're a little speedboat bobbing up and down on the choppy surf. That's all that's happening.

  But the more she struggled to fight back the uneasiness, the stronger it became, feeding on the brilliant flashes at the window, growing with the lurches left and right. Julie now had a sickening, giddy, weightless feeling each time the plane dipped.

  A dozen call lights were on, people searching for a stewardess or the lone male steward.

  But they weren't around.

  The plane tilted sharply left—whee—and some passengers moaned. They were getting their money's worth.

  And Julie, as much as she tried to avoid it, was forced to think of what... mattered to her.

  If I die now, what would be lost?

  Who'd miss me? Dr. S.? Yes, he'd be very sad.

  And Eathan. Julie never questioned his love.

  How about Sam? Well, even if her twin were functioning, no real loss for Sam.

  That kind of love had never existed between them.

  The plane went up another invisible roller-coaster hill, then down.

  No, the real loss for Julie would be that she never would find out what happened to Samantha.

  "Shit," she whispered. She felt the fleshy businessman looking at her, his bulbous eyes fixed in their horror.

  If she was going to put up with this bouncing, heaving crap, the least the flight crew could do was hand out those nifty little bottles of Glenfiddich.

  She grinned at her gallows humor.

  Would the staff at the memoryscape project miss her? Not right away, maybe, but after a week or two ...

  Would Dr. S. be able to land the Bruchmeyer grant without her? Good question.

  She closed her eyes, and in the rattling freight car of the plane's cabin, she waited for the landing, or whatever the hell fate was going to throw at her.

  It seemed like an eternity, but twenty minutes later the plane touched down, miraculously, out of the rainy England night sky onto a slick-black runway.

  People walked off on wobbly legs to waiting relatives and faceless taxi drivers.

  Julie wasn't going far. She'd made arrangements to sleep at the local Hilton. She'd rented a Ford Fiesta at the airport for the next day's drive to Oakwood.

  She was so glad she didn't have to face that tonight.

  And glad too that the hotel room had a well-stocked mini-bar.

  But despite a couple of stiff scotches, sleep wouldn't come.

  Just as well. She didn't want to dream again.

  Twelve

  The ultimate horror, I think, would be having no memories and no ability to form them. You'd have no past, no data to use as reference points. You wouldn't know who you were, where you were, or why you were there. You'd have no sense of time because that requires memory of a previous event. You'd be a person without a past, without a future, lacking even rudimentary self-awareness, existing only in the moment in an endlessly alien environment peopled entirely with strangers.

  —Random notes: Julia Gordon

  1

  A crisp, blue October sky domed the morning—about as un-British as Julie could imagine. The countryside seemed alive with the pulse-quickening chill of fall.

  Cramped in her Fiesta, Julie headed east, aiming for the North Sea through the heart of Yorkshire. She felt pangs of nostalgia as she passed giant, empty fields of recently cut corn and rape, and bundles of harvested hay, ancient signs of people preparing for winter. Sheep and cattle dotted the rolling hills. And then she was flying through Fylingdales Moor, its heather all dry and brown now, but she remembered Augusts when it was alive with mauve blossoms as far as the eye could see.

  Oakwood stood on a high sea cliff between Whitby and Scarborough. The elegant gentleman's estate was testimony to Eathan's financial acumen. He'd taken the keen mind that had made him such an excellent diagnostician and applied it to the financial markets with enviable success. His professorship at Edinburgh University was for the soul rather than for sustenance.

  Picturesque Robin Hood's Bay was nearby, though its charm was lost on Julie ... a bit too determinedly quaint for her taste. She remembered when Sam threw a tantrum in the dining room of the Bay Hotel and had to be carried out by an embarrassed Uncle Eathan.

  Then she had a thought about Sam. She was getting ideas about what she wanted to do once she went back inside her sister's memoryscape.

  She picked up her micro tape recorder.

  "Keep watching for fever... maybe get some more blood work done." She clicked the Off button. She had an id
ea, not something to put a lot of faith in, but there was the possibility that Samantha had picked up some kind of unknown slow virus that attacked the brain's reticular activating system. If that was the case, other symptoms might manifest themselves soon.

  If Sam's problem was due to infection instead of trauma or toxin, she'd find no meaning in the chaos of the memoryscape—no hidden memories, no traumatic secrets.

  She doubted that was the case, but it was worth a check.

  She drove a few more miles, then she scooped up the recorder again.

  "Ask Eathan to contact the Paris police.... Have them talk to Madame DuPont's daughter."

  The girl had said she hadn't seen what the man looked like, but maybe something might come back to her. Memory could be funny that way.

  The road grew narrower, barely two lanes now as Julie passed through Robin Hood's Bay—just "Bay" to the locals—with its stone and brick houses stacked higgledy-piggledy along the cliff edge. Oakwood wasn't far.

  The ideas, the memos, stopped.

  Strange to be coming home like this ...

  To a place that had never felt like home.

  Trees lined the long, winding lane that left the road and climbed to where Oakwood crouched near the cliffs overlooking the North Sea. The lane swerved left and right, each time providing a glimpse of the manor through the trees.

  The trees had always seemed like a fence when she was a little girl, a wall sealing them off from the rest of the world.

  And here we are again.

  Then the trees ended and the house hove into view: a large, very straightforward Georgian manor, a rectangular block of a building, built of dressed stone laid in a herringbone pattern.

  Julie instinctively looked left, to the sunken gardens, once a favored place to play. The luxuriant flowers and herbs there were Eathan's pride and joy. Sam especially had taken pleasure in playing there, paying no attention to Eathan's warnings to watch out for this flower, don't step on that delicate plant.

  Always too tolerant of her.

  A small circular driveway curved in front of the house, then wound around to a parking area in the back near the toolshed and garage. But since Julie felt like a guest, she pulled to a stop in front of the house, grabbed her small bag, and got out.