False Memory

by Dean Koontz

  From behind a veil of water that drizzled off the visor of his uniform cap, the security guard said, “They might put you on a list of undesirable contractors they’d rather not have in the community. But probably all that’ll happen is they’ll want you never to bring this guy inside the gates again. What’s his full name, anyway?”

  Opening the passenger door of the van, Dusty said, “Bruce Wayne.”

  “I thought it was Skeet something.”

  Helping Skeet into the van, Dusty said, “That’s just his nickname.” Which was truthful yet deceptive.

  “I’ll need to see his ID.”

  “I’ll bring it later,” Dusty said, slamming the door. “Right now I’ve got to get him to a doctor.”

  “He hurt?” the guard asked, following Dusty around the van to the driver’s side.

  “He’s a wreck,” Dusty said as he got in behind the wheel and pulled the door shut.

  The guard rapped on the window.

  Starting the engine with one hand, winding down the window with the other, Dusty said, “Yeah?”

  “You can’t go back to strike force, but crew isn’t the right word, either. Better call them your circus or maybe hullabaloo.”

  “You’re all right,” Dusty said. “I like you.”

  The guard smiled and tipped his sopping hat.

  Dusty rolled up the window, switched on the wipers, and drove away from the Sorensons’ house.

  7

  Descending the exterior stairs from her third-floor apartment, Susan Jagger stayed close to the house, sliding her right hand along the shingle siding, as though constantly needing to reassure herself that shelter was close by, fiercely clutching Martie’s arm with her left hand. She kept her head down, focusing intently on her feet, taking each ten-inch-high step as cautiously as a rock climber might have negotiated a towering face of sheer granite.

  Because of Susan’s raincoat hood and because she was shorter than Martie, her face was concealed, but from rainless days, Martie knew how Susan must look. Shock-white skin. Jaw set, mouth grim. Her green eyes would be haunted, as though she’d glimpsed a ghost; however, the only ghost in this matter was her once vital spirit, which had been killed by agoraphobia.

  “What’s wrong with the air?” Susan asked shakily.

  “Nothing.”

  “Hard to breathe,” Susan complained. “Thick. Smells funny.”

  “Just humidity. The smell is me. New perfume.”

  “You? Perfume?”

  “I’ve got my girlish moments.”

  “We’re so exposed,” Susan said fearfully.

  “It’s not a long way to the car.”

  “Anything could happen out here.”

  “Nothing will happen.”

  “There’s nowhere to hide.”

  “There’s nothing to hide from.”

  Fifteen-hundred-year-old religious litanies were no less rigidly structured than these twice-a-week conversations on the way to and from therapy sessions.

  As they reached the bottom of the steps, the rain fell harder than before, rattling through the leaves of the potted plants on the patio, clicking against the bricks.

  Susan was reluctant to let go of the corner of the house.

  Martie put an arm around her. “Lean on me if you want.”

  Susan leaned. “Everything’s so strange out here, not like it used to be.”

  “Nothing’s changed. It’s just the storm.”

  “It’s a new world,” Susan disagreed. “And not a good one.”

  Huddling together, with Martie bending to match Susan’s stoop, they progressed through this new world, now in a rush as Susan was drawn forward by the prospect of the comparatively enclosed space of the car, but now haltingly as Susan was weighed down and nearly crushed by the infinite emptiness overhead. Whipped by wind and lashed by rain, shielded by their hoods and their billowing coats, they might have been two frightened holy sisters, in full habit, desperately seeking sanctuary in the early moments of Armageddon.

  Evidently Martie was affected either by the turbulence of the incoming storm or by her troubled friend, because as they proceeded fitfully along the promenade toward the side street where she had parked her car, she became increasingly aware of a strangeness in the day that was easy to perceive but difficult to define. On the concrete promenade, puddles like black mirrors swarmed with images so shattered by falling rain that their true appearance could not be discerned, yet they disquieted Martie. Thrashing palm trees clawed the air with fronds that had darkened from green to green-black, producing a thrum-hiss-rattle that resonated with a primitive and reckless passion deep inside her. On their right, the sand was smooth and pale, like the skin of some vast sleeping beast, and on their left, each house appeared to be filled with a storm of its own, as colorless images of roiling clouds and wind-tossed trees churned across the large ocean-view windows.

  Martie was unsettled by all these odd impressions of unnatural menace in the surrounding landscape, but she was more disturbed by a new strangeness within herself, which the storm seemed to conjure. Her heart quickened with an irrational desire to surrender to the sorcerous energy of this wild weather. Suddenly she was afraid of some dark potential she couldn’t define: afraid of losing control of herself, blacking out, and later coming to her senses, thereupon discovering she had done something terrible…something unspeakable.

  Until this morning, such bizarre thoughts had never occurred to her. Now they came in abundance.

  She remembered the unusually sour grapefruit juice that she’d drunk at breakfast, and she wondered if it had been tainted. She didn’t have a sick stomach; but maybe she was suffering from a strain of food poisoning that caused mental rather than physical symptoms.

  That was another bizarre thought. Tainted juice was no more likely an explanation than the possibility that the CIA was beaming messages into her brain via a microwave transmitter. If she continued down this twisty road of illogic, she’d soon be fashioning elaborate aluminum-foil hats to guard against long-distance brainwashing.

  By the time they descended the short flight of concrete steps from the beach promenade to the narrow street where the car was parked, Martie was drawing as much emotional support from Susan as she was giving, although she hoped Susan didn’t sense as much.

  Martie opened the curbside door, helped Susan into the red Saturn, and then went around and got in the driver’s seat.

  Rain drummed on the roof, a cold and hollow sound that brought hoofbeats to mind, as though the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death—were approaching at full gallop along the nearby beach.

  Martie pulled back her hood. She fished in one coat pocket and then in the other until she found her keys.

  In the passenger seat, Susan remained hooded, head bowed, hands fisted against her cheeks, eyes squeezed shut, and face pinched, as if the Saturn were in one of those hydraulic car crushers, about to be squashed into a three-foot cube.

  Martie’s attention fixed on the car key, which was the same one she had always used, yet suddenly the point seemed wickedly sharp, as never before. The serrations resembled those on a bread knife, which then reminded her of the mezzaluna in Susan’s kitchen.

  This simple key was a potential weapon. Crazily, Martie’s mind clotted with images of the bloody damage a car key could inflict.

  “What’s wrong?” Susan asked, though she had not opened her eyes.

  Thrusting the key into the ignition, struggling to conceal her inner turmoil, Martie said, “Couldn’t find my key. It’s okay. I’ve got it now.”

  The engine caught, roared. When Martie locked herself into her safety harness, her hands were shaking so badly that the hard plastic clasp and the metal tongue on the belt chattered together like a pair of windup, novelty-store teeth before she finally engaged the latch.

  “What if something happens to me out here and I can’t get home again?” Susan worried.

  “I’ll take care of you,” Martie pr
omised, although in light of her own peculiar state of mind, the promise might prove empty.

  “But what if something happens to you?”

  “Nothing is going to happen to me,” Martie vowed as she switched on the windshield wipers.

  “Something can happen to anybody. Look at what happened to me.”

  Martie pulled away from the curb, drove to the end of the short street, and turned left onto Balboa Boulevard. “Hold tight. You’ll be in the doctor’s office soon.”

  “Not if we’re in an accident,” Susan fretted.

  “I’m a good driver.”

  “The car might break down.”

  “The car’s fine.”

  “It’s raining hard. If the streets flood—”

  “Or maybe we’ll be abducted by big slimy Martians,” Martie said. “Be taken up to the mother ship, forced to breed with hideous squidlike creatures.”

  “The streets do flood here on the peninsula,” Susan said defensively.

  “This time of year, Big Foot hides out around the pier, bites the heads off the unwary. We better hope we don’t have a breakdown in that area.”

  “You’re vicious,” Susan complained.

  “I’m mean as hell,” Martie confirmed.

  “Cruel. You are. I mean it.”

  “I’m loathsome.”

  “Take me home.”

  “No.”

  “I hate you.”

  “I love you anyway,” Martie said.

  “Oh, shit,” Susan said miserably. “I love you, too.”

  “Hang in there.”

  “This is so hard.”

  “I know, honey.”

  “What if we run out of fuel?”

  “The tank’s full.”

  “I can’t breathe out here. I can’t breathe.”

  “Sooz, you’re breathing.”

  “But the air’s like a…sludge. And I’m having chest pains. My heart.”

  “What I’ve got is a pain in the ass,” Martie said. “Guess its name.”

  “You’re a mean bitch.”

  “That’s old news.”

  “I hate you.”

  “I love you,” Martie said patiently.

  Susan began to cry. She buried her face in her hands. “I can’t go on like this.”

  “It’s not much farther.”

  “I hate myself.”

  Martie frowned. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever.”

  “I hate what I’ve become. This frightened, quivering thing I’ve become.”

  Martie’s eyes clouded with tears of pity. She blinked furiously to clear her vision.

  From off the cold Pacific, waves of black clouds washed across the sky, as though the tide of night were turning and would drown this bleak new day. Virtually all the oncoming traffic, northbound on Pacific Coast Highway, approached behind headlights that silvered the wet blacktop.

  Martie’s perception of unnatural menace had passed. The rainy day no longer seemed in the least strange. In fact, the world was so achingly beautiful, so right in every detail, that although she was no longer afraid of anything in it, she was terribly afraid of losing it.

  Despairing, Susan said, “Martie, can you remember me…the way I used to be?”

  “Yes. Vividly.”

  “I can’t. Some days I can’t remember me any other way but how I am now. I’m scared, Martie. Not just of going outside, out of the house. I’m scared of…all the years ahead.”

  “We’ll get through this together,” Martie assured her, “and there’ll be a lot of good years.”

  Massive phoenix palms lined the entrance road to Fashion Island, Newport Beach’s premier shopping and business center. In the wind, the trees, like agitated lions preparing to roar, shook their great green manes.

  Dr. Mark Ahriman’s suite of offices was on the fourteenth floor of one of the tall buildings that surrounded the sprawling, low-rise shopping plaza. Getting Susan from the parking lot to the lobby and then across what seemed like acres of polished granite into an elevator was not as arduous a trek as Frodo’s journey from the peaceful Shire to the land called Mordor, there to destroy the Great Ring of Power—but Martie was nonetheless relieved when the doors slid shut and the cab purred upward.

  “Almost safe,” Susan murmured, gaze fixed on the indicator board inset in the transom above the doors, watching the light move from number to number, toward 14, where sanctuary waited.

  Though entirely enclosed and alone with Martie, Susan never felt secure in the elevator. Consequently, Martie kept one arm around her, aware that from Susan’s troubled point of view, the fourteenth-floor elevator alcove and the corridors beyond it—even the psychiatrist’s waiting room—were also hostile territories harboring uncountable threats. Every public space, regardless of how small and sheltered, was an open space in the sense that anyone could enter at any time. She felt safe only in two places: in her home on the peninsula—and in Dr. Ahriman’s private office, where even the dramatic panoramic view of the coastline did not alarm her.

  “Almost safe,” Susan repeated as the elevator doors slid open at the fourteenth floor.

  Curiously, Martie thought of Frodo again, from The Lord of the Rings. Frodo in the tunnel that was a secret entrance to the evil land of Mordor. Frodo confronting the guardian of the tunnel, the spiderlike monster Shelob. Frodo stung by the beast, apparently dead, but actually paralyzed and set aside to be devoured later.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” Susan whispered urgently. For the first time since leaving her apartment, she was eager to proceed.

  Inexplicably, Martie wanted to pull her friend back into the elevator, descend to the lobby, and return to the car.

  Once more she sensed a disquieting strangeness in the mundane scene around her, as if this were not the ordinary elevator alcove that it appeared to be, but was in fact the tunnel where Frodo and his companion Sam Gamgee had confronted the great pulsing, many-eyed spider.

  Responding to a sound behind her, she turned with dread, half expecting to see Shelob looming. The elevator door was rolling shut. Nothing more than that.

  In her imagination, a membrane between dimensions had ruptured, and the world of Tolkien was seeping inexorably into Newport Beach. Maybe she had been working too long and too hard on the video-game adaptation. In her obsession with doing honor to The Lord of the Rings, and in her mental exhaustion, was she confusing reality and fantasy?

  No. Not that. The truth was something less fantastic but equally strange.

  Then Martie caught a glimpse of herself in the glass panel that covered a wall niche containing an emergency fire hose. Immediately, she turned away, rattled by the razor-sharp anxiety in her face. Her features appeared jagged, with deep slashes for laugh lines, a mouth like a scar; her eyes were wounds. This unflattering expression was not what made her look away. Something else. Worse. Something to which she couldn’t quite put a name.

  What’s happening to me?

  “Let’s go,” Susan said more insistently than before. “Martie, what’s wrong? Let’s go.”

  Reluctantly, Martie accompanied Susan out of the alcove. They turned left into the corridor.

  Susan took heart from her mantra—“almost safe, almost safe”—but Martie found no comfort in it.

  8

  As the wind stripped wet leaves off trees and as cataracts gushed along gutters toward half-clogged street drains, Dusty drove down through the Newport hills.

  “I’m soaked. I’m cold,” Skeet complained.

  “Me too. Fortunately, we’re high-order primates with lots of gadgets.” Dusty switched on the heater.

  “I screwed up,” Skeet mumbled.

  “Who, you?”

  “I always screw up.”

  “Everybody’s good at something.”

  “Are you angry with me?”

  “Right now I’m sick to death of you,” Dusty said honestly.

  “Do you hate me?”

  “No.”

  Skeet sighed and slid down farther in
his seat. In his boneless slump, as a faint steam rose off his clothes, he looked less like a man than like a pile of damp laundry. His chafed and swollen eyelids drooped shut. His mouth sagged open. He appeared to be asleep.

  The sky pressed down, as gray-black as wet ashes and char. The rain wasn’t the usual glittering silver, but dark and dirty, as if nature were a scrubwoman wringing out a filthy mop.

  Dusty drove east and south, out of Newport Beach, into the city of Irvine. He hoped that the New Life Clinic, a drug-and-alcohol-rehabilitation facility, would have an open bed.

  Skeet had been in rehab twice before, once at New Life six months ago. He came out clean, sincerely intending to stay that way. After each course of therapy, however, he gradually slid backward.

  Until now he’d never gotten low enough to try suicide. Perhaps, from this new depth, he’d realize that he was facing his last chance.

  Without lifting his chin from his chest, Skeet said, “Sorry…back there on the roof. Sorry I forgot which one was your dad. Dr. Decon. It’s just that I’m so wrecked.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve been trying to forget him most of my life.”

  “You remember my dad, I’ll bet.”

  “Dr. Holden Caulfield, professor of literature.”

  “He’s a real bastard,” Skeet said.

  “They all are. She’s attracted to bastards.”

  Skeet slowly raised his head, as though it were a massive weight elevated by a complex system of powerful hydraulic lifts. “Holden Caulfield’s not even his real name.”

  Dusty braked at a red traffic signal and regarded Skeet with skepticism. The name, identical to that of the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye, seemed too pat to have been an invention.

  “He changed it legally when he was twenty-one,” Skeet said. “Sam Farner was his born name.”

  “Is this stoned talk or true talk?”

  “True,” Skeet said. “Old Sam’s dad was a career military man. Colonel Thomas Jackson Farner. His mom, Luanne, she taught nursery school. Old Sam had a falling-out with them—after the colonel and Luanne finished putting him through