by Dean Koontz
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.”
50
After they went through the enabling litany of Dusty’s personal haiku, Dr. Ahriman escorted him into the office and led him directly to the armchair in which Martie had been seated earlier. She slept upon the couch, and Dusty didn’t glance at her.
Ahriman sat in the facing armchair and studied his subject for a minute. The man had a slightly detached attitude, but he responded immediately to the doctor’s voice. His passive expression was nothing stranger than the looks one saw on the faces of motorists caught in the boredom of bumper-to-bumper, rush-hour traffic.
Dustin Rhodes was a relatively new acquisition in the Ahriman collection. He had been fully controlled by the doctor less than two months.
Martie herself, operating under the doctor’s guidance, on three occasions had served to her husband the meticulously blended dose of drugs required to slip him into the twilight sleep that allowed him to be effectively programmed: Rohypnol; phencyclidine; Valium; and a substance known—although only to a few cognoscenti—as Santa Fe #46. Because Dusty always had dessert with dinner, the first dose had come in a slice of peanut butter pie; the second, two nights later, lent neither flavor nor odor to a bowl of crème brûlée with a crown of toasted coconut curls; the third, three nights after the second, would have been undetectable to a bloodhound, tucked away in an ice-cream sundae topped with fudge sauce, maraschino cherries, almonds, and chopped dates.
The man knew how to eat. As regarded culinary preferences, at least, the doctor felt a certain kinship with him.
The programming had been conducted in the Rhodeses’ bedroom: Dusty on the bed, Martie sitting cross-legged and out of the way on the big sheepskin pillow in the corner, a floor lamp serving as an IV rack. All had gone well.
The dog wanted to be a problem but was too sweet and obedient to do more than growl and sulk. They shut him away in Martie’s study with a bowl of water, a yellow Booda duck with a squeaking tummy, and a Nylabone.
Now, after a seizure of REM passed out of Dusty’s eyes, Dr. Ahriman said, “This won’t take long, but my instructions today are very important.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Martie will return here for an appointment on Friday, the day after tomorrow, and you will arrange your schedule to be able to bring her. Tell me if this is clear.”
“Yes. Clear.”
“Now. You surprised me yesterday—all your heroics at the Sorensons’ house. That was not according to my plan. In the future, if you are present when your brother Skeet attempts suicide, you will not interfere. You may make some effort to talk him out of it, but you’ll do nothing but talk, and in the end you will allow Skeet to destroy himself. Tell me if you understand.”
“I understand.”
“When he does destroy himself, you will be utterly devastated. And angry. Oh, enraged. You will give yourself completely to your emotions. You’ll know at whom to direct your rage, because the name will be there in the suicide note. We’ll discuss this further on Friday.”
“Yes, sir.”
Always one to find time for some fun, even when he had a busy schedule, the doctor glanced at Martie on the couch, and then turned his attention to Dusty. “Your wife is succulent, don’t you think?”
“Do I?”
“Whether you do or not, I think she is a succulent piece.”
Dusty’s eyes were primarily gray, but with blue striations that made them unique. As a boy, Ahriman had been a marble collector, with many sacks of fine glass shooters, and he had owned three that had been similar to, but not as lustrous as, Dusty’s eyes. Martie found her husband’s eyes particularly beautiful, which was why the doctor had gotten such a kick out of implanting the suggestion that her autophobia would really begin to get a grip on her when she had a sudden vision of sticking a key into one of those beloved eyes.
“On this subject,” Ahriman said, “no more curt answers. Let’s have a ge
nuine discussion of your wife’s succulence.”
Dusty’s gaze was fixed not on Ahriman, but on a point in the air midway between them, as he said with no inflection whatsoever, as flatly as a machine might speak, “Succulent, I guess, meaning juicy.”
“Exactly,” the doctor confirmed.
“Grapes are juicy. Strawberries. Oranges. Good pork chops are succulent,” said Dusty. “But the word isn’t…accurately descriptive of a person.”
Smiling with delight, Ahriman said, “Oh, really—not accurately descriptive? Be careful, housepainter. Your genes are showing. What if I were a cannibal?”
Unable, in this state, to answer a question with anything but a request for further information, Dusty asked, “Are you a cannibal?”
“If I were a cannibal, I might be accurately descriptive when calling your tasty wife succulent. Enlighten me with your opinion of that, Mr. Dustin Penn Rhodes.”
Dusty’s emotionless tone of voice remained unchanged, but now it seemed drily pedantic, much to the doctor’s amusement. “From a cannibalistic point of view, the word works.”
“I’m afraid that under all your blue-collar earthiness lurks a droning professor.”
Dusty said nothing, but his eyes jiggled with REM.
“Well, though I’m no cannibal,” said Ahriman, “I think your wife is succulent. From now on, in fact, I’ll have a new pet name for her. She’ll be my little pork chop.”
The doctor concluded the session with the usual instructions not to retain any conscious or any accessible subconscious memory of what had transpired between them. Then: “You will return to the outgoing waiting room, Dusty. Pick up the book that you were reading and sit where you were sitting before. Find the point in the text where you were interrupted. Then, in your mind, you’ll leave the chapel where you are now. As you close the chapel door, all recollection of what happened from the moment I stepped out of my office, just after you heard the click of the latch, until you wake from your current state, will have been erased. Then, counting slowly to ten, you’ll ascend the stairs from the chapel. When you reach ten, you will regain full consciousness—and continue reading.”
“I understand.”
“Have a good afternoon, Dusty.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Dusty rose from his armchair and crossed the office, not once glancing at his wife upon the couch.
When the mister was gone, the doctor went to the missus and stood studying her. Succulent, indeed.
He dropped to one knee beside the couch, kissed each of her closed eyes, and said, “My pork chop.”
This, of course, had no effect, but it gave the doctor a laugh.
Another kiss to each eye. “Princess.”
She woke but was still in the mind chapel, not yet permitted full consciousness.
At Ahriman’s instruction, she returned to the armchair in which she had been sitting earlier.
Settling into his chair, he said, “Martie, through the rest of the afternoon and early evening, you will feel somewhat more at peace than you have been during the past twenty-four hours. Your autophobia hasn’t disappeared, but it has relented a bit. For a while, you’ll be troubled only by a low-grade uneasiness, a sense of fragility, and brief spells of sharper fear at the rate of about one an hour, each only a minute or two in duration. But later, at about…oh, at about nine o’clock, you will experience your worst panic attack yet. It’ll begin in the usual way, escalate as before—but suddenly through your mind will pass the dead and tortured people we studied together, all the stabbed and shot and mutilated bodies, the decomposing cadavers, and you’ll become convinced, against all reason, that you personally are responsible for what happened to them, that your hands committed all this torture and murder. Your hands. Your hands. Tell me if you understand what I have said.”
“My hands.”
“I leave the details of your big moment to you. You’ve certainly got the raw materials for it.”
“I understand.”
Sizzling passion eyes. Simmer in broth of eros. My juicy pork chop.
Haiku with culinary metaphor. This was nothing the masters of Japanese verse were likely to endorse, but although the doctor respected the demandingly formal structures of haiku, he was enough of a free spirit to make his own rules from time to time.
Dusty was reading about Dr. Yen Lo and the team of dedicated Communist mind-control specialists who were screwing with the brains of the hapless American soldiers, when suddenly he exclaimed, “What the hell is this,” referring to the paperback that he was holding in his hands.
He nearly pitched The Manchurian Candidate across the waiting room, but checked himself. Instead, he dropped it on the little table next to his chair, shaking his right hand as though the book had burnt him.
He sprang to his feet and stood looking down at the damn thing. He was no less shocked and spooked than he would have been if an evil sorcerer’s curse had transformed the novel into a rattlesnake.
When he dared to look away from the book, he glanced at the door to Dr. Ahriman’s office. Closed. It looked as though it had been closed since time immemorial. As formidable as a stone monolith.
The squeak of the lever-action handle, the click of the latch: He had clearly heard both those sounds. Embarrassment, alarm, shame, a sense of danger. Inexplicably, those feelings and more had crackled through him as quick as an electric arc snapping across a tiny gap in a circuit: Don’t be caught reading this! Reflexively, he had tossed the book on the table, and because its shiny cover was slippery, it had sailed right off the granite top. The door had done its pop-sigh vacuum thing, and he had started to shoot to his feet as the book hit the floor with a plop, and then…
…and then the novel was back in his hand, and he was reading, sitting in his chair, as if the squeak-click-pop-sigh-plop moment of alarm had never happened. Maybe his entire life, from birth to death, was on a videotape up there in kingdom come, where one of the celestial editors had rewound it a few seconds, to the moment immediately before the sounds of the door had alarmed him, erasing all those events from his past but forgetting to erase his memory of them. Apparently, an apprentice editor with a lot to learn.
Magic. Dusty recalled the fantasy novels in Skeet’s apartment. Wizards, warlocks, necromancers, sorcerers, spellcasters. This was the kind of experience that made you believe in magic—or question your sanity.
He reached for the book on the table, where he had dropped it—for the second time?—and then he hesitated. He poked the book with one finger, but it didn’t hiss or open an eye and wink at him.
He picked it up, turned it wonderingly in his hands, and then riffled the pages across his thumb.
That sound reminded him of a deck of cards being snap-shuffled, which reminded him, in turn, that the brainwashed American soldier in the novel, the one programmed to be an assassin, was activated when handed a pack of cards and asked Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire? To be effective, the question had to be asked in exactly those words. The guy then played solitaire until he turned up the queen of diamonds, whereupon his subconscious mind became accessible to his controller, making him ready to receive his instructions.
Gazing thoughtfully at the paperback, Dusty let the edges of the pages fan across his thumb again.
He sat down, still thoughtful. Still thumbing the pages.
What he had here wasn’t magic. What he had here was another bit of missing time, only a few seconds, shorter even than his moment on the phone in the kitchen, the previous day.
Shorter?
Was it really?
He consulted his wristwatch. Maybe not shorter. He couldn’t be sure, because he hadn’t checked the time since reading the first words of the novel. Maybe he had been zoned out for a few seconds or maybe for ten minutes, even longer.
Missing time.
What sense did this make?
None.
Energized by gut instinct, mind spinnin
g along a trail of logic twistier than the human intestinal tract, he couldn’t concentrate on Condon’s novel right now. He crossed the room to the coatrack and tucked the book in his own jacket rather than in Martie’s.
From another jacket pocket, he withdrew his phone.
Instead of activating the brainwashed, programmed person with a precisely worded question—Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?—why not activate him with a name? Dr. Yen Lo.
Instead of the deep subconscious becoming accessible to the controller upon the appearance of the queen of diamonds…why not access it by the recitation of a few lines of poetry? Haiku.
Pacing, Dusty entered Ned Motherwell’s mobile number.
Ned answered on the fifth ring. He was still at the Sorensons’ house. “Couldn’t paint today, still damp from the rain, but we’ve done a lot of prep work. Hell, Fig and I have gotten more done today, just us, than we get done in two days with that hopeless little turd hanging around, smacked on one kind of dope or another.”
“Skeet’s doing fine,” Dusty said. “Thanks for asking.”
“I hope wherever you took him, they’re kicking his skinny ass around the clock.”
“Absolutely. I checked him into Our Lady of the Ass-Kickers Hospital.”
“There ought to be such a place.”
“I’m sure if Straight Edgers take over the church, there’ll be one in every town. Listen, Ned, can you let Fig close up the job today while you do something for me?”
“Sure. Fig isn’t a dope-sucking, self-destructive, walking scrotum. Fig is reliable.”
“Has he seen Big Foot recently?”
“If he ever said he did, I’d believe him.”
“Me, too,” Dusty admitted.
He told Ned Motherwell what he needed to have done, and they agreed on when and where to meet.
After terminating the call, Dusty clipped the phone to his belt. He checked his watch. Almost three o’clock. He sat down again.
Two minutes later, hunched forward in his chair, forearms on his thighs, hands clasped between his knees, staring at the black granite floor, Dusty was thinking so hard that the wax should have been blown out of his ears with the velocity of bullets. When the lever-action handle squeaked and the latch clicked, he twitched but didn’t explode to his feet.
Martie came out of the office first, smiling prettily, and Dusty rose to greet her, smiling less prettily, and Dr. Ahriman entered the waiting room behind her, smiling paternally, and maybe Dusty smiled a little more prettily when he saw the psychiatrist, because the man virtually radiated competence and compassion and confidence and all sorts of good stuff.
“Excellent session,” Dr. Ahriman assured Dusty. “We’re already making progress. I believe Martie is going to respond brilliantly to therapy, I really do.”
“Thank God,” Dusty said, getting Martie’s jacket from the rack.
“Not to say there won’t be difficult times ahead,” the doctor cautioned. “Perhaps even worse panic attacks than any heretofore. This is, after all, a rare and challenging phobia. But whatever short-term setbacks there may be, I’m absolutely sure that in the long term there will be a complete cure.”
“Long term?” Dusty asked, but not worriedly, because no one could be worried in the presence of the doctor’s confident smile.
“Not more than a few months,” Dr. Ahriman said, “perhaps much more quickly. These things have clocks of their own, and we can’t set them. But there’s every reason to be optimistic. I’m not even going to consider a medication component at this time, just therapy for a week or two, and then see where we are.”
Dusty almost mentioned the prescription for Valium that Dr. Closterman had issued, but Martie spoke first.
Shrugging into her black leather jacket as Dusty held it for her, she said, “Honey, I feel pretty good. Really much, much better. I really do.”
“Friday morning. Ten o’clock appointment,” Dr. Ahriman reminded them.
“We’ll be here,” Dusty assured him.
Smiling, nodding, Ahriman said, “I’m certain you will.”
When the doctor retreated to his inner office and closed the heavy door, a measure of warmth went out of the waiting room. A little chill came in from somewhere.
“He’s really a great psychiatrist,” Martie said.
Zipping up his jacket, Dusty said, “He’s deeply committed to his patients,” and though he was smiling and still felt good, some cranky part of him wondered
