False Memory

by Dean Koontz

  And then Fig: “Dr. Yen Lo.”

  Skeet surveyed the expectant faces around him, including that of the dog, who had stood up with his forepaws on the table. “What is this, a riddle, a quiz or something? Was this Lo some guy in history? I was never any good at history.”

  “Well,” said Fig.

  “Clear cascades,” Dusty said.

  Baffled, Skeet said, “Sounds like a dish-washing soap.”

  At least the first part of the plan had worked. Skeet was no longer programmed, no longer controllable.

  Only the passage of time would prove, however, whether or not Dusty’s second goal had also been achieved: Skeet’s liberation from his tortured past.

  Dusty pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. To Skeet, he said, “Get up.”

  “Huh?”

  “Come on, bro, get up.”

  Letting the clinic blanket slip off his shoulders, the kid rose from the chair. He looked like a stick-and-straw scarecrow wearing a fat man’s pajamas.

  Dusty put his arms around his brother and held him very tight, very tight, and when at last he could speak, he said, “Before we go, I’ll give you some money for vanilla Yoo-hoo, okay?”

  62

  The wheel of luck was turning. Two seats on United, out of John Wayne International Airport, to Santa Fe by way of Denver, were available on an early-morning flight. Using a credit card, Dusty secured the tickets from the phone in Fig Newton’s kitchen.

  “Gun?” Fig asked, a few minutes later, as Dusty and Martie were at the front door, preparing to leave brother and dog in his care.

  “What about it?” Dusty asked.

  “Need one?”

  “No.”

  “Think you will,” Fig disagreed.

  “Please tell me you don’t have an arsenal big enough to start a war,” Martie said, clearly wondering if Foster Newton was something more troubling than a mere eccentric.

  “Don’t,” Fig assured her.

  “Anyway, I’ve got this,” Dusty said, drawing the customized .45 Colt Commander from his jacket.

  “Flying, aren’t you?” Fig said.

  “I’m not going to try to carry it on the plane. I’ll pack it in one of our suitcases.”

  “Might get random scanned,” Fig warned.

  “Even if the baggage isn’t carry-on?”

  “Lately, yeah.”

  “Even on short-haul flights?”

  “Even,” Fig insisted.

  “It’s all these terrorist events recently. Everyone’s nervous, and the FAA’s issued some new crisis rules,” Skeet explained.

  Dusty and Martie regarded him with no less astonishment than they would have shown if he had suddenly opened a third eye in the center of his forehead. Subscribing to the philosophical contention that reality sucks, Skeet never read a newspaper, never tuned in to television or radio news.

  Recognizing the source of their amazement, Skeet shrugged and said, “Well, anyway, that’s what I overheard one dealer telling another.”

  “Dealer?” Martie asked. “Like in drug dealer?”

  “Not blackjack. I don’t gamble.”

  “Drug dealers sit around talking current events?”

  “I think this impacted their courier business. They were ticked off about it.”

  To Fig, Dusty said, “So how random is random scanning? One bag in ten? One in five?”

  “Maybe some flights, five percent.”

  “Well, then—”

  “Maybe others, a hundred percent.”

  Looking at the pistol in his hand, Dusty said, “It’s a legal gun—but I don’t have a permit to carry.”

  “And crossing state lines,” Fig warned.

  “Even worse, huh?”

  “Not better.” Winking one owlish eye, he added: “But I have something.”

  Fig disappeared into back rooms of the trailer but returned only a minute later, carrying a box. From the box, he extracted a gleaming toy truck. With a swipe of one hand, he spun the wheels. “Vrooooom! Transport.”

  From black sky, black wind. Black, the windows of the house. Does wind live within?

  On the back porch of the Rhodeses’ miniature Victorian, which Ahriman found too precious for his taste, he hesitated at the door, listening to the maraca rhythms of the shaken trees in the night, and to the black-wind haiku in his mind, pleased with himself.

  When he’d first come here to conduct programming sessions with Dusty, a couple months ago, he had acquired one of the Rhodeses’ spare house keys, just as he had kept a key to Susan’s apartment. Now he stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind him.

  If the wind lived here, it wasn’t home. This blackness was warm and still. No one else was in residence, either, not even the golden retriever.

  Accustomed to a royal right of passage in the homes of those whom he ruled, he boldly switched on the kitchen lights.

  He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he was confident that he would recognize it when he saw it.

  Almost at once, a discovery. A padded mailing envelope, torn open, discarded on the dinette table. His attention was snared by the return address on the label: Dr. Roy Closterman.

  Because of Ahriman’s spectacular success both in his practice and with his books, because he had inherited considerable wealth and was a figure of envy, because he did not suffer fools well, because he was more disposed to feel contempt rather than admiration for others in the healing community, whose self-congratulatory codes of ethics and dogmatic views he found suffocating, and for a number of other reasons, he made few friends but more than a few enemies among fellow physicians in every specialty. Consequently, he would have been surprised if the Rhodeses’ internist had not been one of those harboring a negative opinion of him. That they were patients of the self-beatified Saint Closterman, therefore, was only marginally more troublesome than if they had consulted one of the other doctors to whom Ahriman disdainfully referred as pokers-and-prodders.

  What concerned him was a handwritten message that lay with the torn envelope. The note was on Closterman’s stationary, signed by him.

  My receptionist passes your place on her way home, so I’ve asked her to drop this off. I thought you might find Dr. Ahriman’s latest book of interest. Perhaps you’ve never read him.

  Here was another wild card.

  Dr. Ahriman folded the note and pocketed it.

  The volume to which Closterman referred was not here. If it was truly the latest, then it must have been a hardcover copy of Learn to Love Yourself.

  The doctor was pleased to know that even his enemies contributed to his book royalties.

  Nevertheless, when this crisis had been resolved, Ahriman would have to turn his attention to Saint Closterman. Some balance could be restored to the boyfriend’s head by clipping from it the remaining ear. From Closterman himself, perhaps the middle finger of the right hand could be removed, reducing his capacity to make vulgar gestures; a saint should not object to being relieved of a digit that had such obscene potential.

  The fire truck—five inches wide, five inches high, and twelve inches long—was constructed of pressed metal. Nicely detailed, hand-painted, made in Holland by craftsmen with pride and flair, it would charm any child.

  Sitting at the dining table, as his guests gathered around to watch, Fig used a tiny screwdriver with a quarter-inch head to remove eight brass screws, detaching the body of the truck from the base frame and wheels.

  Inside the truck was a small felt bag of the type used to pack a pair of shoes in a suitcase to prevent rubbing.

  “Gun,” Fig said.

  Dusty gave the .45 Colt to him.

  Fig wrapped the compact pistol in the shoe bag so it wouldn’t rattle, and he placed the bag inside the hollow body of the fire truck. If the weapon had been much larger, they would have needed a bigger truck.

  “Spare magazine?” Fig asked.

  “I don’t have one,” Dusty said.

  “Should.”

  “
Don’t.”

  Fig reattached the body of the truck to the base, taped the little screwdriver to the underside, and handed it to Dusty. “Let ’em scan.”

  “Lay it on its side in a suitcase, and it makes a recognizable toy-truck silhouette on an X ray,” Martie said admiringly.

  “There you go,” Fig said.

  “They wouldn’t make anyone open a bag to inspect anything like that.”

  “Nope.”

  “We could probably even take this in a carry-on,” Dusty said.

  “Better.”

  “Better?” Martie said. “Well, yeah, because sometimes airlines lose the luggage you don’t carry.”

  Fig nodded. “Exactly.”

  “You ever use this yourself?” Skeet asked.

  “Never,” said Fig.

  “Then why do you have it?”

  “Just in case.”

  Turning the fire truck over in his hands, Dusty said, “You’re a strange man, Foster Newton.”

  “Thanks,” said Fig. “Kevlar body armor?”

  “Huh?”

  “Kevlar. Bulletproof.”

  “Bulletproof vests?” Dusty said.

  “Got ’em?”

  “No.”

  “Want ’em?”

  “You have body armor?” Martie marveled.

  “Sure.”

  Skeet said, “You ever needed it, Fig?”

  “Not yet,” said Fig.

  Martie shook her head. “Next you’ll be offering us an alien death-ray pistol.”

  “Don’t have one,” Fig said with evident disappointment.

  “We’ll skip the body armor,” Dusty said. “They might notice how bulked up we look going through airport security.”

  “Might,” Fig agreed, taking him seriously.

  The doctor found nothing more to engage him downstairs. Though he had a lively interest in the arts and interior design, he didn’t pause to admire even one painting, article of furniture, or objet d’art. The decor left him cold.

  In the bedroom were signs of a hasty departure. Two dresser drawers weren’t closed. A closet door stood open. A sweater lay discarded on the floor.

  On a closer inspection of the closet, he saw two matched pieces of luggage stored overhead on a shelf. Beside those two was an empty space where two smaller bags might have been shelved.

  Another bedroom and bath provided no clues, and then he came to Martie’s office.

  Busy blue-eyed girl. Busy making Hobbit games. Death waits in Mordor.

  Across her large U-shaped work area were stacked books, maps of fantasy lands, sketches of characters, and other materials related to her project based on The Lord of the Rings. Ahriman took more time examining these items than was warranted, indulging his enthusiasm for anything to do with games.

  As he pored through the computer-assisted designs for Hobbits and Orcs and other creatures, the doctor realized one reason why he was able to compose routinely better haiku about Martie than he’d been able to write when Susan and other women were his inspiration. He and Martie shared this gaming interest. She liked the power of being the game master, as did he. At least this one aspect of her mind resonated in sympathy with his.

  He wondered if, in time, he might discover other attitudes and passions they shared. Once they were past the current regrettable ferment in their relationship, how ironic it would be to learn that they were fated to have a more complex future together than he had ever envisioned, distracted as he had been by Susan’s exceptional beauty and by Martie’s family connections.

  The sweet sentimentalist in Ahriman delighted at the thought of falling in love or at least in something like it. Although his life was full and his habits long established, he would not be averse to the complication of romance.

  Proceeding from desktop to desk drawers, he felt now less like a detective than like a naughty lover leafing through his darling’s diary in search of the most guarded secrets of her heart.

  In a bank of three drawers, he found nothing to interest either a detective or a lover. In the wide but shallow center drawer, however, among rulers and pencils and erasers and the like, he came upon a microcassette on which SUSAN had been printed in red letters.

  He felt what a gifted Gypsy might feel when tipping a mess of tea leaves on a plate and glimpsing a particularly ominous fate in the soggy patterns: a chill that turned the pia mater of his spine into a membrane of ice.

  He searched the remaining drawers for a tape recorder that would accept the microcassette. Martie didn’t have one.

  When he saw the answering machine on one corner of the desk, he realized what he held in his hand.

  The aluminum awning, vibrating in the wind, had the guttural growl of a living beast, as though in the night something hungry waited for Dusty to open the trailer door.

  “If the weather forecasts can be believed, the rest of the week is going to be a mess,” he told Fig. “Don’t even try to go out to the Sorenson job. Just look after Skeet and Valet for me.”

  “Till when?” Fig asked.

  “I don’t know. Depends on what we find out there. Probably be back the day after tomorrow, Friday. But maybe Saturday.”

  “We’ll keep ourselves entertained,” Fig promised.

  “We’ll play some cards,” Skeet said.

  “And monitor shortwave frequencies for alien code bursts,” Fig said, in what was for him the equivalent of an oration.

  “Listen to talk radio, I bet,” Skeet predicted.

  “Hey,” Fig said to Skeet, “you want to blow up a courthouse?”

  Martie said, “Whoa.”

  “Joke,” said Fig, with an owlish wink.

  “Bad one,” she advised.

  Outside, as Dusty and Martie descended the steps and crossed the small porch, the wind tore at them, and all the way to the car, large dead-brown magnolia leaves scuttled like rats at their feet.

  Behind them, out of the open door of the trailer came a piercing and pathetic whine from Valet, as though canine precognition told him that he would never see them again.

  The indicator window on the answering machine showed two waiting messages. Dr. Ahriman decided to listen to these before reviewing the cassette labeled SUSAN.

  The first call was from Martie’s mother. She sounded frantic to find out what was wrong, to learn why her previous calls had not been returned.

  The second voice on the tape was that of a woman who identified herself as an airline ticket agent. “Mr. Rhodes, I neglected to ask for the expiration date on your credit card. If you get this message, would you please call me back with the information? She provided an 800 number. “But if I don’t hear from you, your two tickets to Santa Fe will still be waiting for you in the morning.”

  Dr. Ahriman marveled at their having focused so quickly on the central importance of his New Mexico days. Martie and Dusty seemed to be supernatural adversaries…until he realized that the Santa Fe connection must have been made for them by Saint Closterman.

  Nevertheless, the doctor’s slow and steady pulse, which even during the commission of murder was seldom elevated by more than ten beats per minute, accelerated upon the receipt of this news regarding the Rhodeses’ travel plans.

  With an athlete’s intimate awareness of his body, ever sensitive to the maintenance of good health, the doctor sat down again, took several deep breaths, and then consulted his wristwatch to time his pulse. Usually, when he was seated, his rate ranged between sixty and sixty-two beats per minute, because he was in exceptional condition. Now, he counted seventy, a full eight-point elevation, and with no dead woman handy to credit for it.

  In the car, as Dusty went in search of a hotel near the airport, Martie at last phoned her mother.

  Sabrina was distraught and in full fluster. For minutes, she refused to believe that Martie was not injured or maimed, that she was not the victim of a traffic accident, a drive-by shooting, fire, lightning, a disgruntled postal employee, or that horrid flesh-eating bacteria that was in the news aga
in.

  As she listened to this rant, Martie was filled with a special tenderness that only her mother could evoke.

  Sabrina loved her sole child with a crazy intensity that would have made Martie a hopeless neurotic by the age of eleven, if she had not been so determinedly independent almost from the day that she took her first steps. But this world harbored worse things than crazy love. Crazy hate. Oh, lots of that. And just plain crazy, in abundance.

  Sabrina loved Smilin’ Bob no less than she loved her daughter. The loss of him, when he was only fifty-three, had made her more protective of Martie than ever. The probability of her husband and her daughter both dying young, of separate causes, might be as low as the chances of the earth being destroyed by an asteroid impact before morning, but cold statistics and insurance-company actuarial tables offered no consolation to a wounded and wary heart.

  Martie, therefore, wasn’t going to say a word to her mother about mind control, haiku, the Leaf Man, the priest with the spike through his head, severed ears, or the trip to Santa Fe. Given this overload of weird news, Sabrina’s anxiety would explode into hysteria.

  She wasn’t going to tell her mother about Susan Jagger, either, partly because she didn’t trust herself to talk about the loss of her friend without breaking down, but also because Sabrina had loved Susan almost like a daughter.