Sibs

by F. Paul Wilson

  "Is your car going to be here when we're through?" Kara asked, pointing to the sign.

  Rob in turn pointed to the vehicle identification card lying on his dashboard.

  "That lets me park anywhere. Come on. Let's get inside. It's freezing out here."

  Dr. Gates' receptionist appeared poised to leave, waiting only for their arrival.

  "He'll see you inside," she said, pointing to the closed consultation room door, and then she was out, locking the hall door behind her.

  Dr. Gates' face registered frank surprise when Kara walked in with Rob.

  "I expected you to come alone, Miss Wade," he said with that mysteriously accented voice.

  "Detective Harris is along as a friend," she said.

  "That is immaterial. I thought I made it clear to you that I will not discuss your sister's medical history with anyone but you. Especially not with the police."

  Kara sensed Rob bristling beside her. She gave his arm a quick squeeze.

  "I'm not here to discuss Kelly. I'm here to find out about myself. I want to know if I've got a second personality hiding within me as well."

  "Very well. Arrange a regular appointment and we'll begin therapy."

  Kara had expected that. But she had other ideas.

  "I can't wait that long, Dr. Gates. I need to know now. Today. I'm heading back to Pennsylvania tomorrow. If you won't help my today, I'll find somebody back there who will."

  "I can't possibly help you in one evening!" he said.

  "I don't want therapy, Dr. Gates. At least not until I have a diagnosis. And you said you could make that diagnosis through hypnotism."

  Dr. Gates was shaking his head. "No. It's much too risky."

  "What's the risk? Hypnotism is used in stage acts. I thought it was pretty safe."

  "In your case it might not be. If indeed you have a second personality akin to your twin's, it is most likely dormant. By attempting to reach it while you are under hypnotism, we run the risk of awakening it. You may or may not have a multiple personality, Miss Wade. If you do, it is presently a potential problem. I do not wish to be the one to turn it into an active problem."

  "He's got a point there, Kara," Rob said.

  Kara didn't look at him. She hadn't considered the possibility of awakening the someone else inside her. The very thought of it gave her a crawly feeling in her stomach. But she couldn't go on not knowing.

  Besides, there's no one in here but me.

  "It's a risk I'll have to take."

  Dr. Gates shook his head. "Then it's a risk you'll take without me."

  "Very well," Kara said. She turned and reached for the door knob. "But I'll find someone who will. And when I do, I'll have him drop you a line and let you know how it comes out. Come on, Rob."

  This was her ace play. She hoped he went for it. She was banking on the fact that the prospect of discovering a pair of twins, each with multiple personalities, would be too tempting for him to pass up. He wouldn't want to share the discovery with another shrink. He'd want it all for Lawrence Gates, M.D.

  But when he didn't call her back as she crossed the waiting room, she thought she had lost. She was reaching for the deadbolt knob on the door to the hall when she heard his voice behind her.

  "Wait. Come back. Please."

  Kara turned and faced him across the combined lengths of the waiting room and office, but did not move toward him.

  "I didn't think there was anything to discuss."

  He got up from behind his desk and approached her.

  "Are you really so set on going through with this?"

  "Absolutely."

  He pulled the door open wider and gestured to the chairs before his desk.

  "Come in and sit down. Please. There is much to discuss before we do anything."

  ▼

  Rob had to admit it, Kara was one cool character.

  Remind me never to play poker with you, lady, he thought as he watched her sit and deal with Gates.

  Rob didn't care how highly Doc Winters thought of Dr. Gates. Rob's antipathy after their brief meeting yesterday had been consolidated by today's lengthier encounter. The guy thought he had all the answers, like he talked to God every night.

  But there was more to it than that. Rob didn't trust him. He had no rational basis for the feeling but some primitive instinct deep inside warned him not to turn his back on Dr. Lawrence Gates, ne Lazlo Gati. Over the years, Rob had learned to trust his instincts.

  At least now he could explain that accent.

  He was glad he was here. He wouldn't want Kara to be alone with him, especially under hypnotism.

  "I hope I have made my position clear," he was saying.

  "Perfectly," Kara replied. "You've explained the risks backwards and forwards. I'm going into this with my eyes open. Detective Harris is a witness: I won't hold you responsible for anything that goes wrong."

  Dr. Gates looked at him with his cold, watery eyes.

  "Are you a witness to that, Detective Harris?"

  "Yes," he said. "But a reluctant one."

  "Ah!" Gates said, turning back to Kara. "Your friend shares my reservations."

  "Because I am her friend," Rob said.

  He hated this whole idea. It sounded risky to him. Why couldn't Kara leave well enough alone?"

  "I appreciate that," Kara said, glancing at him, "but neither of you have to live with the possibility of a 'Janine' hiding inside you. I do. And this is how I choose to deal with it. Enough said."

  Gates shrugged. "Very well. Detective Harris, if you'll excuse us, I'll begin the—"

  "I'm staying," Rob said. "I'm her witness."

  Gates' eyes swept back and forth between the two of them.

  "I see. There appears to be a lack of trust here."

  You might say that, Rob thought, but said nothing. He was going to sit right here and watch. No way was Gates going to make "an unprecedented discovery" by fabricating a second personality or by planting any post-hypnotic suggestions. Rob was going to make sure it stayed clean and simple.

  "Don't be offended, doctor," Kara said. "Would you allow yourself to be hypnotized by a person you had never met before yesterday and never heard of until the day before?"

  Rob thought that sounded pretty damn logical, but Gates' expression was grim as he thought about it. Then he smiled. The effect was startling—it was the first time he had done it all afternoon.

  "Touche, Miss Wade. Your policeman friend can stay."

  ▼

  The actual hypnotism procedure was nowhere near as dramatic as Rob had expected. No watch swinging back and forth on a chain, no spinning spiral to gaze into. As Kara sat there not four feet from Rob, Gates dimmed the lights and pulled out a metronome. He started it ticking, then told Kara to close her eyes and listen to the tick. He spoke to her in a soothing voice, telling her to relax different parts of he body, and that was it.

  "Kara Wade," he said, "I want you to think back, back to your childhood. Do you remember when you were six years old?"

  "Yes," Kara said in a dreamy voice. Her eyes were closed and she appeared totally relaxed.

  "Do you remember being alone with your father at any time?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you remember him undressing you and touching you in places he didn't usually touch you?"

  "No," she said, as if the question were the most natural thing in the world.

  Rob was convinced then that Kara was in a trance. He knew how she felt about her family. If she were awake she'd be on her feet and raging after a question like that.

  "Is anyone else listening?" Gates said. "Is there anyone named Janine listening? If she is, I'd like to speak to her."

  Janine. Rob had heard Kara mention someone named Janine. He held his breath, half expecting to hear a voice like the one that had come out of that little girl in The Exorcist. But Kara kept quiet, thank God.

  Gates sat there twirling a key ring. Twirl-twirl-stop. Twirl-twirl-stop. It was getting on Rob's nerves.


  "Janine!" Gates said in a sharp tone. "Are you there? Speak to me if you can hear me! Don't play games! Speak to me now!"

  Still no answer. Rob exhaled.

  Gates scribbled on a memo pad and handed Rob the sheet.

  I'm going to my files for more past history. Watch her.

  Rob nodded and Gates slipped out through the flush door behind his desk. He watched Kara as she sat with her eyes closed, looking like she was asleep but sitting upright. If he didn't know better he'd have said she was stoned out of her gourd. He let his eyes roam about the room, taking in the antique furniture and the hundreds of books lining the walls.

  Something drew his attention back to Kara.

  Her eyes were open.

  They blinked once, twice, then her head turned toward him, slowly, smoothly, like a gun turret rotating atop a tank. Her eyes fixed on him, vacantly at first, then they seemed to focus.

  Then she smiled.

  Rob nearly jumped out of his seat. He had never seen a smile like that before, at least not on Kara. It was little more than a pulling back of the lips. There was no warmth, no humor in it. In fact there was nothing in the eyes to confirm that it really was a smile at all. Maybe it was just a baring of the teeth. Whatever it was, it drove a spike of icy fear through Rob's gut.

  Whatever it was, it wasn't Kara's smile.

  And then, still smiling fixedly, her head rotated back the other way. When it reached its previous position, the rictus faded and Kara's eyes closed again. She made no further movement.

  Gates returned a few minutes later with a folder in his hands. He took one look at Rob and stopped in his tracks.

  "What's wrong? Did something happen?"

  Kara answered first. "No."

  Rob started at the sound of her voice and tried to gather his thoughts. His reflex was to tell Gates nothing. He went with it.

  "No," he said, half choking as he waved a dismissing hand. "Everything's fine."

  Rob had no intention of giving Gates any ammunition. If there was something there, let Gates find it and confirm it on his own.

  But as the time dragged on, Gates' best efforts turned up nothing. He asked Kara all sorts of bizarre questions about intimacies with her father—some of them pretty foul-sounding—which she denied one after the other.

  After a full hour of this garbage, Rob had had enough.

  "I think it's time to call it quits, don't you?" he said.

  Gates looked at him, leaned back in his chair, and nodded. He looked disappointed.

  "I believe you're right." He turned to Kara. "Kara Wade, when I count to three and clap, you will awaken feeling alert, relaxed, and refreshed, with no memory of the past hour."

  He counted, clapped, and Kara opened her eyes.

  "Well?" she said, looking back and forth between the two of them. "Did anything happen?"

  Gates shook his head. "Nothing."

  She turned to Rob, smiling hesitantly, hopefully. "Really?"

  Rob rose slowly to his feet, as much to stretch his cramped muscles as to give himself a second or two to listen to his racing mind. What to say? Tell her how she'd looked at him with that vulpine grin, an expression that was as much at home on her face as swastikas on a synagogue? Tell her and snuff out the relief glowing so brightly in her eyes now as she looked up at him, make her spend the rest of her life under a cloud of doubt? Or let it ride and see what happened?

  Rob smiled back at her. "Really."

  She leaped from the chair and embraced him, laughing.

  "Oh, God! Thank God!"

  And then she was crying, gripping his lapels and sobbing against his shirt. He slipped his arms around her and gently held her for a little while.

  Too soon she straightened up and back away.

  "I'm sorry," she said, taking a deep breath and wiping her eyes. "It's just that I've been so worried! So frightened!"

  Dr. Gates said, "I do not feel we should rest too easy, Miss Wade. We have not completely ruled out the existence of a second personality."

  "Maybe you haven't," she said, "but I have." She stepped forward and thrust out her hand. "Thank you, Dr. Gates. Please send me your bill."

  Gates rose and shook it once. "Please be careful, Miss Wade. There remains the possibility that this experience may have awakened something. If you suffer any unusual experiences, black-outs, memory lapses, please do not hesitate to call me."

  "Don't worry," she said smiling brightly. "You'll be the first to know."

  And then she had her arm crooked around Rob's and was leading him from the consultation room. "Let's celebrate!"

  ▼

  7:20 P.M.

  This was not exactly what Kara had meant by celebrate.

  She had been thinking of a bar or a restaurant, someplace with lots of people and laughter, even if it was desperate laughter. Instead, Rob had called in her promise to allow him to cook her a meal. He had insisted too that Jill and Ellen join them.

  Kara had said absolutely not, but he had gone ahead and called Ellen's place. Ellen had demurred, but Jill had been thrilled, leaving Kara with little choice but to agree. She had been briefly furious, but then remembered what a good friend Rob had been these past two days, and the anger evaporated. Leaving only anxiety about putting those two together for so long. But Rob hadn't noticed any resemblance between Jill and himself two days ago, so there was a good chance everything would work out tonight.

  So far, so good.

  She was sitting now in the tiny living room of Rob's one-bedroom apartment, sipping wine and watching him as he stood in the even tinier kitchen and showed Jill how to slice scallions. The air was redolent of garlic and oil heating in the wok; laughter from Jill and Rob mixed with the sounds of the St. John's basketball game on the TV.

  Rob and Jill. It was scary the way they hit it off. Rob, who used to say he never wanted to be tied down by kids, must have been repressing his nurturing needs all these years. Jill had somehow tapped into them. Maybe it was their blood relationship. Maybe somewhere inside, on a subconscious level, they had recognized each other. Whatever the reason, they were instant buddies.

  Seeing them together like this made Kara intensely uneasy. She wanted no new ties to Rob. Their break up ten years ago had been excruciating. She didn't want to go through that again — for both their sakes. And she did not want to try to explain why she had raised his daughter all these years without telling him she existed. Because she wasn't quite sure herself.

  But the bonding between Jill and Rob didn't explain all the tension she sensed coiled within her now. After passing the hypnosis test this afternoon she had expected to feel relieved, exhilarated, free, cleansed. And she had, briefly. But then an ill-defined malaise had set in, a vague, pervasive sense of something not-quite-right that she hadn't noticed before.

  Maybe it was the city. That had to be it. It was always the city. A good thing she and Jill were leaving tomorrow. Not a moment too soon. If she stayed much longer there was no telling what might happen. She could even imagine herself falling in love with Rob again.

  She wondered if she had ever really stopping loving him.

  "Jill," she said, rousing herself, "come on over here and sit with me and let Mr. Harris get the cooking done."

  Jill hopped of the stool and ran over to where Kara was sitting. Rob had tied an apron around her neck. It dangled around her knees and she almost tripped over it.

  "He needs my help, mom," she said in a loud whisper. "He wants me to cut the scallions real thick, and we always cut them thin."

  "I think you can cut them thick when you're putting them in a wok," Kara whispered back.

  "Really?" She glanced at Rob with new respect. "How come we don't ever wok?"

  "We will, if you want to."

  "Yeah!" Her eyes were bright with excitement. She loved to cook. "It's fun!"

  "Okay. Then we'll buy one as soon as we get back to the farm."

  Jill glanced furtively at Rob and lowered her voice further.

>   "He doesn't exploit women, does he." It was a statement.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, he's doing the cooking and you're sitting out here. That's good, isn't it?"

  "And you're helping him. Sharing the jobs, that's what's really important."