False Memory полностью

She appeared to have no interest in the gun. She opened the nightstand drawer and withdrew a ballpoint pen and a lined notepad the size of a stenographer’s tablet. At the top of each page in the pad was her photograph, plus the logo and phone numbers of the real-estate company for which she had worked before agoraphobia had ended her career.

“Put the gun away, please,” he directed, with no fear whatsoever that she would use the weapon on him.

She placed the pistol in the nightstand and closed the drawer. Turning to Ahriman, she held out the pen and the notepad.

He said, “Bring them with you.”

“Where?”

“Follow me.”

The doctor led her to the dining room. There, he instructed her to switch on the chandelier and sit at the table.

Still staring into the bathroom mirror, reviewing yet again his rooftop conversation with Skeet, trying to marshal details that would lend credibility to his incredible theory that his brother had been programmed, Dusty realized that he was finished with sleep for the night. Mosquito swarms of questions buzzed through his mind, their bites more ruinous of sleep than pots of black coffee boiled to the thickness of molasses.

Who would have programmed Skeet? When? How? Where? For what possible purpose? And why Skeet, of all people: self-admitted feeb, druggie, sweet loser that he was?

The whole thing smelled-smacked-reeked of paranoia. Perhaps this crazy-ass theory would make sense in the world of paranormal talk radio, in which Fig Newton lived while painting houses — and in fact during most of his waking hours — in that unreal but widely cherished America where scheming extraterrestrials were busily crossbreeding with hapless human females, where transdimensional beings were reputed to be responsible for both global warming and outrageous credit-card interest rates, where the President of the United States had been secretly replaced by a look-alike android assembled in Bill Gates’s basement, where Elvis was alive and living on an elaborate space station built and operated by Walt Disney, whose brain had been transplanted into a host body that we now know as the rap star and movie titan, Will Smith. But the idea of a programmed Skeet didn’t make sense here, not here in the real world, where Elvis was thoroughly dead, where Disney was dead, too, and where the closest things to horny extraterrestrials were the aging cast of Star Trek on Viagra.

Dusty would have laughed off his harebrained theory. assuming that Skeet had not said he’d been instructed to take a header from the Sorensons’ roof, assuming the kid hadn’t dropped into that eerie trance at New Life Clinic, assuming all of them — Skeet, Martie, and Dusty himself — had not been missing bits of time from their day, and assuming their lives hadn’t abruptly fallen apart with such uncanny simultaneity and with the cataclysmic weirdness of a two-part XFiles episode. If laughs were dollars, if chuckles were quarters, and if smiles were pennies, Dusty would at the moment be flat broke.

Are you lonesome tonight, Elvis, up there in orbit?

Certain that insomnia would be his companion until dawn, he decided to shave and shower while Martie was still deep in a drugged sleep. When she woke, if she was once more gripped by that grotesque fear of herself, she wouldn’t want him to let her out of his sight, for fear she would somehow wrench loose of her restraints and creep up on him with homicidal intent.

A few minutes later, smooth-cheeked, Dusty switched off his electric razor — and heard muffled cries of distress coming from the bedroom.

When he reached Martie’s side, he found her whimpering in her sleep, dreaming again. She strained at her bonds and murmured, “No, no, no, no.”

Stirred from dog fantasies no doubt full of tennis balls and bowls of kibble, Valet raised his head to crack a wide and toothy yawn worthy of a crocodile, but he did not growl.

Martie rolled her head back and forth on her pillow, grimacing and softly groaning, like a feverish malaria patient wandering the land of delirium.

Dusty blotted her damp brow with a few Kleenex, smoothed her hair away from her face, and held her stylishly shackled hands until she quieted.

In which nightmare was she snared? The one that had plagued her on several other occasions over the past half year, involving the hulking figure composed of dead leaves? Or the new spook show from which she awakened earlier, choking and gagging and scrubbing at her mouth with both hands?

As Martie settled into silent sleep once more, Dusty wondered if her recurring dream of the Leaf Man might be as meaningful as his encounter with the lightning-chased heron had seemed to him.

She had described the nightmare to him months ago, the second or third time that she had suffered through it. Now he brought it forth from his vaultlike memory and examined it as he watched over her.