False Memory полностью

“Perhaps she was a murderer herself.”

“She’s me.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“What does that mean?” she parroted.

“You say that she is you. Explain.”

“It can’t be explained.” “Then it’s meaningless.” “It can only be known.”

“It can only be known,” he repeated scornfully.

“Yes.”

“Is this a riddle, maybe a Zen koan or something?” “Is it?” she asked.

“Girls,” he said impatiently. Martie said nothing.

The doctor closed the book, studied her profile for a moment, and then said, “Look at me.”

She turned her head to face him.

“Be still,” he said. “I want to taste.”

Ahriman pressed his lips to each of her welling eyes. A little tongue work, too.

“Salty,” he said, “but something else. A subtle something quite intriguing.”

He required another sip. A spasm of REM caused her eye to quiver erotically against his tongue.

Sitting back from her again, Ahriman said, “Astringent but not bitter.”

Girl’s face shiny damp. All the sorrow of the world. Yet such bright beauty.

Daring to believe that those three lines were the beginning of yet another haiku worth committing to paper, the doctor tucked the verses away in his mind to be polished later.

As if the heat of Ahriman’s lips had withered Martie’s lacrimal apparatus, her eyes grew dry once more.

“You’re going to be a lot more fun than I thought,” Ahriman said.

“You’ll require considerable finesse, but the extra effort ought to be worthwhile. Like all the best toys, the art of your form — your mind and heart — at least equals the thrill of your function. Now I want you to be calm, perfectly calm, detached, observant, obedient.”

“I understand.”

He opened the textbook again.

With the doctor’s patient guidance, dry-eyed this time, Martie studied the crime-scene photograph of the dismembered girl, whose parts had been creatively rearranged. He instructed her to imagine what it would be like to commit this atrocity herself, to glory in the reeking wet reality of what she saw here on the glossy page. To be certain Martie involved all five of her senses in this exercise, Ahriman employed his medical knowledge, his personal experience, and his well-conditioned imagination to assist her with many details of color, texture, and stench.

Then other pages. Other photographs. Fresh corpses but also bodies in various stages of decomposition.

Blink.

Blink.

Finally he returned the two heavy volumes to the bookshelves.

He had spent fifteen minutes too long with Martie, but he had taken considerable satisfaction in refining her appreciation for death. Sometimes the 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.