As Dusty turned right onto Pacific Coast Highway, Martie opened
Then she spoke it aloud, “Raymond Shaw,” with no more serious effect than another brief shiver.
“May be it doesn’t work on you properly when you read it or say it yourself, “he suggested, “only when someone says it to you.”
“Or maybe just by knowing the name, I’ve taken away its power over me.”
“Raymond Shaw,” he said.
“I’m listening.”
When Martie returned to full consciousness after about ten seconds, Dusty said, “Welcome back. And so much for that theory.”
Scowling at the book, she said, “We should take it home and burn it.”
“No point doing that. There are clues in it. Secrets. Whoever put the book into your hands — and I tend to think you
“Yeah? Why didn’t they just walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, lady, some people we know are screwing with your brain, planting auto-phobia in your head and lots more stuff you don’t even know about yet, for reasons you couldn’t even imagine, and we just don’t like it much.’
“Well, let’s say it
“Opposed to Operation Brainwash Dusty, Skeet, and Martie.”
“Yeah. But they can’t come to us publicly.”
“Why?” she persisted.
“Because they’d be killed. Or maybe it’s just that they’re afraid of being fired and losing their pensions.”
“Morally opposed but not to the extent of losing their pensions. That part sounds creepily real. But the rest of it… So they slip me this book. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Then for some reason they seem to program me not to read it.”
Dusty braked to a stop in a backup at a red traffic light. “A little lame, huh?”
“A lot lame.”
They were on a bridge that spanned the channel between Newport Harbor and its back bay. Under the sunless sky, the broad expanse of water was dark gray-green, though not black, with hatching drawn on it by the breeze above and the currents below, so that it looked scaly, like the hide of a fearsome slumbering reptile out of the Jurassic Period.
“But there’s something that isn’t lame,” Martie said, “not in the least lame. Something that’s happening to Susan.”
A grimness in her voice drew Dusty’s attention from the harbor. “What about Susan?”
“She’s missing periods of time, too. Not little pieces, either. Big blocks of time. Whole nights.”
The Valium veil in her eyes had been gradually lifting, that welcome but artificial calm giving way to anxiety once more. At Dr.
Ahriman’s office, the unnatural paleness left her, replaced by peachy color, but now shadows were gathering in the tender skin under her eyes, as though her face were darkening in sympathy with the slowly waning winter afternoon.
Beyond the farther end of the bridge, the red signal changed to green. The traffic began to move.
Martie told him about Susan’s phantom rapist.
Dusty had been worried. He had been frightened. Now a feeling worse than worry or fear wrapped his heart.
Sometimes, when he woke in the abyss of night and lay listening to Martie’s sweet soft breathing, a mortal dread — more terrible than simple fear — crept into him. After one too many glasses of wine at dinner, too much cream sauce, and perhaps a bitter clove of garlic, his mind was as sour as his stomach, and he contemplated the silence of the predawn world without his usual appreciation for the beauty of stillness, hearing no peace in it, hearing instead the threat of the void. In spite of the faith that was his rock through most of his life, a worm of doubt chewed at his heart on these hushed nights, and he wondered if all that he and Martie had together was this one life, and nothing beyond it but a darkness that allowed no memory and was empty even of loneliness. He didn’t want until-death-do-you-part, didn’t want anything short of forever, and when a despairing inner voice suggested that forever was a fraud, he always reached out in the night to touch Martie in her sleep. His intention was not to wake her, only to feel in her what she invariably contained and what was detectable to even his lightest touch: her given grace, her immortality and the promise of his own.
