The gate in the white picket fence squeaked. In this earthbound cloud bank, the sound was muffled, too slight even to prick the ears of a cat on guard for mice.
Departing, the doctor averted his face from the house. He had been equally discreet upon arrival.
No lights had shone at the windows earlier. None were visible now. The retirees renting the lower two floors were no doubt snug under their blankets, as oblivious as their parakeets dozing in covered cages.
Nevertheless, Ahriman took sensible precautions. He was the lord of memory, but not everyone was susceptible to his mind-clouding power.
Its voice muted by the dense mist, the lazy surf crumbling to shore was less a sound than a vibration, less heard than felt as a tingle in the chilly air.
Palm trees hung limp. Condensation dripped from the points of every blade of every frond, like clear venom from the tongues of serpents.
He paused to look up at the fog-veiled crowns of the palms, suddenly uneasy for reasons he could not identify. After a moment, puzzled, he took another swallow of beer and continued along the boardwalk.
His Mercedes was two blocks away. He encountered no one en route.
Parked under a huge, dripping Indian laurel, the black sedan plinked, tinked, and tatted like an out-of-tune xylophone.
In the car, as he was about to start the engine, Ahriman paused again, still uneasy, brought closer to the source of his uneasiness by the tuneless music of water droplets snapping steel. Finishing the beer, he stared out at the massive overhanging canopy of the laurel, as if revelation awaited him in the complex patterns of those branches.
When revelation didn’t come, he started the car and drove west on Balboa Boulevard, toward the head of the peninsula.
At three o’clock in the morning, traffic was light. He saw only three moving vehicles in the first two miles, their headlights ringed by fuzzy aureoles in the fog. One was a police car, heading down the peninsula, in no hurry.
Across the bridge to Pacific Coast Highway, glancing at the westernmost channel of the huge harbor to his right, where yachts loomed like ghost ships at docks and moorings in the mist, and then south along the coast, all the way into Corona Del Mar, he puzzled over the cause of his uneasiness, until he came to a stop at a red traffic light and found his attention drawn to a large California pepper tree, lacy and elegant, rising out of low cascades of red bougainvillea. He thought of the potted ming tree with the sprays of ivy at its base.
The ming tree. The
The traffic light changed to green.
So green, her eyes riveted on the ming tree.
The doctor’s mind raced, but he kept his foot hard on the brake pedal.
Only when the light turned yellow did he finally drive through the deserted intersection. He pulled to the curb in the next block, stopped, but didn’t switch off the engine.
An expert on the nature of memory, he now applied his knowledge to a meticulous search of his own recollections of events in Susan Jagger’s bedroom.
Waking in darkness, Susan Jagger thought she heard someone speak that number. Then she surprised herself by saying, “Ten.”
Tense, listening for movement, she wondered if she had spoken both numbers or whether her
A minute passed, another, with no sound but her low breathing, and then, when she held her breath, no sound at all. She was alone.
According to the glowing numbers on the digital clock, it was shortly after three in the morning. Apparently she had been asleep more than two hours.
Finally she sat up in bed and switched on the lamp.
The half-finished glass of wine. The book tumbled among the rumpled bedclothes. The blind-covered windows, the furniture — all as it should be. The ming tree.
She raised her hands to her face and smelled them. She sniffed her right forearm, as well, and then her left.
His scent. Unmistakable. Partly sweat, partly the lingering fragrance of his preferred soap. Perhaps he used a scented hand lotion, as well.
If she could trust her memory, this was not how Eric smelled. Yet she remained convinced that he, and no other, was her too-real incubus.
Even without the residual scent, she would have known that he had paid her a visit while she slept. A soreness here, a tenderness there. The faint ammonia odor of his semen.
When she threw back the covers and got out of bed, she felt his viscid essence continuing to seep from her, and she shuddered.
At the Biedermeier pedestal, she parted the concealing runners of ivy to reveal the camcorder under the ming tree. At most, the cassette could contain a few remaining feet of unused tape, but the camera was still recording.
She switched it off and extracted it from the pot.
Her curiosity and eagerness for justice were suddenly outweighed by her disgust. She put the camcorder on the nightstand and hurried into the bathroom.
