by Dean Koontz
Ginger had no false modesty. She knew she was attractive. But her beauty was more that of a pixie, while Rita had the blueblood looks of one who could sit upon a throne and convince the world she belonged.
Rita did nothing to cause Ginger’s newfound inferiority complex. The woman treated her not like a daughter but like a sister and an equal. Ginger’s feelings of inadequacy were, she knew, a direct result of her pathetic condition. Until two weeks ago, she had not been dependent on anyone in ages. Now she was dependent again, not entirely able to look after herself, and her self-respect slipped a bit further every day. Rita Hannaby’s good humor, carefully planned outings, woman-to-woman shmoozing, and unflagging encouragement were not enough to distract Ginger from the cruel fact that fate once more had cast her, at thirty, in the frustrating role of a child.
Together, they descended to the marble-floored foyer, where they got their coats from the closet, then went out the door and down the steps under the portico to the black Mercedes 500 SEL in the driveway. Herbert, who was sort of a cross between a butler and a Man Friday, had brought the car around five minutes ago and had left the engine running, so the interior was a toasty-warm haven from the frigid winter day.
Rita drove with her usual confidence, away from the old estates, out of quiet streets lined with bare-limbed elms and maples, through ever-busier thoroughfares, heading to Dr. Immanuel Gudhausen’s office on bustling State Street. Ginger had an eleven-thirty appointment with Gudhausen, whom she had seen twice last week. She was scheduled to visit him every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until they got to the bottom of her attacks of fugue. In her bleaker moments, Ginger was sure she’d still be lying on Gudhausen’s couch thirty years from now.
Rita intended to do a bit of shopping while Ginger was with the doctor. Then they would go to lunch at some exquisite restaurant in which, no doubt, the decor would seem to have been planned to flatter Rita Hannaby and in which Ginger would feel like a schoolgirl foolishly trying to pass for a grownup.
“Have you given some thought to what I suggested last Friday?” Rita asked as she drove. “The Women’s Auxiliary at the hospital?”
“I don’t really think I’m up to it. I’d feel so awkward.”
“It’s important work,” Rita said, expertly slipping the Mercedes out from behind a Globe newspaper truck, into a gap in traffic.
“I know. I’ve seen how much money you’ve raised for the hospital, the new equipment you’ve bought ... but I think I’ve got to stay away from Memorial right now. It’d be too frustrating to be around the place, too constant a reminder that I can’t do the work I’ve been trained for.”
“I understand, dear. Don’t give it another thought. But there’s still the Symphony Committee, the Women’s League for the Aged, and the Children’s Advocacy Committee. We could use your help at any of those.”
Rita was an indefatigable charity worker, ably chairing committees or serving on them, not only organizing beneficent societies but getting her hands dirty in the operation of them. “What about it?” she pressed. “I’m sure you’d find working with children especially rewarding.”
“Rita, what if I had one of my attacks while I was with the children? It would frighten them, and I—”
“Oh, pish posh,” Rita said. “Every time I’ve gotten you out of the house these last two weeks, you’ve used that same excuse to try to resist leaving your room. ‘Oh, Rita,’ you say, ‘I’ll have one of my awful fits and embarrass you.’ But you haven’t, and you won’t. Even if you did, it wouldn’t embarrass me. I don’t embarrass easily, dear.”
“I never thought for a moment you were a shrinking violet. But you haven’t seen me in this fugue state. You don’t know what I’m like or—”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, you make it sound as if you’re a regular Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—or Ms. Hyde—which I’m sure you’re not. You haven’t beaten anyone to death with a cane yet, have you, Ms. Hyde?”
Ginger laughed and shook her head. “You’re something else, Rita.”
“Excellent. You’ll bring so much to the organization.”
Although Rita probably did not think of Ginger as another charity case, she had approached this recuperation and rehabilitation as a new cause. She rolled up her sleeves and committed herself to seeing Ginger through the current crisis, and nothing on earth was going to stop her. Ginger was touched by Rita’s concern—and depressed by the need for it.
They stopped at a traffic light, third car from the intersection, with cars, trucks, buses, taxis, and delivery vans crowding them on all sides. In the Mercedes, the cacophony of the city was muffled but not silenced altogether, and when Ginger looked out the window at her side to search for the source of a particularly annoying engine roar, she saw a large motorcycle. The rider turned his head toward her at that moment, but she could not see his face. He was wearing a helmet with a tinted visor that came all the way down to his chin.
For the first time in ten days, the amnesic mist descended over Ginger. It happened much faster this time than it had with the black gloves, ophthalmoscope, or sink drain. She looked into the blank and shiny visor, and her heart stuttered, and her breath was pinched off, and she was instantly swept away by a massive wave of terror, gone.
First, Ginger became aware of horns. Car horns, bus horns, the air-horns of trucks. Some like the high squeals of animals, some low and ominous. Wailing, whooping, barking, shrieking, honking, bleating.
She opened her eyes. Her vision swam into focus. She was still in the car. The intersection was still in front of them, though evidently a couple of minutes had passed and the traffic ahead had moved. With the engine running but the gearshift in park, the Mercedes was ten feet closer to the crosswalk and angled slightly into the next lane, which was what was causing the horn blowing as other vehicles tried to get around.
Ginger heard herself whimpering.
Rita Hannaby was leaning across the console that separated the driver’s and passenger’s seats, very close, gripping both of Ginger’s hands, holding them down and holding them very tightly. “Ginger? Are you there? Are you all right? Ginger?”
Blood. After the jarring blasts of the horns, after Rita’s voice, Ginger became aware of the blood. Red spots marked her lime-green skirt. A dark smear stained the sleeve of her suit jacket. Her hands were gloved in blood, as were Rita’s hands.
“Oh, my God,” Ginger said.
“Ginger, are you with me? Are you back? Ginger?” One of Rita’s manicured nails was torn off, with only a splintered stub sticking up jaggedly from the cuticle, and both her hands appeared to have been gouged. Scratches on the woman’s fingers, on the backs of her hands, and on her palms were bleeding freely, and as far as Ginger could tell, all of the blood was Rita’s, none of it her own. The cuffs of the gray St. John’s suit were wet with blood. “Ginger, talk to me.”
Horns continued to blare.
Ginger looked up and saw that Rita’s perfectly coiffured hair was now in disarray. A two-inch-long scratch furrowed her left cheek, and blood tinted with makeup was trickling along her jaw to her chin.
“You’re back,” Rita said with obvious relief, letting go of Ginger’s hands.
“What’ve I done?”
“Only scratches,” Rita said. “It’s all right. You had an attack, panicked, tried to leave the car. I couldn’t let you go. You might’ve been hit in traffic.”
A passing driver, maneuvering around the Mercedes, angrily shouted something unintelligible at them.
“I’ve hurt you,” Ginger said. Sickness throbbed through her at the thought of the violence she had done.
Other drivers sounded their horns with increasing impatience, but Rita ignored them. She took Ginger’s hands again, not to restrain her this time but to offer comfort and reassurance. “It’s all right, dear. It’s passed now, and a little iodine will patch me up just fine.”
The motorcyclist. The dark visor.
Ginger looked out the side window; the cyclist was gone
. He had, after all, been no threat to her, just a stranger passing in the street.
Black gloves, an ophthalmoscope, a sink drain, and now the dark visor of a motorcyclist’s helmet. Why had those particular things set her off? What did they have in common, if anything?
As tears spilled down her face, Ginger said, “I’m so sorry.”
“No need to be. Now, I better get us out of the way,” Rita said. She pulled handsful of Kleenex from the box on the console and used them to grip the wheel and gearshift, to avoid spreading bloodstains.
Her own hands wet with Rita’s blood, Ginger sagged back against her seat and closed her eyes and tried to stop the tears but could not.
Four psychotic episodes in five weeks.
She could no longer glide placidly through the gray winter days, defenseless, docile in the face of this vicious turn of fate, merely waiting for another attack or for a shrink to explain what was wrong.
It was Monday, December 16, and Ginger was suddenly determined to do something before she suffered a fifth fugue. She could not imagine what she possibly could do, but she was sure she’d think of something if she put her mind to it and stopped feeling sorry for herself. She had reached bottom now. Her humiliation, fear, and despair could not bring her to any greater depths. There was nowhere to go but up. She would claw her way back to the surface, damned if she wouldn’t, up toward the light, out of the dark into which she had fallen.
THREE
Christmas Eve-Christmas Day
1. Laguna Beach, California
At eight A.M., Tuesday, December 24, when Dom Corvaisis got out of bed, he went through his morning ablutions in a haze resulting from the lingering effects of yesterday’s indulgence in Valium and Dalmane.
For the eleventh night in a row, he had been troubled by neither somnambulism nor the bad dream that involved the sink. The drug therapy was working, and he was willing to tolerate a period of pharmaceutically induced detachment to put an end to his unnerving midnight journeys.
He did not believe he was in danger of becoming physically addicted to—or even psychologically dependent on—Valium or Dalmane. He had been exceeding the prescribed dosage, but he was still not worried. He had almost run out of pills, and in order to get another prescription from Dr. Cobletz, he had fabricated a story about a break-in at his house, claiming that the drugs had been taken along with his stereo and TV set. Dom had lied to his doctor in order to obtain drugs, and sometimes he saw his action in exactly that harsh and unfavorable light; but most of the time, in the soft haze that accompanied continuous tranquilization, he was able to dress the shabby truth in self-delusion.
He dared not think about what would happen to him if the episodes of somnambulism returned in January, after the drugs were discontinued.
At ten o’clock, unable to concentrate enough to work, he put on a light corduroy jacket and left the house. The late-December morning was cool. Except for a few unseasonably warm days now and then, the beaches would not be busy again until April.
As Dom descended the hills in his Firebird, heading for the center of town, he noticed that Laguna looked dull under a somber gray sky. He wondered how much of the leaden gloom was real and how much resulted from the dulling effects of the drugs, but he quickly abandoned that disturbing line of thought. In acknowledgment of his somewhat fuzzy perceptions and impaired responsiveness, he drove with exaggerated care.
Dom received most mail at the post office. Because he subscribed to so many publications, he rented a large drawer rather than just a box, and that day before Christmas, the drawer was more than half full. He didn’t look at the return addresses but carried everything back to the car with the intention of reading his mail at breakfast.
The Cottage, a popular restaurant for decades, was on the east side of Pacific Coast Highway, on the slope above the road. At that hour, the breakfast rush had passed, and the lunch crowd had not yet arrived. Dom was given a table by the window with the best view. He ordered two eggs, bacon, cottage fries, toast, and grapefruit juice.
As he ate, he went through the mail. In addition to magazines and bills, there was a letter from Lennart Sane, the wonderful Swedish agent who handled translation rights in Scandinavia and Holland, and a padded envelope from Random House. As soon as he saw the publisher’s address on the label, he knew what he had. Finally, his mind began to clear, the fuzziness partially dispelled by excitement. He put down the toast he had been eating and tore open the large envelope, and an advance copy of his first novel slid out. No man can know what a woman feels when taking her newborn child in her arms for the first time, but a novelist who holds the first copy of his first book must experience a joy similar to that of the mother who looks upon the face of her baby for the first time and feels its warmth through the swaddling clothes.
Dom kept the book beside his plate and could barely look away from it. He had finished his meal and had ordered coffee by the time he was able to tear his attention from Twilight and examine what mail remained. Among other things, there was a plain white envelope with no return address, which contained a single page of white paper on which had been typewritten two sentences that rocked him:
The sleepwalker would be well-advised to search the past for the source of his problem. That is where the secret is buried.
He read the passage again, astonished. The sheet of paper rattled as a tremor passed through him. The back of his neck went cold.
2. Boston, Massachusetts
When Ginger got out of the cab, she was in front of a six-story, brick, Victorian Gothic building. A blustery wind slapped her, and the bare-limbed trees along Newbury Street rasped, clattered, and clicked: the sound of rattling bones. Huddling against the bitter wind, she scurried past a low iron fence and entered 127 Newbury, the former Hotel Agassiz, one of the city’s finest historic landmarks, now converted into condominiums. She had come to see Pablo Jackson, about whom she knew only what she had read in yesterday’s Boston Globe.
She had left Baywatch after George departed for the hospital and after Rita went off to do some last-minute Christmas shopping, for she had been afraid they would try to stop her. In fact, the maid, Lavinia, had pleaded with her not to go out alone. Ginger had left a note, explaining her whereabouts, and she hoped they would not be too upset.
When Pablo Jackson opened his door, Ginger was surprised. That he was a black man, that he was in his eighties—those things were not surprising, for she had learned as much about him from the article in the Globe. However, she was not prepared for such a vital and vigorous octogenarian. He was about five-eight, slight, but age had not bowed his legs, bent his back, or rounded his shoulders. He stood militarily erect, in white shirt and sharply creased black trousers, and there was a sprightliness and youthfulness in his smile and in the way he waved her into the apartment. His thick kinky hair had not receded, but it had gone so white that it seemed to glow with a spectral light, giving him a curiously mystical aura. He escorted Ginger into the living room, moving with the stride of a man forty or fifty years his junior.
The living room was a surprise, too, not what she expected either of a sedate old monument like the Hotel Agassiz or of Pablo Jackson, an elderly bachelor. The walls were cream-colored, and the contemporary sofas and chairs were upholstered in a matching fabric. An Edward Fields carpet of the same creamy shade provided relief from the dominant scheme by means of a deeply sculpted wave pattern. Color was provided by pastel accent pillows—yellow, peach, green, and blue—on the sofas, and from two large oil paintings, one a Picasso. The result was an airy, bright, warm, and modem decor.
Ginger settled into one of two armchairs that faced each other across a small table near a long, bay window. She declined coffee and said, “Mr. Jackson, I’m afraid I’m here under false pretenses.”
“What an interesting beginning,” he said, smiling, crossing his legs, resting his long-fingered black hands on the arms of his chair.
“No, really, I’m not a reporter.”
“Not from People?” He studied her speculatively. “Well, that’s all right. I knew you weren’t a reporter when I let you in. These days, reporters have an oily smoothness about them, and they’re an arrogant lot. Soon as I saw you standing at the door, I said to myself, ‘Pablo, this bitty girl is no reporter. She’s a real person.’ ”
“I need some help that only you can provide.”
“A damsel in distress?” he said, amused. He seemed not at all angry or uneasy, which she had expected he would be.
She said, “I was afraid you wouldn’t see me if I told you my real reasons for wanting to meet you. You see, I’m a doctor, a surgical resident at Memorial, and when I read the article about you in the Globe, I thought you might be able to help.”
“I’d be delighted to see you even if you were selling magazines. An eighty-one-year-old man can’t afford to turn anyone away ... unless he prefers to spend his days talking to the walls.”
Ginger appreciated his efforts to put her at ease, though she suspected that his social life was more interesting than her own.
He said, “Besides, not even a burnt-out old fossil like me would turn away such a lovely girl as you. But now tell me what this help is that only I can give you.”
Ginger leaned forward in her chair. “First, I’ve got to know if the article in the newspaper was accurate.”
He shrugged. “As accurate as newspaper articles ever are. My mother and father were expatriate Americans living in France, just as the newspaper said. She was a popular chanteuse, a cafe singer in Paris, before and after World War I. My father was a musician, as the Globe said. And it’s true that my parents knew Picasso and recognized his genius early on. I was named after him. They bought two score of Picasso’s pieces when his work was cheap, and he gave them several paintings as gifts. They had bon goût. They didn’t own a hundred works, as the paper said, but fifty. Still, that collection was an embarrassment of riches. Sold gradually over the years, it cushioned their retirement and gave me something to fall back on as well.”
“You were an accomplished stage magician?”
“For over fifty years,” he said, raising both hands in a graceful and elegant expression of amazement at his own longevity. That gesture was marked by the rhythm and fluidity of prestidigitation, and Ginger half-expected him to pluck living white doves from thin air. “And I was famous, too. Sans pareil, even if I say so myself. Not famous over here so much, you understand, but all over Europe and in England.”
“And your act involved hypnotizing a few members of the audience?”
He nodded. “That was the centerpiece. It always wowed them.”
“And now you’re helping the police by hypnotizing witnesses to crimes, so they can recall details they’ve forgotten.”
“Well, it’s not a full-time job,” he said, waving one slender hand as if to dismiss any such thoughts she might have had. The gesture seemed likely to end with the magical appearance of a bouquet of flowers or deck of cards. “In fact, they’ve only come to me four times in the past two years. I’m usually their last resort.”
“But what you’ve done has worked for them?”
“Oh, yes. Just as the newspaper said. For instance, a by-stander might see a murder take place and get a glimpse of the car in which the killer escaped, but not be able to recall the license number. Now, if he glanced at the license even for a split second, that number is buried in his subconscious mind, ’cause we never really forget anything we see. Never. So if a hypnotist puts the witness in a trance, regresses him in time—that is, takes him back in his memories to the shooting—and tells him to look at the car, then the license number can be obtained.”
“Always?”
“Not always. But we win more than we lose.”
“Why turn to you? Aren’t the police department’s psychiatrists capable of using hypnosis?”
“Certainly. But they’re psychiatrists not hypnotists. Hypnosis is not what they specialized in. I’ve made it a lifelong study, developed my own techniques that often succeed where standard methods fail.”
“So when it comes to hypnotism, you’re a maven.”
“An expert? Yes, that’s true. Even a maven’s maven. But why does any of this interest you, Doctor?”
Ginger had been sitting with her purse in her lap and her hands at rest upon it. But as she told Pablo Jackson about her attacks, she clutched the purse tighter, tighter, until her knuckles were white.
Jackson’s relaxed demeanor changed to shocked interest and concern. “You poor child. You poor, poor little thing. De mal en pis—en pis! From bad to worse—to worse! How horrible. You wait there. Don’t you move.” He popped up from the chair and hurried from the room.
When he returned, he was carrying two glasses of brandy. She tried to refuse hers. “No thank you, Mr. Jackson. I don’t drink much, and certainly not at this hour of the morning.”
“Call me Pablo. How much sleep did you get last night? Not much? You were up most of the night, woke up hours ago, so for you this isn’t morning, it’s the middle of the afternoon. And there’s no reason a person can’t have a drink in the afternoon, is there?”
He settled into his chair again, and for a moment they were silent as they sipped their brandies.
Then she said, “Pablo, I want you to hypnotize me, regress me back to the morning of November twelfth, to Bernstein’s Delicatessen. I want you to hold me at that point in time and question me relentlessly until I can explain why the sight of those black gloves terrified me.”
“Impossible!” He shook his head. “No, no.”