False Memory

by Dean Koontz

  Rosettes, conchas, and rope braids were carved into the arched front door. The hand-forged, hand-stamped iron coyote knocker hung from its hind legs. Its forelegs swung against a large iron clavo set in the door, and when Dusty knocked, the sound carried across the forecourt in the cold, still air.

  The thirty-something woman who responded to the knock must have been only two generations out of Italy on one side of her family; but another branch of her tree unmistakably had Navajo grafted onto it. Lovely, with high cheekbones, eyes as black as raven feathers, hair even blacker than Martie’s, she was a Southwest princess in a white blouse with bluebirds embroidered on the collar, a faded denim skirt, folded bobbysocks, and scuffed white sneakers.

  Dusty introduced himself and Martie. “We’re looking for Chase Glyson.”

  “I’m Zina Glyson,” she said, “his wife. Maybe I can help.”

  Dusty hesitated, and Martie said, “We’d very much like to talk to him about Dr. Ahriman. Mark Ahriman.”

  No tension came into Mrs. Glyson’s serene face, and her voice remained pleasant when she said, “You come here to my door, speaking the devil’s name. Why should I talk to you?”

  “He’s not the devil,” Martie said. “He’s more a vampire, and we want to drive a stake straight through the bastard’s heart.”

  Mrs. Glyson’s direct and analytic stare was as penetrating as that of any elder sitting on a tribal council. After a moment, she stepped back and invited them off the cold porch, into the warm rooms beyond the thick adobe walls.

  Ordinarily, the doctor did not carry a concealed weapon, but with all the unknowables of the Rhodes situation, he believed that prudence required him to be armed.

  Martie and Dusty were no immediate danger to him out there in New Mexico. They would pose no threat when and if they returned, either, unless he wasn’t able to get close enough to them to speak the names—Shaw, Narvilly—that activated their programs.

  Skeet was another matter. His holey brain, drilled by drugs, didn’t seem able to hold the essential details of a control program without periodic reloading. If the little dope fiend, for whatever reason, got it into his addled head to stalk Ahriman, he might not respond immediately to Dr. Yen Lo and might be able to use a knife or gun or whatever other weapon he was carrying.

  The doctor’s double-breasted, gray pinstripe suit by Ermenegildo Zegna was elegantly tailored; and strictly as a fashion issue, there ought to have been a federal law against spoiling the garment’s lines by wearing a shoulder holster under it. Fortunately, ever the man of foresight, the doctor had commissioned a custom holster of supple leather, which carried his pistol so deep under the arm and so snugly against the body that even the master tailors in Italy would not have been able to detect the weapon.

  Unsightly bulge was eliminated, as well, by the fact that the weapon was a compact automatic, the Taurus PT-111 Millennium fitted with a Pearce grip extension. Quite small, but powerful.

  After his busy night, the doctor had slept late, which was possible because he didn’t need to keep the usual Thursday-morning appointment with Susan Jagger now that she was so dead. With no commitments until after lunch, he enjoyed a visit to his favorite antique-toy store, where he purchased a mint-condition Gunsmoke Dodge City playset by Marx for only $3,250, and a die-cast Johnny Lightning Custom Ferrari for only $115.

  A couple of other customers were browsing in the store, chatting with the owner, and Dr. Ahriman had great fun imagining what it would be like to surprise them by drawing his pistol and gutshooting them without provocation. He did not do this, of course, because he was pleased with his purchases and wanted the owner to feel comfortable with him when he returned to shop for other treasures in the future.

  The kitchen was redolent of baking corn bread, and from a large pot on the stove rose the beefy aroma of beanless chili.

  Zina phoned her husband at work. They owned a gallery on Canyon Road. When he heard why Martie and Dusty had sought him out, he came home in less than ten minutes.

  While waiting for him, Zina set out red ceramic mugs of strong coffee mellowed with cinnamon, and pinwheel cookies topped with toasted pine nuts.

  Chase, when he arrived, appeared to earn his living not in an art gallery but as a cowboy on the range: tall and lanky, tousled straw-yellow hair, a handsome face abraded by wind and sun. He was one of those men who, just by walking through any stable, would win the trust of horses, which would nicker softly at him and strain their necks across stall doors to nuzzle his hands.

  His voice was quiet but intense as he sat down at the kitchen table with them. “What has Ahriman done to you and yours?”

  Martie told him about Susan. The worsening agoraphobia, the suspected rapes. The sudden suicide.

  “He made her do it somehow,” Chase Glyson said. “I believe it. I absolutely do. You came all this way because of your friend?”

  “Yes. My dearest friend.” Martie saw no reason to tell more.

  “Over nineteen years,” Chase said, “since he ruined my family, and more than ten since he hauled his sick ass out of Santa Fe. For a while, I hoped he was dead. Then he got famous with his books.”

  “Do you mind if we tape what you tell us?” Dusty asked.

  “No, don’t mind at all. But what I’ve got to say…hell, I’ve said it all maybe a hundred times to the cops, to different district attorneys over the years, until I was bluer in the face than a blue coyote. No one listened to me. Well, the once when someone listened and thought I might be telling the truth, then some big-shot friends of Ahriman’s paid him a visit, taught him some religion, so he’d know what he damn well was supposed to believe about my mom and dad.”

  While Martie and Dusty taped Chase Glyson, Zina perched on a stool before an easel near the adobe fireplace, drawing a pencil study of a humble tableau that she’d earlier set up on one corner of the distressed-pine table at which the rest of them sat. Five pieces of Indian pottery in unusual shapes, including a double-spouted wedding pitcher.

  The essence of Chase’s story was the same as in the clippings from Roy Closterman’s file. Teresa and Carl Glyson had for years operated a successful preschool, the Little Jackrabbit School, until they and three employees were accused of molesting children of both sexes. As in the Ornwahl case in Laguna Beach years later, Ahriman conducted supposedly careful, psychiatrically valid exploratory conversations with the kids, sometimes using hypnotic regression—and found a pattern of stories supporting the original accusations.

  “The whole thing was a lot of bushwa, Mr. Rhodes,” said Chase Glyson. “My folks were the best people you’d want to meet.”

  Zina said, “Terri, that was Chase’s mother, would have cut off her hand before she’d raise it to hurt a child.”

  “My daddy, too,” said Chase. “Besides, he was hardly ever at the Little Jackrabbit. Only to do some repairs now and then, ’cause he was handy. The school was my mother’s business. Daddy was half owner of a car dealership, and it kept him busy. Lots of people in town, they never believed a word of it.”

  “But there were those who did,” Zina added darkly.

  “Oh,” said Chase, “there’s always those who’ll believe anything about anybody. You whisper in their ear that ’cause there was wine at the Last Supper, Jesus must’ve been a drunkard, and they’ll gossip their souls into perdition, passing it along. Most people figured it couldn’t be true, and with no physical evidence, it might never have resulted in convictions…until Valerie-Marie Padilla killed herself.”

  Martie said, “One of the students, that five-year-old girl.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Chase’s face seemed to darken as if a cloud had passed between him and the ceiling lights. “She left that good-bye of hers, that colored-pencil drawing, that sad little scribble drawing that changed everything. Her and a man.”

  “Anatomically correct,” Martie said.

  “Worse, the man had a mustache…like my daddy. In the drawing, he’s wearing a cowboy hat, white with a red band,
and a black feather tucked in it. Which is the type of hat my daddy always wore.”

  With a violence that drew their attention, Zina Glyson tore off the top sheet from her drawing pad, balled it up, and threw it into the fireplace. “Chase’s father was my godfather, my own father’s best friend. I knew Carl from when I was a toddler. That man…he respected people, no matter who they were, no matter how little they had or what their faults. He respected children, too, and listened to them, and cared. Never once did he ever put his hand on me that way, and I know he didn’t touch Valerie-Marie. If she killed herself, it’s because of the hateful, evil stuff Ahriman put in her head, all the twisted sex and stories about sacrificing animals at the school and being forced to drink their blood. This child was five. What mess do you make of a little child’s mind, what awful depression do you instigate when you ask her about stuff like that under hypnosis, when you help her remember what never happened?”

  “Easy, Zee,” her husband said softly. “It’s all over long ago.”

  “Not for me, it isn’t.” She went to the ovens. “It won’t be over until he’s dead.” She slipped her right hand into an oven mitt. “And then I won’t believe his obituary.” She drew a pan of finished corn bread from the oven. “I’ll have to look at his corpse myself and stick a finger in its eye to see if he reacts.”

  If she was Italian, then she was Sicilian, and if she was part Indian, she was not a peaceful Navajo but an Apache. There was an unusual strength in her, a toughness, and if she’d had the chance to finish Ahriman herself without being caught, she probably would have acted on the opportunity.

  Martie liked her a lot.

  “I was seventeen at the time,” Chase said, almost to himself. “God knows why they didn’t accuse me, too. How did I escape? When they’re burning witches, why not the whole family?”

  Returning to something that Zina had said, Dusty raised a key question: “If she committed suicide? What did you mean by that?”

  “Tell him, Chase,” said Zina, moving from the corn bread to the pot of chili. “See if they think it sounds like something a little child would do to herself.”

  “Her mother was in the next room,” Chase said. “She heard the gunshot, ran, found Valerie-Marie seconds after it happened. No one else could’ve been there. The girl definitely killed herself with her father’s pistol.”

  “She had to get the pistol out of a box in the closet,” Zina said. “And a separate box of ammunition. And load the thing. A child who’d never handled a gun in her life.”

  “Even that isn’t the hardest to believe,” Chase said. “What’s hardest is…” He hesitated. “This is awful stuff, Mrs. Rhodes.”

  “I’m getting used to it,” Martie grimly assured him.

  Chase said, “The way Valerie-Marie killed herself…the news quoted Ahriman as calling it ‘an act of self-loathing, of gender denial, an attempt to destroy the sexual aspect of herself that had led to her being molested.’ That little girl, you see, before she pulled the trigger, she undressed herself, and then she put the gun…inside….”

  Martie was on her feet before she realized that she intended to get out of her chair. “Dear God.” She needed to move, to go somewhere, do something, but there was nowhere to go except—as she discovered when she got there—to Zina Glyson, around whom she put her arms as she would have put them around Susan at such a moment as this. “Were you dating Chase then?”

  “Yes,” Zina said.

  “And stood by him. And married him.”

  “Thank God,” Chase murmured.

  “What it must have been like,” Martie said, “after the suicide, to defend Carl to other women, and stand by his son.”

  Zina had accepted Martie’s embrace as naturally as it had been given. The memory made this Southwest princess tremble after all these years, but both Sicilian and Apache women were loath to cry.

  “No one accused Chase,” she said, “but he was suspected. And me…people smiled, but they kept their children at a distance from me. For years.”

  Martie brought Zina back to the table, and the four of them sat together.

  “Forget all that psychological blather about gender denial and destroying her sexual aspect,” said Zina. “What Valerie-Marie did, no child would think to do. No child. That little girl did what she did because someone put it in her head to do it. Impossible as it seems, crazy as it sounds, Ahriman showed her how to load a gun, and Ahriman told her what to do to herself, and she went home and just did it, because she was…she was, I don’t know, hypnotized or something.”

  “It doesn’t sound impossible or crazy to us,” Dusty assured her.

  The town was torn apart by Valerie-Marie Padillo’s death, and the possibility that other Little Jackrabbit kids might be suicidally depressed caused a sort of mass hysteria that Zina called the Plague Year. It was during this plague that a jury of seven women and five men returned unanimous guilty verdicts against all five defendants.

  “You probably know,” said Chase, “other inmates consider child molesters the lowest of the low. My daddy…he lasted just nineteen months before he was killed at his job in the prison kitchen. Four stab wounds, one through each kidney from behind, two through the gut from in front. Probably, two guys sandwiched him. No one would ever talk, so no one was ever charged.”

  “Is your mother still alive?” Dusty asked.

  Chase shook his head. “The other three ladies from the school, nice people, all of them—they served four years each. My mom, she was released after five, and when they let her go, she had cancer.”

  “Officially, the cancer killed her, but what really killed her was shame,” Zina said. “Terri was a good woman, a kind woman, and a proud woman. She’d done nothing, nothing, but she was eaten up by shame just dwelling on what people thought she’d done. She lived with us, but it wasn’t long. The school had been closed, Carl lost his interest in the car dealership. Legal bills took everything. We were still scraping by ourselves, and we hardly had money to bury her. Thirteen years, she’s dead. Might as well be yesterday to me.”

  “What’s it like here for you, these days?” Dusty asked.

  Zina and Chase exchanged a look, volumes written in one glance.

  He said, “A lot better than it used to be. Some people still believe it all, but not many after the Pastore killings. And some of the Little Jackrabbit kids…they eventually recanted their stories.”

  “Not for ten years.” Zina’s eyes in that moment were blacker than anthracite and harder than iron.

  Chase sighed. “Maybe it took ten years for those false memories to start falling apart. I don’t know.”

  “In all that time,” Martie wondered, “did you ever think of just picking up and leaving Santa Fe?”

  “We love Santa Fe,” Chase said, and his heart seemed to be in his declaration.

  “It’s the best place on earth,” Zina agreed. “Besides, if we’d ever left, there are a few out there who would’ve said our leaving proved all of it was true, that we were crawling away in shame.”

  Chase nodded. “But just a few.”

  “If it was just one,” Zina said, “I wouldn’t have left and given him the satisfaction.”

  Zina’s hands were on the table, and Chase covered both of them with one of his. “Mr. Rhodes, if you think it would help you, some of those Little Jackrabbit kids, the ones who recanted, I know they would talk to you. They’ve come to us. They’ve apologized. They aren’t bad people. They were used. I think they’d like to help.”

  “If you could set it up,” Dusty said, “we’ll devote tomorrow to them. Today, while there’s still light and before it snows, we want to go out to the Pastore ranch.”

  Chase pushed his chair back from the table and got to his feet, seeming taller than he had been earlier. “You know the way?”

  “We’ve got a map,” Dusty said.

  “Well, I’ll lead you halfway,” Chase said. “Because halfway to the Pastore ranch, there’s something you should s
ee. The Bellon-Tockland Institute.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Hard to say. Been there twenty-five years. It’s where you’ll find Mark Ahriman’s friends, if he has any.”

  Without pulling on a jacket or sweater, Zina walked with them to the street.

  The piñons in the forecourt were as still as trees in a diorama, sealed behind glass.

  The squeak of the iron hinges on the spindled gate was the only sound in the winter day, as if every soul in the city had vanished, as if Santa Fe were a ghost ship on a sea of sand.

  No traffic moved on the street. No cats roamed, no birds flew. A great weight of stillness pressed down on the world.

  To Chase, whose Lincoln Navigator was parked in front of them, Dusty said, “Does that van across the street belong to a neighbor?”

  Chase looked, shook his head. “I don’t think so. Maybe. Why?”

  “No reason. Nice-looking van, is all.”

  “Something’s coming down,” Zina said, gazing at the sky.

  At first Martie thought she meant snow was falling, but there was no snow.

  The sky was more white than gray. If the clouds were moving at all, their motion was internal, concealed behind the pale skin that they presented to the world below.

  “Something bad.” Zina put her hand on Martie’s arm. “My Apache premonition. Warrior blood senses violence coming. You be careful, Martie Rhodes.”

  “We will be.”

  “Wish you lived in Santa Fe.”

  “Wish you lived in California.”

  “World’s too big, and all of us too small,” Zina said, and again they hugged each other.

  In the car, as Martie pulled into the street, following Chase’s Navigator, she glanced at Dusty. “What about the van?”

  Turned in his seat, peering through the rear window, he said, “Thought maybe I’d seen it earlier.”

  “Where?”

  “At the shopping center where we bought the recorder.”

  “Is it coming?”

  “No.”

  One right turn and three blocks later, she asked, “Yet?”

  “No. Guess I was wrong.”

  65

  In California, one time zone farther west than Santa Fe, Mark Ahriman ate lunch alone, at a table for two, in a stylish bistro in Laguna Beach. A dazzling Pacific vista lay to his left; a generally well-dressed and monied luncheon crowd was seated to his right.

  Not all was perfect. Two tables away, a thirtyish gentleman—and this was stretching the word to its elastic limits—let out a bray of laughter from time to time, so harsh and protracted that all donkeys west of the Pecos must have pricked their ears at each outburst. A grandmotherly woman at the next table was wearing an absurd mustard-yellow cloche hat. Six younger women at the far end of the room were obnoxiously giggly. The waiter brought the wrong appetizer, and then didn’t return with the correct dish for a tedious number of minutes.

  Nevertheless, the doctor didn’t shoot any of them. For a true gamesman like him, little pleasure was to be had in a simple shooting spree. Mindless blasting appealed to the deranged, to the hopelessly stupid, to waxed-off teenage boys with far too much self-esteem and no self-discipline, and to the fanatical political types who wanted to change the world by Tuesday. Besides, his mini-9mm pistol had a double-column magazine that held only ten rounds.

  After finishing lunch with a slice of flourless dark-chocolate cake and saffron ice cream, the doctor paid his check and departed, granting absolution even to the woman in the absurd cloche hat.

  Thursday afternoon was pleasantly cool, not chilly. The wind had blown itself to far Japan during the night. The sky was pregnant, but the rain that was supposed to break shortly after dawn had not yet been delivered.

  While the valet brought the Mercedes, Dr. Ahriman examined his fingernails. He was so pleased by the quality of his manicure that he almost didn’t pay attention to the surrounding scene, didn’t look up from his hands—strong, manly, and yet with the gracefully tapered fingers of a concert pianist—almost didn’t see the stranger lounging against a pickup parked across the street.

  The truck was beige, well maintained but not new, the type of vehicle that would never be collectible even a thousand years from now and, therefore, one in which Ahriman had so little interest that he had no idea what make or model year it was. The bed of the truck was covered by a white camper shell, and the doctor shivered at the thought of a vacation thus spent.

  The lounging man, although a stranger, was vaguely familiar. He was in his early forties, with reddish hair, a round red face, and thick eyeglasses. He was not staring directly at Ahriman, but there was something about his demeanor that screamed surveillance. He made a production of checking his wristwatch, and then looking impatiently toward a nearby store, as if waiting for someone, but his acting ability was far inferior even to that of the movie star currently preparing for his once-in-a-career role as a presidential nose nosher.

  The antique-toy shop. Just a few hours ago. A half-hour drive and six towns away from here. That was where the doctor had seen the blushing man. When he’d amused himself by imagining the surprise that would sweep the shop staff if he gut-shot the other customers for no reason other than whimsy, this was one of two patrons who, in his mind’s eye, had been targets.

  In a county with a population of three million, it was difficult to believe that this second encounter in only a few hours was merely happenstance.