by Mark Lukens
The book is the answer, her mother had told her in the dream. The book is the key.
But what key? What did it unlock?
Pam closed the book in frustration and lay back down on the bed with her feet hanging down over the edge of it. It was still murky in the bedroom, but the room was lightening up little by little as the world woke up outside.
She needed to close her eyes for a moment and relax. Maybe if she didn’t try to think about things for a while, an answer would come to her. Maybe if she went back to sleep and dreamed some more …
She wondered why she saw her mother as dead in the dream.
Was her mother really dead? Was this something her father had known about and kept from her all these years?
Leonard had seemed to believe her mother had been dead for a long time now, ever since Pam was eight years old. And he seemed to believe that her father had something to do with her mother’s death.
But maybe that was just the townspeople gossiping about the rich people that lived at the edge of town on the estate. Leonard had admitted that he (and maybe many others) had been jealous of her father, and also afraid of him. And maybe they hated him, too.
Pam let out a long sigh. She wanted to force herself out of her comfort zone for a moment—something Dr. Stanton had taught her to do. She made herself think about things and consider things that she didn’t want to face. She wondered for a moment if it could be true. Could her father have murdered her mother? That would explain why her mother had just walked out without a good-bye or a note. It would explain why her mother had left so many of her possessions behind except for her purse, I.D., and some cash taken out from the bank the next day.
Dad had always believed that his wife had found another wealthy man to run away with, maybe someone more fun and exciting than he was. He always said they were probably jet-setting around Europe.
But it had always hurt Pam to believe that her mother had just run off with another man. She could see a wife running out on her husband—especially a controlling and possibly abusive husband like her father—but not her child. She couldn’t see a mother leaving her child without a look back. She could’ve imagined herself leaving her own husband in the middle of the night—he had been controlling and definitely mentally and emotionally abusive—but she wouldn’t have left her daughter behind in a million years.
Yet she wasn’t so naïve to believe that it couldn’t happen, that her mother may have indeed left her behind without a look back. She realized that mothers and fathers abandoned their children all the time. Just look at her own husband, Doug; he had left three months ago without even as much as a phone call or a birthday card to Sarah.
Not that Sarah hadn’t dealt with Doug’s abandonment well. In fact, things had been so much better since Doug was gone, so much less stressful and tense.
People were just built differently, Dr. Stanton had told her many times.
Her mind was drifting away from her original thoughts—that her father could have possibly killed her mother. But she would not even entertain that idea until there was more proof.
But in the dream her mother had been trying to show her the proof, the clue … the blue book.
The key.
It was so frustrating. If the answer was in the blue book, then why couldn’t she find it? If the key was supposed to be …
Pam sat up quickly, staring at the far wall across the room.
That’s it! she thought. Maybe her mother hadn’t been talking about Pam’s copy of the blue book, or any other copy. No, it was one specific copy—the one in her father’s study.
TWENTY-FIVE
Pam crept downstairs through the silent house and then headed for her father’s study. She felt like she was doing something wrong by sneaking into his study; she felt like a child again.
After she was inside, she closed the door softly and then locked it. It was still so early in the morning that no one else was up yet, not even Rita.
The study was dark, but there was enough light coming in through the sheer curtains over the large windows behind her father’s desk to see by.
Pam hurried over to the desk and pushed the curtains aside to let more light into the room—she didn’t want to turn any of the lights on right now.
After that, she darted straight for the bookshelf of her father’s books. The blue book was right in the middle of the books on the fourth shelf up from the floor. She tugged at the top of the book by the spine to pull it out from the row of books—it slid out easily. She took the book with her back to the desk and sat down in her father’s high-back leather chair. It squeaked a little when she sat down, just as it had done when her daughter had sat in it.
She opened the book and immediately a small gold key fell out from somewhere in the middle of the pages. The key dropped down to the ink blotter on the desk and then bounced away, almost falling down onto the floor. But it didn’t, it rested there right on the edge of the desk.
The key.
In her dream, her dead mother had told her that the key was in the book. Pam had figured the key was figurative—some kind of message to be found inside the book somewhere. But it was a literal key, a key that unlocked something.
But what?
She plucked the key up from the edge of the desk and held it in her fingers. She stared at it a moment, studying it. The key was gold-colored and it looked kind of old-fashioned. It was small enough to fit easily into her hand so it seemed too small to be a key to a door. No, she was sure that this key unlocked something smaller.
Maybe it unlocked a safe or a lockbox of some kind.
Now she would just have to figure out where the safe was. It had to be in this room somewhere; it wouldn’t make sense for her father to have the key here and the safe somewhere else in the house.
Pam started with the desk, exploring every drawer, removing papers if she needed to. But there were no lockboxes in the larger drawers at the bottom of the desk.
Next she checked the oak filing cabinets, but no luck there.
She looked around the room—most of the walls were taken up by the built-in bookshelves. Maybe the safe was hidden in the wall behind some of those books. But which ones? She didn’t want to take every book off of those shelves.
Pam stared at the shelf of books with the hole in it now where the blue book used to be. Could it be that simple? Could the safe be behind those books he had written?
Maybe. Why would her father go to a lot of trouble to hide a safe in here? No one else ever came into his study, except for Rita to do some general cleaning once a week.
She walked to the bookshelf and wasted no time unloading the row of books from the fourth shelf. But after she had removed the entire shelf of books, there was only a wall behind them; a wood wall the same color as the book shelves with three decorative panels. That was it. No safe.
Then she looked more closely at one of the panels. She wasn’t sure why there would be panels in a wall behind rows of books. Who would ever see them? Of course, sometimes people put other things on bookshelves besides books, like knickknacks, awards, and statues.
But the panels were her only shot. Maybe they were fake. She pried at the edges of the molding around the panels, but they didn’t budge. She was about to give up when she heard a click from the center panel as she felt around the edges of it. And then the panel swung open like a small door. And behind the panel was a safe door with a recessed handle and a slot for a key.
She dug the key out of her pants pocket where she had stuffed it down while she unloaded the books. She stuck it into the lock and it slid in smoothly. She twisted the key gently and the metal door opened easily.
The wall safe was small, but she could tell there were objects inside of it. She reached in and pulled out a stack of folded papers and a few envelopes. She set these on the shelf next to the open door. The next thing she pulled out was a small jewelry box made of wood with a gold clasp on it, and then another smaller box made of a lighter-colored wood. S
he set these next to the papers and envelopes. The last thing she pulled out of the safe was a single VHS tape.
She brought all of the items to the desk and laid them out. She inspected the papers and envelopes first. They were just copies of the deed to the house, a copy of her father’s will (which she realized most everything was going to be left to her after his death), his publishing and agent contracts, and a few other important papers. Nothing earth-shatteringly secret.
Now it was time to inspect the jewelry box. She opened it and found an assortment of women’s jewelry inside. Some of the jewelry looked like heirlooms handed down through the generations from either her father’s side or her mother’s. But some of the jewelry looked newer, and she thought she recognized some of them—she thought they might have belonged to her mother.
Just seeing the gold ring brought back a flash of a memory of her holding her mother’s hand as they walked to the diner that Leonard used to own.
Her heart sank as she thought about the implications of this. She was finding it more and more difficult to believe that her mother had left them. Her mother had left all of her precious jewelry behind, her car, her money, and even her daughter. This wasn’t definite proof that her mother had died (or been murdered), but it was pretty convincing.
Leonard’s words echoed in her mind again: She wouldn’t have left her share of the money behind. The house. And she wouldn’t have left you like that.
She opened the smaller box and her heart and breath stopped for a moment. She reached inside and pulled out a stack of cards: ID cards. Her mother’s driver’s license was among the cards, her social security card, and numerous credit cards.
That sinking feeling she’d felt earlier was worse now, the heaviness of certainty bearing down on her. Her mother wouldn’t have left without her driver’s license and credit cards, and her jewelry that she always wore. Her father had always told her that her mother had taken a large amount of cash out of the bank when she left, but he could’ve done that himself.
Another possibility formed in Pam’s mind. Maybe her mother had run away from an abusive husband and left everything behind so she could become an entirely new person. Maybe she had gone underground, went into a kind of witness relocation program, or had some kind of help from a spousal abuse center.
There was a possibility that her father was still innocent of murdering her mother, wasn’t there?
The last item left was the VHS cassette. It was labeled with a plain white sticker and there were words written on the label with a black marker in neat handwriting: Girl P. Case # 2068
Girl P. That was similar to Girl M in the blue book. Was it another hypnosis experiment?
Pam took the VHS tape to the other side of the study where her father had his media area. Next to the old stereo/record player combination with its assortment of classical albums, there was a TV on a metal stand with a DVD/VCR combo machine underneath of it.
She turned the power on to the player and to the TV. She slid the tape in and pressed REWIND. She listened to the whir of the tape rewinding as she stared at the blue screen on the TV with a digital number two in the upper right hand corner; obviously it was already set up to display the video. That was probably the only thing this TV was ever used for.
The tape clicked to a stop and Pam jumped.
She hit PLAY and began watching.
And then it felt like her heart stopped for a moment. Unnoticed tears fell from her eyes and ran down her face. She sat tense in the chair she had pulled up in front of the TV.
She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
TWENTY-SIX
The film on the video tape was in color, but it was a little muted, like it was shot from a cheap video camera. The film was also a little jumpy because whoever was filming it wasn’t keeping the camera very steady—but it was steady enough to see everything very clearly.
A date and timestamp was at the bottom of the screen, along with the seconds ticking by.
Her father stood in front of the camera on the TV screen. He seemed to be posing for the camera, waiting to begin a speech. He looked younger, and she knew his age, judging by the date on the screen at the bottom. His hair was still dark and neatly trimmed, and his blue eyes pierced the screen. He was lean, his face chiseled. He wore a white lab coat over his white, button-down shirt and black pants. He stood in the middle of some kind of lab that she had never seen before—or at least she didn’t remember seeing it before.
But she had been in that lab before because she saw her younger self sitting in a large leather chair in the background. She was eight years old in this tape. She was leaned back in the chair, her eyes closed, relaxed.
She was Girl P.
Her father, Carl (she began to think of him as Carl now and not her dad), began to narrate to the camera, explaining the experiment that he was about to perform.
“Girl P is in a hypnotic state awaiting my instructions.”
Carl went on to explain in the tape that some people, a small percentage of society, was highly susceptible to hypnosis and any commands while under hypnosis. It had been a commonly held belief that people under hypnosis would not do anything while in that state that they wouldn’t do normally—nothing that would go against their normal code of ethics and morality.
But Carl promised to disprove that theory with Girl P.
He also explained that he had already given Girl P many hypnotic sessions over the last several months, sessions that she wouldn’t remember in her conscious mind. He had already laid down the matrix of rules and the trigger words and phrases to get her to do anything he wanted her to.
And to prove his point, he was going to convince Girl P to commit one of the most heinous of acts—murdering her own mother.
Pam’s heart felt like it had stopped for a moment, and she let out a half-sob, half-wheeze. She stood up and was about to push the button to stop the tape, but then she froze. She didn’t want to continue watching, but she had to know.
Had she killed her own mother? Was she going to watch herself do it?
She wiped at her eyes and continued watching.
The camera followed Carl as he walked over to the eight year old Pam in the video resting on the chair. He sat down beside her in a folding chair. His movements were slow and silent.
“Hello, Girl P.”
“Hello, doctor,” her eight year old self whispered back to him.
“I’m going to put you in a deeper trance now.”
She nodded slightly.
“You’re going to feel fine, and nothing bad will happen to you. Everything we do will be good—nothing we do will be bad. You believe that, don’t you?”
“Yes, doctor,” her eight year old self answered in a sluggish voice.
“Good. You’re doing so well.”
Pam watched as her eight year old self just laid there in the chair, her body totally relaxed. Her hair was so blond, her skin so pale. She wore a pair of jeans with some kind of iron-on stickers on the knees—maybe Barbie. She wore a colorful shirt, one that she could remember now that she was seeing it again. She had loved that shirt—she wore it all the time. She also had on a pair of white sneakers.
“I’m going to begin counting down backwards from ten, and you will fall into a deeper state of relaxation. And when I get to one, I’m going to ask you to do me a favor. Is that okay?”
The little girl on the film nodded. “Yes, doctor.”
“Good,” he purred in his soft voice; it was so low and even, so calm and reassuring.
“Ten … nine … eight …”
Even all these years later, Pam could feel the pull of that voice, of those numbers counting down. She could feel the memories in her mind wanting to loosen—like there was a metal safe in her own mind and those numbers were like the gold key slipping in to unlock the door. And when he got to one, the secrets inside that dark safe would come out into the light.
Pam grabbed the remote control and hit PAUSE. She was trembling. Carl h
ad said he was going to command Girl P to kill her own mother.
Was that true? Had she killed her own mother while somebody filmed the act?
Could she even watch this?
Even from what she’d seen, she still had no memory of this ever happening at all. She remembered going with Mom to Dad’s lab and visiting. She remembered going to get some ice cream afterwards, but not much about the lab itself.
But she needed to see. If she did anything at all, it was obviously under the influence of her father.
Pam took a deep breath and hit PLAY. But she turned the sound down for a moment while Carl counted down to one. She didn’t want to hear those numbers counting down; she didn’t want to hear his metronomic voice.
Then she turned the sound back up just as Carl said:
“ … one.”
There was a pause as Carl watched Girl P.
“You are now in a totally relaxed and safe place where nothing is wrong … and everything is okay.”
Girl P nodded.
Carl leaned over and picked up something from the floor beside his chair that was hidden from the view of the camera.
But Pam already knew what the object was going to be even before she saw it … because she’d seen it in her dreams so many times: a handheld ax.
And there it was. The ax looked just like the one she’d seen in her nightmares about Dr. Stanton, the same handheld ax he pulled up from beside his chair, the same ax he raised above her head as she lay on his psychiatrist’s couch, the same ax he chopped down into her face.
“Take the ax,” Carl said to Girl P in his low, soothing voice.
Girl P (she had to keep reminding herself that Girl P was her on the screen) took the ax. It looked like it was a little heavy for her, but she held it by the handle. She sat up straight in the chair, her eyes open. She looked perfectly normal, but maybe a little too calm for an eight year old girl with an ax in her hands.
“Your mother is lying down in a room down the hall. The first room on your right. She’s asleep.”