The Devil's Eye

by Jack McDevitt

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I was directed to you.”

  “May I ask, what’s your connection with Ms. Greene? Are you a relative?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  He looked in my direction. “Is she?”

  “You may talk directly to me, Dr. Hemsley,” I said. “And no, I’m not a relative.”

  He looked puzzled. “A friend? Is there a legal connection here somewhere?”

  “No.” Alex sat back, crossed one leg over the other. “Ms. Greene contacted us for assistance. Several days ago.”

  “I see.” He took on the demeanor of a man about to deliver bad news. “Well, in any case, she seems to have negated all that. You’re aware of the procedure she’s undergone?”

  “Yes.”

  “It severs her old world. She’s—” He hesitated. But I got the impression he was only pretending to search for the proper phrase. “She’s no longer with us. What kind of assistance did she request?”

  “She didn’t specify, Doctor. She merely asked for our help.”

  “And what kind of help would you have been able to provide, Mr. Benedict?”

  “We’re fairly flexible, Doctor. Is it possible to speak to whoever was charged with her care?”

  “I think there may have been a misunderstanding. Her psychiatrist is prohibited by ethical considerations from discussing her case with anyone except family members. Or her lawyer. And there are even strict prohibitions on that. It would therefore be pointless to proceed further.” He got up. “I’m sorry you wasted your time.”

  We called Cory again. Would he be willing to see her doctor and ask some questions?

  No. “It’s over,” he said. “She’s past help now. Let’s just let it go.”

  “But somebody may be in danger.”

  “Look, Benedict,” Cory said, “if something unusual had been happening in her life, I’d have known about it. Nobody’s in danger.”

  “You didn’t know the mind wipe was coming.”

  “Just go away. Please.”

  Naturally they wouldn’t give us Greene’s new name. Nobody gets that. Not even a spouse or a mother. It wouldn’t have mattered, of course. There was nothing to be gained even if we could speak with her. Cory was right. She was gone.

  Alex sat in the big living room at the country house, staring at logs burning in the fireplace. “After the procedure,” he said, “St. Thomas provides her with a couple of people who masquerade as family. I checked before we went out there. They create the illusion of a whole new life.” Alex had discovered years before that a close friend had gone through the process. Had lived an earlier life of which he was completely unaware.

  “Time to walk away,” I said.

  “Sure.” He smiled at me. “Take the money and run.”

  I couldn’t see any point in attending the memorial service. It’s basically a funeral, and I hate funerals. But Alex insisted on going, so I accompanied him.

  Vicki had lived in a spacious double-tier early-Valaska manor, surrounded by broad lawns, clusters of trees, and a high fence. Two sculpted fountains flanked the front of the house, made to look like demons and wolves. They were shut down the day of the memorial, maybe because of the continuing cold, maybe because someone thought a functioning fountain would be improper.

  I wondered who would be getting the property. “They’ve put it up for sale,” Alex said. We were in the skimmer, beginning our descent. “The proceeds will be put into a sealed fund and made available to Vicki’s new persona on a periodic basis. She won’t know where it’s coming from.”

  “Has anybody ever gone through this procedure and later recovered her memory?”

  “It’s happened. But not very often.”

  We got clearance from the AI and came down in a parking area a mile or so away. There, along with a dozen other people, all appropriately subdued, we boarded a limo, which flew us to a pad at the side of the house. We got out and were directed across the frozen ground by two valets. The front doors opened, and we climbed stone steps onto the portico and went inside. A somber young woman greeted us and thanked us for coming.

  There was a substantial crowd, maybe two hundred people wandering through a cluster of sitting rooms and spilling out onto a heated side deck. Cory showed up and managed a frigid hello. We tracked down Vicki’s editor, an older woman with tired eyes and a clenched jaw that never seemed to relax. Her name was Marjorie Quick.

  Alex expressed his sympathy and engaged her in a few minutes of small talk, how he was an avid reader of Vicki’s work, and what a loss this was. Was there by any chance another book coming?

  “Not that I know of,” she said. “Unfortunately, she took the last year off. Vacationed. Enjoyed herself. Just let it go.”

  “But she’d been producing a book every year, hadn’t she?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But that can wear on you.”

  “I’m sure it would.”

  Quick had recognized his name. “Aren’t you the Alex Benedict—?”

  He admitted that yes, he was, and steered the conversation back to Vicki: “I read that she’d gone to Salud Afar,” he said.

  “Yes. She wanted to get away.”

  “It’s a long way out. Even with the new drive, it’s a month. One way.”

  “I know. But she wanted to go.” She started looking around for a way to extricate herself from us.

  “You say she wasn’t working on a book? I mean, that would be the ideal place to work, on a long trip like that.”

  “The reality is that she was always working on a book. More or less.”

  “Did you see her after she got back?”

  “No. I haven’t seen her for eight or nine months.”

  I got the impression that she’d tried to dissuade Vicki from making the flight. “Vicki needed to fill her tank, Mr. Benedict. It’s as simple as that.” She adjusted her jacket. “If it weren’t so far, Salud Afar would be the perfect place for a horror writer on vacation.”

  “Really? Why’s that?”

  “Read the tourist brochures. It has lost seas and beaches where monsters come ashore and God knows what else.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Of course I am. But those are the stories. I know she’d paid a virtual visit to Salud Afar in the spring. But if you understand writers, you’ll understand that’s not enough. If you write horror, and you want atmosphere, Salud Afar is your world.”

  Somebody had put a picture of Vicki Greene in the center aisle. She looked bright and happy, holding a kitten in her lap. They could have used an avatar, of course, and a lot of people do that. You go to a funeral, and they have a replica of the deceased delivering a few final sentiments. It’s always struck me as creepy.

  Instead, they’d settled for a picture. Vicki had been a lovely woman. I don’t think I’d realized how lovely.

  As ten o’clock approached, the guests wandered toward the main room. It wasn’t big enough to accommodate everyone. We joined the crowd, watching the proceedings from a passageway. Precisely on the hour, somebody sat down and played “Last Light,” the moderator appeared, and the service began.

  There was no religious element, of course. According to all reports, Vicki and her family were believers, but she wasn’t really dead. So it was a memorial, and no more. Friends and family members went forward one by one to talk about her, to remember her, and to express their regret that, for whatever reason, she had resorted to such extreme measures. “So many of us loved her,” said one man, who described himself simply as a friend but could not hold back tears. “Now she’s gone from us.”

  It was the first time I’d attended a service for someone who was still technically alive. Who could have walked through the doors at any moment.

  The last of the speakers finished, and the moderator turned things over to Cory, who thanked everyone for coming and announced there’d be refreshments in the dining room. He hoped, he said, everybody would stay.

  Some did. Others began to drift away. We wa
ndered through the gathering, offering condolences, looking for someone who might know why she’d done it. I got introduced to a few other people whose names were familiar. “Horror writers,” someone told us. “They’re a pretty close-knit bunch.” I tried to imagine what an evening at a bar would be like with a group of people who wrote about swamp monsters.

  She had a lot of friends. Women talked of good times, men spoke admiringly of her abilities, which were supposed to be references to her writing, but which I came to suspect were code words for Vicki’s lustrous brown eyes and her up-front equipment. But maybe I’m selling them short. She’d had a lot of boyfriends, one of whom had apparently put together an avatar of Vicki and now sat talking with it for hours at a time. I wasn’t aware of that fact when I met him. Found it out later in the day. But I remember sensing that he was obsessed with the woman. Most painful for him, probably, was knowing she was still alive, her personality more or less intact. But whatever he might have meant to her was gone. He was not even a memory.

  I found only one person who’d seen her since her return from Salud Afar: Cass Jurinsky, a craggy, ancient-looking female author who wrote about the horror genre. When she asked what I did for a living and I mentioned Alex’s name, she got excited. “Vicki was a big fan of his,” she said. “She used to talk about using him as a character in one of her novels.”

  Alex in a horror novel. I tried to imagine him playing tag with a poltergeist.

  “Seriously.” She looked at me with sad eyes. “I guess she never got in touch with him, did she?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. Maybe it explained why she’d come to us for help. “What was her state of mind when she got back from her vacation? Did you notice anything unusual, Cass?”

  “She seemed depressed,” Jurinsky said. “I don’t know what it was. It was as if all the spirit had gone out of her.”

  She had white hair and a lined face. But her eyes took fire when she talked about Vicki and her diabolical creations. “Nobody was better at it. She didn’t have the biggest audience because she wrote a subtler kind of horror than the rest of them. But if you were tuned in to her, nobody could scare the pants off people the way she did.”

  “Where did you last see her?” I asked.

  “A few weeks ago. At the World Terror Convention. It’s for horror fans.” (I could have figured that one out.) “They hold it every year in Bentley. Vicki showed up without warning. She wasn’t on the schedule, but at one point I looked up and there she was. I didn’t even know she was back.”

  “You got to talk to her?”

  “Oh, yes.” She sighed. “I loved that woman. I asked her how the trip had gone, and she said it was all right but she was glad to be home. And I remember thinking she didn’t look glad.”

  “How did she look?”

  “You want the truth? Frightened. And older. She’d aged while she was away.” Jurinsky stopped, and I saw her replaying the scene in her mind. “I asked if everything was okay, and she said sure. She said it was good to see me again, then somebody interrupted and I drifted away from her.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.” Her lips tightened. “I should have paid more attention. Maybe I could have helped.”

  We stood quietly for a moment. She seemed far away. Then I brought her back. “Why do you think she went to the convention?”

  “Well, she usually attended World Terror. She enjoyed spending time with her fans. Or, maybe she was looking for someone to talk to.”

  “You?”

  “I’d guess anybody. Looking back now, I think she just wanted to be in a crowd. A crowd that knew her. But I was too busy to notice.” She took a deep breath. “Too dumb.”

  It was on the whole a depressing hour and I was glad when it was over. Alex had found a couple more who’d seen her, and who’d thought something might be wrong. But nobody had pursued the issue with her. “I talked with Cory again,” he said.

  “And—?”

  “She bought a new notebook after she got home from Salud Afar.”

  “What happened to the old one?”

  “Apparently left behind.”

  On the way home, he mentioned that he’d gotten the name of her psychiatrist.

  FOUR

  Trust your instincts, Shiel. In the end, it’s all you’ve got.

  —Nightwalk

  The painful truth about humanity is that the only people who can’t be bought are the fanatics. Clement Obermaier was not a fanatic. He was the authorizing psychiatrist in Vicki’s case. And when Alex offered to contribute substantially to a fund in which he had an interest, he discovered a way around the ethical dilemma posed by the need to talk about a patient.

  Alex met him at Cokie’s Place, a cabaret in the mountains north of St. Thomas. Afterward, he reconstructed the conversation for me.

  Obermaier apparently thought Alex hoped there’d be a manuscript around somewhere. If there were, it would be worth a considerable sum. “At first,” Alex said, “it was pretty obvious he was hoping he could talk to me, collect the contribution, but not tell me anything.”

  “So what did he tell you?”

  “Somebody did a lineal block on her.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a procedure that’s used with psychotic patients. Or with those who have extreme emotional problems. It allows the doctors to isolate a memory, or a set of memories, and prevent the patient from acting on them. From even talking about them.”

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  “It can negate a wish for vengeance, for example. Or prevent stalking. That sort of thing.”

  “So who used it on her? Why would they do it?”

  “Obermaier has no idea. There’s nothing in her medical record.”

  “Which means it was an illegal procedure.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can they estimate when it happened?”

  “He’s pretty sure it was within the last year.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that she had some sort of specific memory that was locked away. She couldn’t even tell anybody what it was.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “But the memory was still there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why wouldn’t they—whoever did it—just do a mind wipe?”

  “If we can find them, we’ll ask. My guess would be that you can’t hide a complete memory abstraction. I mean, the poor woman wouldn’t even have been able to find her way home.”

  “Couldn’t this guy help her? Other than by removing her memory completely?”

  “He says he tried. But apparently lineal blocks tend to be permanent.”

  “So he did the extraction because she was having a problem with the lineal block? Do I have that right?”

  “They did the extraction because she requested it.”

  “Couldn’t he have refused?”

  “He said he saw no recourse except to allow her to proceed.”

  “Why?”

  “He said that, left to herself, she might have committed suicide.”

  “You think it happened on Salud Afar?”

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt.”

  “Are you suggesting maybe she ran into a real werewolf? Something like that?”

  “I think she found out something she wasn’t supposed to know.”

  Two days later, Alex had something he wanted me to watch. “This is from the Nightline Horror Convention,” he said. “It took place a few days before Vicki left for Salud Afar. She was among the guests, and this is one of her panels.”

  The hologram blinked on. Four people at a table. Vicki at one end. I could hear an audience behind me. A tall redheaded man sitting beside her held up his hand, and the crowd quieted. “My name’s Sax Cherkowski. And I just want to say my latest novel is Fright Night. I’m the moderator of the panel, and I’d like to take a moment to introduce everyone. We’ll be talking about how to set mood, which is to say, how to scare the reader.” />
  We fast-forwarded through most of the comments until it was Vicki’s turn to speak. “It doesn’t have to be dark,” she said. She used a dazzling smile to demonstrate that all the mummies and vampires were in fun. “It doesn’t have to be gloomy. All you need is a hint that you’re setting the stage. The wind suddenly becomes audible.

  “It might be two o’clock in the afternoon in an office building with a thousand people moving around. But if you know what you’re doing, you can still arrange things so that every time someone opens a door, your reader will jump.”

  The panelists took turns responding to questions from the moderator and the audience. Vicki didn’t really talk. She performed. She sparkled. The audience loved her. “Keep in mind,” she told them, “that you’re not telling a story. You’re creating an experience. When those floorboards creak, your reader should hear it. When a log falls in the fireplace, your reader should jump. That means if you write anything that doesn’t move the action forward, throw in an adjective you don’t need, do anything that doesn’t keep things going, you remind the reader that she’s in a comfortable chair at home reading a book. When that happens, everything you’ve worked to accomplish goes away.”

  Alex let it run for about twenty minutes. Vicki held the audience in her hand. She got laughs, collected applause, traded quips with the other guests, joked with people in their seats, and was the star of the show. Then he showed me a second panel in which she tried to explain why people love to be scared. She was, if anything, even better.

  “This next,” said Alex, “is a teachers’ luncheon. She was the guest speaker.”

  A long table appeared. A tall, rangy man stood at a lectern and introduced her. While he delivered accolades and the applause heated up, she took her place beside him. She thanked everyone for coming, announced that she would be talking about the importance of literacy and the critical role teachers play in the process of enlightening the rest of us, and she proceeded to do so. In a workmanlike, methodical manner.