Brain Child

by John Saul

  It was a large earthenware planter, exploding with the vivid colors of impatiens in full bloom. In the center of the planter, wrapped neatly in aluminum foil and well-hidden by the profuse foliage, he found the spare key to the house. Letting himself inside, he moved confidently through the kitchen and dining room, then down a short hall to the den.

  This, he was sure, was the room in which Dr. Torres spent most of his time. There was a fireplace in one corner, and a battered desk that was in stark contrast to the gleaming sleekness of the desk Torres used at the Brain Institute. And in equal contrast to the Institute office was the clutter of the den. Everywhere were books and journals, stacked high on the desk and shoved untidily onto the shelves that lined the walls. Most were medical books and technical journals relating to Torres’s work, but some were not. Resting the gun on its butt in the corner behind the door, Alex began a closer examination of the library, knowing already what he was looking for, and knowing that he would find it.

  There were several old histories of California, detailing the settling of the area by the Spanish-Mexicans, and the subsequent ceding of the territory to the United States. Tucked between two thick tomes was the thin leather-bound volume, its spine intricately tooled in gold, that Alex was looking for. Handling the book carefully, he removed it from the shelf, then sat down in the worn leather chair that stood between the fireplace and the desk. He opened it to the first page, and examined the details of the illuminations that had been painstakingly worked around the ornate lettering.

  It was a family tree, detailing the history of the family of Don Roberto de Meléndez y Ruiz, his antecedents, and his descendants. Alex scanned the pages quickly until he came to the end.

  The last entry was Raymond Torres, son of María and Carlos Torres.

  It was through his mother, María Ruiz, that Raymond Torres traced his lineage back to Don Roberto, through Don Roberto’s only surviving son, Alejandro. Below the box containing Raymond Torres’s name, there was another box.

  It was empty.

  Alex closed the book and laid it on the hearth in front of the fireplace, then moved on to Torres’s desk. Without hesitation, he pulled the bottom-right-hand drawer open, reached into its depths, and pulled out a nondescript notebook.

  In the notebook, neatly penned in a precise hand, was Raymond Torres’s plan for creating the son he had never fathered.

  It was getting dark when Alex heard the car pull up. He retrieved the gun from the corner behind the door. When Raymond Torres entered the den a few moments later, it lay almost carelessly in Alex’s lap, though his right forefinger was curled around the trigger. Torres paused in the doorway, frowning thoughtfully, then smiled.

  “I don’t think you’ll kill me,” he said. “Nor, for that matter, do I think you have killed anyone else. So why don’t you put that gun down, and let us talk about what’s happening to you.”

  “There’s no need to talk,” Alex replied. “I already know what happened to me. You’ve put computers in my brain, and you’ve been programming me.”

  “You found the notebook.”

  “I didn’t need to find it. I knew where it was. I knew where this house was, and I knew what I’d find here.”

  Torres’s smile faded into a slight frown. “I don’t think you could have known those things.”

  “Of course I could,” Alex replied. “Don’t you understand what you’ve done?”

  Torres closed the door, then, ignoring the gun, moved around his desk and eased himself into his chair. He regarded Alex carefully, and wondered briefly if, indeed, something had gone awry. But he rejected the idea; it was impossible. “Of course I understand,” he finally said. “But I’m not sure you do. What, exactly, do you think I’ve done?”

  “Turned me into you,” Alex said softly. “Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out?”

  Torres ignored the question. “And how, exactly, did I do that?”

  “The testing,” Alex replied. “Only you weren’t testing me, really. You were programming me.”

  “I’ll agree to that,” Torres replied, “since it happens to be absolutely true. Incidentally, I explained it all to your parents this afternoon.”

  “Did you? Did you really tell them all of it?” Alex asked. “Did you tell them that it wasn’t just data you programmed in?”

  Torres frowned. “But it was.”

  Alex shook his head. “Then you don’t understand, do you?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, no,” Torres said, though he understood perfectly. For the first time, he began to feel afraid.

  “Then I’ll tell you. After the operation, my brain was a blank. I had the capacity to learn, because of the computers you put in my brain, but I didn’t have the capacity to think.”

  “That’s not true—”

  “It is true,” Alex insisted. “And I think you knew it, which is why you had to give me a personality as well as just enough data to look like I was … What? Suffering from amnesia? Was I supposed to remember things slowly, so it would look like I was recovering? But I couldn’t remember anything, could I? My brain—Alex Lonsdale’s brain—was dead. So you gave me things to remember, but they were the wrong things.”

  “I haven’t the vaguest idea what you’re talking about, Alex, and neither have you,” Torres declared icily.

  “It’s strange, really,” Alex went on, ignoring Torres’s words. “Some of the mistakes were so small, and yet they set me to wondering. If it had only been the oldest stuff—”

  “The ‘oldest stuff’?” Torres echoed archly.

  “The oldest memories. The memories of the stories your mother used to tell you.”

  “My mother is an old woman. Sometimes she gets confused.”

  “No,” Alex replied. “She’s not confused, and neither are you. The memories served their purpose, and all the people died. You used me to kill them, and I did. And, as you wished, I had no memory of what I’d done. As soon as the killings were over, they were wiped out of my memory banks. But even if I had remembered them, I wouldn’t have been able to say why I was killing. All I would have been able to do is talk about Alejandro de Meléndez y Ruiz and venganza. Revenge. I would have sounded crazy, wouldn’t I?”

  “You’re sounding crazy right now,” Torres said, rising to his feet.

  Alex’s hands tightened on the shotgun. “Sit down,” he said. Torres hesitated, then sank back into his chair. “But it was revenge you wanted,” Alex went on. “Only not revenge for what happened in 1848. Revenge for what happened twenty years ago.”

  “Alex, what you’re saying makes no sense.”

  “But it does,” Alex insisted. “The school. That was one of your mistakes, but only a small one. I remembered the dean’s office being in the wrong place. But it wasn’t the wrong place—I was just twenty years too late. When you were at La Paloma High, the dean’s office was where the nurse’s office is now.”

  “Which means nothing.”

  “True. I could have seen the same pictures of the school in my mother’s yearbook that I saw in yours.”

  Torres’s eyes flickered over the room, first to the bookshelf where his family tree rested, then to the notebook that still lay on top of his desk where Alex had left it.

  Next to it, lying open, was the annual from his senior year at La Paloma High. It was open to a picture he had studied many times over the years. As he looked at it now, he felt once more the pain the people it depicted had caused him.

  All four of them: Marty and Valerie and Cynthia and Ellen.

  The Four Musketeers, who had inflicted wounds on him that he had nursed over the years—never allowing them to heal—until finally they had festered.

  And as the wounds festered, the planning had begun, and then, when the opportunity finally came, he had executed his plan.

  The memories had been carefully constructed in Alex—the memories of things he couldn’t possibly remember—so that when he finally got caught, as Torres knew he
eventually would, all he would be able to do was talk of ancient wrongs and the spirit of a long-dead man who had taken possession of him.

  The truth would be carefully shielded, for Torres had programmed no memories in Alex of the hatred he felt toward the four women who had looked down on him so many years ago, ignored him as if he didn’t exist.

  Even now, he could hear his mother’s voice talking about them:

  “You think they even look at you, Ramón? They are gringos who would spit on you. They are no different than the ones who killed our family, and they will kill you too. You wait, Ramón. Pretend all you want, but in the end you will know the truth. They hate you, Ramón, as you will hate them.”

  And in the end, she had been right, and he had hated them as much as she did.

  And now it was over. Because Raymond Torres had created Alex, he knew what Alex was going to do. Oddly, he could even accept it. “How did you figure it out?”

  “With the tools you gave me,” Alex replied. “I processed data. The facts were simple. From the damage done to my brain, I should have died.

  “But I wasn’t dead.

  “The two facts didn’t match, until I realized that there was one way I could make them match. I could still be alive, if something had been done to keep my body functioning in spite of the damage to my brain. And the only thing capable of doing that was a system of microprocessors performing the functions of my brain.

  “But then I had to fit the memories in.

  “Alex Lonsdale has no memories. None at all, because he’s dead. But I was remembering things, and the answer had to be the same. What I was remembering had to have been programmed into me too, along with all the rest of the data. From there, it wasn’t hard to figure out who I really am.”

  “My son,” Torres said softly. “The son I never had.”

  “No,” Alex replied. “I am not your son, Dr. Torres. I am you. Inside my head are all the memories you grew up with. They’re not my memories, Dr. Torres. They’re yours. Don’t you understand?”

  “It’s the same thing,” Torres said, but Alex shook his head.

  “No. It’s not the same thing, because if it were, I would be about to kill my father. But I’m you, Dr. Torres, so I guess you are about to kill yourself.”

  His hands steady, Alex raised the shotgun, leveled it at Raymond Torres, and squeezed the trigger. Alex watched as Raymond Torres’s head was nearly torn from his body by the force of the buckshot that exploded from the gun’s barrel.

  As he left Torres’s house, the phone began ringing, but Alex ignored it.

  Getting into Torres’s car—his own car, now—he started back toward La Paloma.

  All of them were dead—Valerie Benson, Marty Lewis, and Cynthia Evans. All of them dead, except one.

  Ellen Lonsdale was still alive.

  Roscoe Finnerty carefully replaced the phone on its hook, and turned to face the Lonsdales once more.

  Ellen, as she had been since they got home, was sitting on the sofa, her face pale, her hands trembling. Her eyes, reddened from weeping, blinked nervously, and she seemed to have become incapable of speech.

  Marsh, on the other hand, wore a demeanor of calm that belied the inner turmoil he was feeling. Before beginning to answer Finnerty’s questions, he had tried to think carefully about what he should say, but in the end he’d decided to tell the officers the truth.

  First, they had asked about the gun, and Marsh had led them to the garage, and the box where he was sure his shotgun was still stored.

  It was gone.

  Once more, he remembered Torres’s words: “Alex is totally incapable of killing anyone.”

  But up the street, Cynthia and Carolyn Evans had both been cut down by a shotgun, and someone matching Alex’s description had been seen carrying a shotgun into this house.

  Torres had been wrong.

  Slowly Marsh began telling the two officers, Finnerty and Jackson, what Torres had told him only an hour or so earlier. They’d listened politely, then insisted on checking Marsh’s story with Raymond Torres. When they’d called his office, they’d been told the director of the Institute had left for the day. Only after identifying themselves had they been able to obtain Torres’s home phone number.

  “Well, he’s not there either,” Finnerty said. Then: “Dr. Lonsdale, I don’t want to seem to be pushing you, but I think the most important thing right now is to find Alex. Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

  Marsh shook his head. “If he didn’t go to Torres, I haven’t any idea at all.”

  “What about friends?” Jackson asked, and again Marsh shook his head.

  “He … well, since the accident, he doesn’t really have any friends anymore.” His eyes filled with tears. “I’m afraid—I’m afraid that the longer time went on, the more the kids decided that there was something wrong with Alex. Besides the obvious problems, I mean,” he added.

  “Okay. We’re going to put a stakeout on the house,” Finnerty told him. “I’ve already got an APB out on your wife’s car, but frankly, that doesn’t mean much. The odds of someone spotting it are next to none. And it seems to me that eventually, your son will come home. So we’ll be out there in an unmarked car. Or, at least, someone will. Anyway, we’ll be keeping an eye on this place.”

  Marsh nodded, but Finnerty wasn’t sure he’d been listening. “Dr. Lonsdale?” he asked, and Marsh met his eyes. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this,” Finnerty went on. “I keep hoping that there’s been a mistake, and that maybe your boy didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  Marsh’s head came up, and he used his handkerchief to blot away the last of the tears on his cheeks.

  “It’s all right, Sergeant,” he said. “You’re just doing your job, and I understand it.” He hesitated, then went on. “And there’s something else I should tell you. I … well, I don’t think there’s been a mistake. I think you should be aware that Alex may be very dangerous. Ever since the operation, he hasn’t felt anything—no love, no hate, no anger, nothing. If he’s started killing, for whatever reason, he probably won’t stop. Nor will he care what he does.”

  There was a short silence while Finnerty tried to assess Marsh Lonsdale’s words. “Dr. Lonsdale,” he finally asked, “would you mind telling me exactly what you’re trying to say?”

  “I’m trying to say that if you find Alex, I think you’d better kill him. If you don’t, I suspect he won’t hesitate to kill you.”

  Jackson and Finnerty glanced at each other. Finally, it was Jackson who spoke for both of them. “We can’t do that, Dr. Lonsdale,” he said quietly. “So far, it hasn’t been proven that your son has done anything. For all we know, he might have been up in the hills shooting rabbits, and hurt himself some way.”

  “No,” Marsh said, his voice almost a whisper. “No, that’s not it. He did it.”

  “If he did, that will be for a court to decide,” Jackson went on. “We’ll find your son, Dr. Lonsdale. But we won’t kill him.”

  Marsh shook his head wearily. “You don’t understand, do you? That boy out there—he’s not Alex. I don’t know who he is, but he’s not Alex.…”

  “Okay,” Finnerty said, in the gently soothing voice he’d long ago developed for situations in which he found himself dealing with someone who was less than rational. “You just take it easy for a while, Dr. Lonsdale, and we’ll take care of it.” He waited until Marsh had settled himself onto the sofa next to Ellen, then led Jackson out of the house. “Well? What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Neither do I,” Finnerty sighed. “Neither do I.”

  “I don’t believe any of this,” Jim Cochran declared. His glance alternated between his wife and his elder daughter, neither of whom seemed willing to meet his gaze. Only Kim seemed to agree with him, and Carol had insisted she be sent up to her room five minutes ago, when it became obvious a fight was brewing. “Ellen and Marsh and Alex have been friends of ours for most
of our lives. And now you don’t even want me to call them?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Carol protested, though she knew that even if she hadn’t said the words, certainly that was what she had meant. “I just think we should leave them alone until we know what’s happened.”

  “That’s not you talking,” Jim replied. “It’s someone else.”

  “No!” Carol exclaimed. “After today, I just can’t stand any more.”

  “And what about Marsh and Ellen? How do you think they feel? They’re the ones whose lives are falling apart, Carol, not us.”

  Carol tried to close her ears to the words that were so much an echo of what she herself had said to Lisa only weeks ago. But weeks ago, no one had died.

  “And what if Alex comes home?” Carol demanded. “No one knows where he is, or what he’s doing, but according to Sheila Rosenberg, he murdered Cynthia and Carolyn Evans this morning, and probably murdered Marty and Valerie as well.”

  “We don’t know that,” Jim insisted. “And you both know that Sheila is the worst gossip in this town.”

  “Daddy!” Lisa said. “Alex didn’t care about what happened to Mrs. Lewis, and he didn’t think Mr. Lewis killed her. He told me so. He even said he thought someone else might get killed.”

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  “And he’s been acting weirder and weirder ever since he came home. Are you going to tell me that’s not true, too?”

  “It’s not the point,” Jim insisted. “The point is that people stick by their friends, no matter what happens. And I don’t accept that Alex has killed anyone.”

  “Then I’m afraid you’re burying your head in the sand,” Carol replied. “If he hasn’t done anything, then where is he?”

  “Anywhere,” Jim said. “Who knows? He could have gone up into the hills, and had another accident.”

  “Daddy—”

  “No,” Jim said. “I’ve heard enough. I’m calling Marsh, and finding out what’s going on. And if they need me, I’m going up there.” He left the kitchen, and a few seconds later, Carol and Lisa heard him talking on the phone.