He found nothing startling, though he noticed that, during hypnotic
regression, a subtle note of anxiety had entered her voice when their
backward journey through time had reached August 31 of the year before
last. It was nothing dramatic that would have caught his attention at
the time the recordings were made. But by telescoping all the sessions
into one afternoon, using the fast-forward control to skip from day to
day, he saw the pattern of steadily building anxiety, and he suspected
they were getting close to the event now hidden behind the Azrael Block.
Therefore, during their sixth post-Christmas session on Saturday,
January 4, Pablo was not surprised when the breakthrough came. As
usual, Ginger was sitting in one of the armchairs by the bay window,
beyond which a fine snow was falling. Her silver-blond hair glowed with
spectral light. As he regressed her back through July of the previous
year, her brows knitted, and her voice became whispery and tense, and
Pablo knew she was drawing closer to the moment of her forgotten ordeal.
Since they were going backward in time, he had already taken her through
her busy months as a surgical resident at Memorial Hospital, back to the
moment when she first reported to George Hannaby for duty on Monday,
July 30,
more than seventeen months ago. Her memories remained sharp and richly
detailed as Pablo conveyed her into Sunday, July 29, when she still had
been settling into her new apartment. July 28, 27, 26, 25, 24 ...
through those days she had been unpacking and shopping for furniture ...
all the way back to July 21, 20, 19. . . . On July 18, the moving
van arrived with her household goods, which she had shipped from Palo
Alto, California, where she had lived the previous two years while
taking an advanced course of study in vascular surgery. Farther back ..
.
On July 17, she arrived in Boston by car and booked a room overnight at
the Holiday Inn Government Center, as close to Beacon Hill as possible,
not yet able to stay at her new apartment because she had no bed there.
"By car? You drove cross-country from Stanford?"
"It was the first vacation I ever really had. I like to drive, and it
was a chance to see a little of the country," Ginger said, but in such
an ominous voice that she might have been talking about a journey
through hell rather than a transcontinental holiday.
So Pablo began to regress her through the days of her journey, back
across the midwestern heartland, around the northernmost horn of the
Rocky Mountains, through Utah, into Nevada, until they came to Tuesday
morning, July 10. She had stayed the previous night at a motel, and when
he asked for the name of it, a shudder passed through her.
"T-Tranquility."
"Tranquility Motel? Where is this place? Describe it, too."
On the arms of her chair, her hands curled into fists. "Thirty miles
west of Elko, on Interstate 80." Haltingly, reluctantly, she described
the twenty-unit Tranquility Motel and Grille. Something about the place
terrified her. Every muscle in her body went rigid.
Pablo said, "So you stayed the night of July ninth at the motel. That
was a Monday. All right, so now it's Monday, July ninth. You're just
arriving at the motel. You haven't stayed there yet; you're just
driving up to it. . . . What time of the day is it?"
She did not answer, and her tremors grew more pronounced, and when he
asked again, she said, "I didn't arrive on Monday. F-Friday."
Startled, Pablo said, "The previous Friday? You stayed at the
Tranquility Motel from Friday, July sixth, through Monday, July ninth?
Four nights at this small motel in the middle of nowhere?" He leaned
forward in his chair, sensing that they had found the time when her mind
had been tampered with. "Why would you want to stay so long?"
In a slightly wooden voice, she said, "Because it was peaceful. I was
on vacation, after all." Her strangely stilted voice became more flat
and devoid of nuance with each word she spoke. "I needed to relax, you
see, and this was a perfect place to relax."
The old magician looked away from her, watched the faintly luminous snow
slanting down through the dreary gray afternoon beyond the window, and
carefully considered his next question. "You said this motel has no
swimming pool. And the rooms you've described aren't luxurious. Not
resort-style rooms for long-term visits. What on earth did you do for
four days out there in the middle of nowhere, Ginger?"
"Like I said, I relaxed. Just relaxed. Napped. Read a couple of
books. Watched some TV. They have good TV even way out there on the
plains because they've got their own little satellite receiver dish on
the roof." Her manner of speech was now entirely altered, and she
sounded as if she were reading from a script. "After two intense years
at Stanford, I needed a few days of doing absolutely nothing."
"What books did you read while at the motel?"
" I ... I don't remember." Her hands were still fisted, and she was
still rigid. Fine pearly beads of sweat popped out along her hairline.
" Ginger, you're there now, in the motel room, reading. Understand? You
are reading whatever you were reading then. Now look at the title of
the book and tell me what it is."
"I . . . no . . . no title."
"Every book has a title."
"No title."
"Because there really is no book-is there?" he said.
"Yes. I just relaxed. Napped. Read a couple of books. Watched some
TV," she said in a soft, dead, emotionless voice. "They have good TV
even way out there on the plains because they've got their own little
satellite receiver dish on the roof."
"What TV shows did you watch?" Pablo asked.
"News. Movies."
"What movies?"
She flinched. "I ... don't remember."
Pablo was quite sure that the reason she did not remember these things
was precisely because she had never done them. She had been at that
motel, all right, because she could describe it in minute detail, but
she could not recall the books and the TV programs because she had never
passed any of that time in those pursuits. Through clever post-hypnotic
suggestions, she had been instructed to say that she had done those
things, and she had actually been made to remember vaguely having done
them, but they were merely artificial memories designed to cover what
had really transpired at that motel. A specialist in brainwashing could
insert false memories in a subject's mind, but even if he worked very
hard at it and built an intricate web of interlocking details, he could
not make the phony memories as convincing as real ones.
Pablo said, "Where did you eat dinner each night?"
"The Tranquility Grille. It's a small place, and it doesn't have much
of a menu, but the food is reasonably good." That response was, once
again, delivered in a flat and hollow voice.
Pablo said, "What did you eat at the Tranquility Grille?"
She hesitated. "I . . . I don't remember."
"But you told me the food was good. How could you make
that judgment if
you don't remember what you ate?"
"Uhhh . . . it's a small place, and it doesn't have much of a menu."
The more insistently he pressed for details, the more tense she became.
Her voice remained emotionless as she spewed out her programmed
responses, but her face twisted and hardened with anxiety.
Pablo could have told her that her apparent memories of those four days
at the Tranquility Motel were false. He could have ordered her to blow
them out of her mind the way one might blow dust from an old book, and
she would have done it. Then he could have told her that her true
memories were locked behind an Azrael Block, and that she must hammer it
into more dust. But if he had done so, she would have plunged, as
programmed, into a coma-or worse. He would have to spend many days,
possibly weeks, looking for tiny cracks to exploit cautiously.
For today, he contented himself with identifying the precise number of
hours of her life that had been stolen from her. He took her back to
Friday, July 6, of the summer before last, and asked exactly when she
signed the register at the Tranquility Motel.
"A little after eight o'clock." She no longer spoke in a wooden voice
because these were real memories. "It was still an hour before sunset,
but I was exhausted. All I wanted was dinner, a shower, and bed." She
described the man and woman behind the check-in counter in detail. She
even recalled their names: Faye and Ernie.
Pablo said, "Once you had checked in, you ate at the Tranquility Grille
next to the motel. So describe the place."
She did so, and in convincing detail. But when he jumped her ahead to
the moment at which she left the restaurant, her recollections were
phony again, thin and without color. Clearly, her memories had been
altered from some point after she had gone into the Tranquility Grille
on that Friday evening until she had left the motel and had headed
toward Utah the following Tuesday morning.
Pablo backtracked, returning Ginger to the small restaurant once more,
searching for the exact moment at which the genuine memories ended and
the false began. "Tell me about your dinner from the moment you went
into Tranquility Grille that Friday evening. Minute by minute."
Ginger sat up straight in her chair. Her eyes were still closed, but
under the shuttered lids, they moved visibly, as if she were looking
left and right upon entering the Tranquility Grille. She unfisted her
hands and got up, much to Pablo's surprise. She walked away from her
chair, toward the center of the room. He walked beside her to prevent
her from bumping into furniture. She did not know she was in his
apartment but imagined herself to be making her way between the tables
in the restaurant. As she moved, the tension and fear left her, for now
she was wholly in that time, prior to all her trouble, when she had had
nothing about which to be tense or afraid.
In a quiet, anxiety-free voice she said, "Took me a while to freshen up
and get over here, so it's almost twilight. Outside, the plains are
orange in the late sunlight, and the inside of the diner is full of that
glow. I think I'll take that booth over in the corner by the window."
Pablo went with her, guiding her past the Picasso painting toward one of
the sofas that was decorated with colorful pastel accent pillows.
She said, "Mmmm. Smells good. Onions . . . spices . . . French
fries . . ."
"How many people in the diner, Ginger?"
She paused and turned her head, surveying the room with closed eyes.
"The cook behind the counter and a waitress. Three men..... truck
drivers, I guess..... on stools at the counter. And..... three at
that table..... and the chubby priest . . . another guy over at that
booth . . ." Ginger continued pointing and counting. "Oh, eleven in
all, plus me."
"All right," Pablo said, "let's go to that booth by the windows."
She began walking again, smiled vaguely at someone, sidestepped an
obstacle that only she could see, then suddenly twitched in surprise,
jerked one hand to her face. "Oh!" She stopped.
"What is it?" Pablo asked. "What's happened?"
She blinked furiously for a moment, smiled, and spoke to someone in the
Tranquility Grille back there on July 6 of last year. "No, no, I'm all
right. It's nothing. I've already brushed it off." She wiped her face
with one hand. "See?" She had been looking down, as if the other person
was seated, and now she raised her eyes as he got up.
Pablo waited for her to continue the conversation.
She said, "Well, when you spill salt you'd better throw some over your
shoulder, or God knows what'll happen. My father used to throw it three
times, so if you'd been him, you'd have buried me in the stuff."
She started walking again, and Pablo said, "Stop. Wait, Ginger. The
man who threw salt over his shoulder-tell me what he looks like."
"Young," she said. "Thirty-two or thirty-three. About five-ten. Lean.
Dark hair. Dark eyes. Sort of handsome. Seems shy, sweet."
Dominick Corvaisis. No doubt about it.
She began to move again. Pablo stayed at her side until, realizing she
was about to sit in the restaurant booth, he guided her gently to the
sofa. She sat back on it and looked out a window, smiling at her
private panorama of Nevada plains washed in the light of a dying sun.
Pablo watched and listened while Ginger exchanged pleasantries with the
waitress and ordered a bottle of Coors. The beer was served, and Ginger
pantomimed sipping it while she watched the sun fade. Seconds ticked
past, but Pablo didn't speed her through the scene because he knew they
were approaching the crucial moment when her real memories gave way to
phony ones. The event-the thing that she saw and should not have
seen-had transpired around this time, and Pablo wanted to learn
everything he could about the minutes leading up to it.
Twilight arrived back there in the past.
When the waitress returned, Ginger ordered a bowl of the homemade
vegetable soup and a cheeseburger with all the trimmings.
Night fell out there in Nevada.
Abruptly, before her food had been served, Ginger frowned and said,
"What's that?" She looked out the imagined window, scowling.
"What do you see?" Pablo asked, chained to his inconvenient vantage
point in present-day Boston.
A worried look came over her face, and she stood up. "What the devil is
that noise?" She looked toward other people in the restaurant with a
puzzled expression, and she spoke to them: "I don't know. I don't know
what it is." She suddenly tottered sideways and nearly fell. "Gevalt!"
She reached out as if supporting herself against the side of a booth or
table. "Shaking. Why's everything shaking?" She jumped in surprise.
"It's knocked over my beer glass. Is it an earthquake? What's
happening? What is that sound?" She stumbled again. Now she was
frightened. "The door!" She started to run across the living room,
though in her mind she was heading toward the exit from the restaurant
that, in reality, sh
e had long ago departed. "The door," she cried
again, but then she stopped abruptly, swaying, gasping, shuddering.
When Pablo caught up with her, she dropped to her knees and hung her
head. "What's happening, Ginger?"
"Nothing." She had changed in an instant.
"What's that noise?"
"What noise?" The robot voice again.
"Ginger, damn it, what's happening in the Tranquility Grille?"
Horror was on her face, but she merely said, "I'm having dinner."
"That's a false memory"Having dinner."
He tried to make her continue with the crucial memory of the frightening
thing that had been about to happen. But at last he had to accept that
the Azrael Block, behind which her memories were repressed, took form
when she had been running for the restaurant door, and it did not end
until the following Tuesday morning, when she drove east toward Salt
Lake City. In time, he might be able to chip it down to smaller
dimensions, but enough had been accomplished for one day.
At last they were making real headway. They knew that on the night of
Friday, July 6, the year before last, Ginger had seen something she had
not been meant to see. Having seen it, she had almost certainly been
detained in a room at the Tranquility Motel, where someone had used
sophisticated brainwashing techniques to conceal the memory of that
event from her and thereby prevent her from carrying word of it to the
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 37