by Dean Koontz
“Hey, I’m not a perfect stranger.”
“Well, almost.”
“Oh, I see,” he said. “I understand. You mean I’m perfect but not a stranger. I can live with that.”
Joanna smiled. She wanted to touch him, but she didn’t. “Well, anyway, we’re here to show you the palace, not to have long boring Freudian discussions. There are a thousand things to see, and every one of them is more interesting than my psyche.”
“You underestimate yourself.”
Another group of chattering tourists rounded the corner and approached from behind Joanna. She turned toward them, using them as an excuse to avoid Alex’s eyes for the few seconds required to regain her composure, but what she saw made her gasp.
A man with no right hand.
Twenty feet away.
Walking toward her.
A. Man. With. No. Right. Hand.
He was at the front of the group: a smiling, grandfatherly Korean gentleman with a softly creased face and iron-gray hair. He wore sharply pressed slacks, a white shirt, a blue tie, and a light blue sweater with the right sleeve rolled up a few inches. His arm was deformed at the wrist: There was nothing but a smooth, knobby, pinkish stub where the hand should have been.
“Are you all right?” Alex asked, apparently sensing the sudden tension in her.
She wasn’t able to speak.
The one-handed man drew closer.
Fifteen feet away now.
She could smell antiseptics. Alcohol. Lysol. Lye soap.
That was ridiculous. She couldn’t really smell antiseptics. Imagination. Nothing to fear. Nothing to fear in Nijo Castle.
Lysol.
Alcohol.
No. Nothing to fear. The one-handed Korean was a stranger, a kindly little ojii-san who couldn’t possibly hurt anyone. She had to get a grip on herself.
Lysol.
Alcohol.
“Joanna? What’s happening? What’s wrong?” Alex asked, touching her shoulder.
The elderly Korean seemed to advance with the slow-motion single-mindedness of a monster in a horror film or in a nightmare. Joanna felt trapped in the unearthly, oppressive gravity of her dream, in that same syrupy flow of time.
Her tongue was thick. A bad taste filled her mouth, the coppery flavor of blood, which was no doubt as imaginary as the miasma of antiseptics, although it was as sickening as if it had been real. Her throat was constricted. She felt as if she might begin to gag. She heard herself straining for air.
Lysol.
Alcohol.
She blinked, and the flutter of her eyelids magically altered reality even further, so the Korean’s pinkish stump now ended in a mechanical hand. Incredibly, she could hear the compact servo-mechanisms purring with power, the oiled push-pull rods sliding in their tracks, and the gears click-click-clicking as the fingers opened from a clenched fist.
No. That was imagination too.
“Joanna?”
When the Korean was less than three yards from her, he raised his twisted limb and pointed with the mechanical hand that wasn’t really there. Intellectually Joanna knew that he was interested only in the mural that she and Alex had been studying, but on a more primitive and affecting emotional level, she reacted with the certainty that he was pointing at her, reaching for her with unmistakably malevolent purpose.
“Joanna.”
It was Alex speaking her name, but she could almost believe that it had been the Korean.
From the deepest reaches of memory came a frightening sound: a gravelly, jagged, icy voice seething with hatred and bitterness. A familiar voice, synonymous with pain and terror. She wanted to scream. Although the man in her nightmare, the faceless bastard with steel fingers, had never spoken to her in sleep, she knew this was his voice. With a jolt, she realized that while she had never heard him speak in the nightmare, she had heard him when she was awake, a long time ago... somehow, somewhere. The words he spoke to her now were not imagined or dredged up from her worst dreams, but recollected. The voice was a cold, dark effervescence bubbling up from a long-forgotten place and time: “Once more the needle, my lovely little lady. Once more the needle.” It grew louder, reverberating in her mind, a voice to which the rest of the world was deaf—“Once more the needle, once more the needle, once more the needle”—booming with firecracker repetitiveness, until she thought her head would explode.
The Korean stopped two feet from her.
Lysol.
Alcohol.
Once more the needle, my lovely little lady ...
Joanna ran. She cried out like a wounded animal and turned away from the startled Korean, pushed at Alex without fully realizing who he was, pushed so hard that she almost knocked him down, and darted past him, her heels tapping noisily on the hardwood floor. She hurried into the next chamber, trying to scream but unable to find her voice, ran without looking back, convinced that the Korean was pursuing her, ran past the dazzling seventeenth-century artworks of the master Kano Tan’yu and his students, fled between strikingly beautiful wood sculptures, and all the while she struggled to draw a breath, but the air was like a thick dust that clogged her lungs. She ran past richly carved transoms, past intricate scenes painted on sliding doors, footsteps echoing off the coffered ceilings, ran past a surprised guard who called to her, dashed through an exit into cool November air, started across the big courtyard, heard a familiar voice calling her name, not the cold voice of the man with the steel hand, so she finally stopped, stunned, in the center of the Nijo garden, shaking, shaking.
10
Alex led her to a garden bench and sat beside her in the brisk autumn breeze. Her eyes were unnaturally wide, and her face was as pale and fragile as bridal lace. He held her hand. Her fingers were cold and chalky white, and she squeezed his hand so hard that her manicured nails bit into his skin.
“Should I get you to a doctor?”
“No. It’s over. I’ll be all right. I just... I need to sit here for a while.”
She still appeared to be ill, but a trace of color slowly began to return to her cheeks.
“What happened, Joanna?”
Her lower lip quivered like a suspended bead of water about to surrender to the insistent pull of gravity. Bright tears glistened in the corners of her eyes.
“Hey. Hey now,” he said softly.
“Alex, I’m so sorry.”
“About what?”
“I made such a fool of myself.”
“Nonsense.”
“Embarrassed you,” she said.
“Not a chance.”
Her eyes brimmed with tears.
“It’s okay,” he told her.
“I was just... scared.”
“Of what?”
“The Korean.”
“What Korean?”
“The man with one hand.”
“Was he Korean? Do you know him?”
“Never saw him before.”
“Then what? Did he say something?”
She shook her head. “No. He... he reminded me of something awful... and I panicked.” Her hand tightened on his.
“Reminded you of what?”
She was silent, biting her lower lip.
He said, “It might help to talk about it.”
For a long moment she gazed up into the lowering sky, as if reading enigmatic messages into the patterns of the swift-moving clouds. Finally she told him about the nightmare.
“You have it every night?” he asked.
“For as far back as I can remember.”
“When you were a child?”
“I guess... no ... not then.”
“Exactly how far back?”
“Seven or eight years. Maybe ten.”
“Maybe twelve?”
Through her shimmering tears she regarded him curiously. “What do you mean?”
Rather than answer, he said, “The odd thing about it is the frequency. Every night. That must be unbearable. It must drain you. The dream itself isn’t particularly strange.
I’ve had worse. But the endless repetition—”
“Everyone’s had worse,” Joanna said. “When I try to describe the nightmare, it doesn’t sound all that terrifying or threatening. But at night... I feel as if I’m dying. There aren’t words for what I go through, what it does to me.”
Alex felt her stiffen as though steeling herself against the recollected impact of the nightly ordeal. She bit her lip and for a while said nothing, merely stared at the funereal gray-black clouds that moved in an endless cortege from east to west across the city.
When at last she looked at him again, her eyes were haunted. “Years ago, I’d wake up from the dream and be so damned scared I’d throw up. Physically ill with fear, hysterical. These days, it’s not so acute... though more often than not, I can’t get back to sleep. Not right away. The mechanical hand, the needle... it makes me feel so... slimy... sick in my soul.”
Alex held her hand in both of his hands, cupping her frigid fingers in his warmth. “Have you ever talked to anyone about this dream?”
“Just Mariko ... and now you.”
“I was thinking of a doctor.”
“Psychiatrist?”
“It might help.”
“He’d try to free me of the dream by discovering the cause of it,” she said tensely.
“What’s wrong with that?”
She huddled on the bench, silent, the image of despair.
“Joanna?”
“I don’t want to know the cause.”
“If it’ll help cure—”
“I don’t want to know,” she said firmly.
“All right. But why not?”
She didn’t answer.
“Joanna?”
“Knowing would destroy me.”
Frowning, he said, “Destroy? How?”
“I can’t explain... but I feel it.”
“It’s not knowing that’s tearing you apart.”
She was silent again. She withdrew her hand from his, rummaged in her purse for a handkerchief, and blew her nose.
After a while he said, “Okay, forget the psychiatrist. What do you suppose is the cause of the nightmare?”
She shrugged.
“You must have given it a lot of thought over the years.”
“Thousands of hours,” Joanna said bleakly.
“And? Not even one idea?”
“Alex, I’m tired. And still embarrassed. Can we just... not talk about it any more?”
“All right.”
She cocked her head. “You’ll really drop it that easily ?”
“What right do I have to pry?”
She smiled thinly. It was her first smile since they had sat down, and it looked unnatural. “Shouldn’t a private detective be pushy at a time like this, inquisitive, absolutely relentless?”
Although her question was meant to sound casual, flippant, Alex saw that she was genuinely afraid of him probing too far. “I’m not a private detective here. I’m not investigating you. I’m just a friend who’s offering a shoulder if you feel like crying on one.” As he spoke, a pang of guilt pierced him, because he actually was investigating her.
“Can we get a taxi?” she asked. “I’m not up to any more sightseeing.”
“Sure.”
She clung to his arm as they crossed the palace garden toward the Kara-mon, the ornate inner gate.
Overhead, a pair of crows wheeled against the somber sky, cawing as they dived and soared. With a dry flutter of wings, they settled into the exquisitely sculptured branches of a large bonsai pine.
Wanting to pursue the conversation but resigned to Joanna’s silence, Alex was surprised when she suddenly began to talk about the nightmare again. Evidently, on some level and in spite of what she’d said, she wanted him to be an aggressive inquisitor, so she would have an excuse to tell him more.
“For a long time,” she continued as they walked, “I’ve thought it’s a symbolic dream, totally Freudian. I figured the mechanical hand and hypodermic syringe weren’t what they seemed. You know? That they represented other things. I thought maybe the nightmare was symbolic of some real-life trauma that I couldn’t face up to even when I was asleep. But...” She faltered. Her voice grew shaky on the last few words and then faded altogether.
“Go on,” he said softly. “A few minutes ago in the palace, when I saw that man with one hand... what scared me so much was... for the first time I realized the dream isn’t symbolic at all. It’s a memory. A memory that comes to me in sleep. It really happened.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
They passed the Kara-mon. No other tourists were in sight. Alex stopped Joanna in the space between the inner and outer gates of the castle. Even the nippy autumn breeze hadn’t restored significant color to her cheeks. She was as white-faced as any powdered geisha.
“So somewhere in your past... there actually was a man with a mechanical hand?”
She nodded.
“And for reasons you don’t understand, he used a hypodermic needle on you?”
“Yeah. And when I saw the Korean, something... snapped in me. I remembered the voice of the man in the dream. He just kept saying, ‘Once more the needle, once more the needle,’ over and over again.”
“But you don’t know who he was?”
“Or where or when or why. But I swear to God it happened. I’m not crazy. Something happened to me... was done to me... something I can’t remember.”
“Something you don’t want to remember. That’s what you said before.”
She spoke in a whisper, as if afraid that the beast in her nightmare might hear her. “That man hurt me ... did something to me that was... a sort of death. Worse than death.”
Each whispered sibilant in her voice was like the hissing of an electrical current leaping in a bright blue arc across the tiny gap between two wires. Alex shivered.
Instinctively he opened his arms. She moved against him, and he held her.
A gust of wind passed through the trees with a sound like scarecrows on the march.
“I know it sounds... so bizarre,” she said miserably. “A man with a mechanical hand, like a villain out of a comic book. But I swear, Alex—”
“I believe you.”
Still in his embrace, she looked up. “You do?”
He watched her closely as he said, “Yes, I really do—Lisa.”
She blinked. “What?”
“Lisa Chelgrin.”
Puzzled, she slipped out of his arms, stepped back from him.
He waited, watched.
“Who’s Lisa Chelgrin?” she asked.
He studied her.
“Alex?”
“I think maybe you honestly don’t know.”
“I don’t.”
“You are Lisa Chelgrin,” he said.
He was intent upon catching any fleeting expression that might betray her, a brief glimpse of hidden knowledge, the look of the hunted in her eyes, or perhaps guilt expressed in briefly visible lines of tension at the corners of her mouth. She seemed genuinely perplexed. If Joanna Rand and the long-lost Lisa Chelgrin were one and the same—and Alex was certain now that she could be no one else—then all memory of her true identity had been scrubbed from her either by accident or by intent.
“Lisa Chelgrin?” She seemed dazed. “I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I.”
“Who is she? What’s the joke?”
“No joke. But it’s a long story. Too long for me to tell it while we’re standing here in the cold.”
11
During the return trip to the Moonglow Lounge, Joanna huddled in one corner of the rear seat of the taxi while Alex told her who he thought she was. Her face remained blank. Her dark-blue eyes were guarded, and she would not look at him directly. He was unable to determine how his words were affecting her.
The driver didn’t speak English. He hummed along softly with the music on a Sony Discma
n.
“Thomas Moore Chelgrin,” Alex told Joanna. “Ring a bell?”
“No.”
“Never heard of him?”
She shook her head.
“He’s been a United States Senator from Illinois for almost fourteen years. Before that, he served two terms in the House of Representatives—a liberal on social issues, to the right on defense and foreign policy. He’s well liked in Washington, primarily because he’s a team player. And he throws some of the best shindigs in the capital, which makes him popular too. They’re a bunch of partying fools in Washington. They appreciate a man who knows how to set a table and pour whiskey. Apparently Tom Chelgrin satisfies his constituents too, because they keep returning him to office with ever larger vote totals. I’ve never seen a more clever politician, and I hope I never do. He knows how to manipulate the voters—white, brown, black, Catholics and Protestants and Jews and atheists, young and old, right and left. Out of six times at bat, he’s lost only one election, and that was his first. He’s an imposing man—tall, lean, with the trained voice of an actor. His hair turned silver when he was in his early thirties, and his opponents attribute his success to the fact that he looks like a senator. That’s damned cynical, and it’s a simplification, but there’s some truth in it.”
When Alex paused, waiting for her reaction, she only said, “Go on.”
“Can you place him yet?”
“I never met him.”
“I think you know him as well as anyone.”
“Not me.”
The cabdriver tried to speed through a changing traffic signal, decided not to risk it after all, and tramped on the brakes. When the car stopped rocking, he glanced at Alex in the rearview mirror, grinned disarmingly, and apologized: “Gomen-nasai, jokyaku-san. ”
Alex inclined his head respectfully and said, “Yoroshii desu. Karedomo ... untenshu-san yukkuri. ”
The driver nodded vigorously in agreement. “Hai.” Henceforth he would go slowly, as requested.
Alex turned to Joanna. “When Tom Chelgrin was thirteen, his father died. The family already had been on the edge of poverty, and now they plunged all the way in. Tom worked through high school and college, earned a degree in business. In his early twenties, he was drafted into the army, wound up in Vietnam. While on a search-and-destroy mission, he was taken prisoner by the Viet Cong. Do you know anything about what happened to our POWs during that war?”