Having expected to be away from home past feeding time, Dusty had brought Valet’s dinner in a Ziploc bag: two cups of dry lamb-and-rice kibble. He poured it into a plastic bowl and put the bowl on the pavement beside the van.

“Sorry about the lousy ambience,” he apologized.

If the clinic parking lot had been a lush meadow or a penthouse, Valet would have approached his dinner with no greater pleasure than he showed now. Like all of his kind, he had no pretensions.

Dogs possessed so many admirable qualities, in fact, that Dusty sometimes wondered if God had created this world expressly for them above all other creatures. Human beings might have been put here as an afterthought, to ensure that dogs would have companions to prepare their meals, to groom them, to tell them they were cute, and to rub their bellies.

While Valet made quick work of the kibble, Dusty fished his cell phone from under the driver’s seat and called home. On the third ring, the answering machine responded.

She didn’t pick up.

“Martie, are you there?” He waited. Then, stretching the message to give her time to get to the study—and the answering machine—from anywhere in the house, he said: “Sorry I’m running

late. Hell of a day. I’ll be there in half an hour, we’ll go out for dinner. Somewhere we can’t afford. I’m sick of always being so damn responsible. Choose something extravagant. Maybe even a place where the food comes on real plates instead of in Styrofoam containers. We’ll take a bank loan if we have to.”

Either she hadn’t heard the phone or she wasn’t home.

Valet had finished his kibble. He used his tongue to imitate an airplane propeller, making 360-degree sweeps of his chops and muzzle, collecting crumbs.

When traveling with the dog, Dusty carried bottled water. He poured a few ounces into the blue dish.

Dusty’s suspicion was difficult to sustain in the face of the unrelenting ordinariness of the clinic grounds. The grass was well manicured, the earth still slightly squishy from the recent rain. The shrubs were neatly trimmed. The night shadows were only shadows.

The fully loaded, conspicuous blue bag gave Dusty an excuse to explore the alleyway behind the clinic, where no grass bordered the pavement. As he located a small trash Dumpster and deposited the bag, he surveyed this more humble aspect of the building: delivery and service entrances, utilities boxes, a second small Dumpster.

Neither he nor his four-legged Dr. Watson discovered anything amiss in the backstreet—although beside the second Dumpster, the dog found a grease-stained Big Mac container that he would have enjoyed sniffing and licking for six or seven hours.

Retreating from the alley, passing once more across the lawn along the south side of the clinic, Dusty glanced up at Skeet’s room— and saw a man standing at the window. Backlit by a single well-shaded lamp, he was a featureless silhouette.

Though the angle was deceiving, the guy seemed too tall and too broad-shouldered to be Skeet or Dr. Donklin. Tom Wong was gone for the night, but he, too, was a different physical type from this man.

Dusty could discern nothing of the stranger’s face, not even the vague glint of his eyes. Nevertheless, he was sure the man was watching him.

As though he were in a staring contest with a ghost, Dusty gazed up at the window until, with the ectoplasmic fluidity of a haunting spirit, the dark form turned away from the glass and drifted out of sight.

Dusty considered hurrying to his brother’s room to learn the identity of the watcher. Almost certainly, however, the man would prove to be a staff member. Or another patient, visiting Skeet.

On the other hand, if this nagging suspicion were merited, rather than being mere paranoia, if the man at the window were up to no good, he would not hang around now that Dusty had seen him. No doubt he was already gone.

Common sense argued against suspicion. Skeet had no money, no prospects, no power. There was nothing to be gotten from him that would motivate anyone to engineer an elaborate conspiracy

Besides, an enemy—in the unlikely event that gentle Skeet had one—would realize the futility of engaging in elaborate schemes to torment and destroy the kid. Left to his own devices, Skeet would torture himself more ruthlessly than could the most cruel dungeon master, and he would diligently pursue his own destruction.

Maybe this wasn’t even Skeet’s room. Dusty had been sure it was the kid’s window when he first looked up. But... perhaps Skeet’s window was to the left of this one.

Dusty sighed. The ever sympathetic Valet sighed as well.

“Your old man’s losin’ it,” Dusty said.

He was eager to go home to Martie, to walk out of the insanity of this day and return to reality.

That bastardized line of verse swung back and forth through Martie’s mind, repeatedly cleaving her train of thought, so she had to struggle to remain focused.

The workbench in the garage featured a vise. After bracing the ax with a block, Martie cranked the jaws shut until they tightened on the handle.

She was able to pick up a pistol-grip hacksaw only with great effort. It was a dangerous instrument, but less fearsome than the ax, which must be destroyed. Later, she’d wreck the hacksaw, too.

In the tool collection were two carpenter’s saws. One was a rip-saw, for cutting with the grain of the wood, the other a crosscut saw, but Martie didn’t know which was which. Hesitantly, she tried one, then the other, and both frustrated her.

She switched off the saw and set it aside. Opened the jaws of the vice. Freed the ax handle. Threw it on the floor.

Next, she decapitated the sledgehammer.

Then the shovel. Longer handle. Cumbersome. Getting it into the vise was more difficult than dealing with the ax or sledgehammer.

The reciprocating saw tore through it, and the shovel blade clattered onto the workbench.

She sawed through the hoe.

The rake.

What else?

A crowbar. A pointed pry blade at one end, leveraging hook at the other. All steel. Couldn’t be sawn.

Use it to smash the reciprocating saw. Steel ringing off steel, off concrete, the garage reverberating like a great bell.

When she had disabled the saw, she still held the crowbar. It was as dangerous as the sledgehammer, which had driven her to use the saws in the first place.

She had come full circle. She hadn’t accomplished anything. In fact, the crowbar was more effective than the sledgehammer, because it was easier to wield.

There was no hope. No way to make the house safe, not even one room within the house, not as little as one corner within one room. It couldn’t be done as long as she remained in residence. She, not any inanimate object, was the source of these vicious thoughts, the sole threat.

She should have clamped the reciprocating saw in the jaws of the vise, switched it on, and cut off her own hands.

Now she held the crowbar in the same grip with which she had held the hammer. Through her mind spiraled bloody thoughts that terrified her.

The garage-door motor kicked in. The door clattered upward, and she turned to face it.

Tires, headlights, the windshield, Dusty in the driver’s seat of the van, Valet beside him. Normal life on wheels, motoring into Martie’s personal Twilight Zone. This was a collision of universes that she had been fearing since the portentous mental image of a key-skewered eye—Dusty’s eye—had caused her heart to plummet like an express elevator and her lunch to rise like a counterweight.

“Stay away from me!” she cried. “For God’s sake, stay away! There’s something wrong with me.”

Almost as effectively as a mirror, Dusty’s expression revealed to Martie how bizarre—how crazed—she looked.

“Oh, God.”

She dropped the crowbar, but the head of the ax and the head of

the sledgehammer were within reach on the workbench. She could easily snatch them up, pitch them at the windshield.

Suddenly Martie realized that she had not thrown away the car key. How could she have failed to dispose of it immediately upon getting home, before dealing with the knives, the rolling pin, the garden tools, and everything else? If in fact the vision she had experienced was a premonition, if this hideous act of violence was inevitable, the car key was the first thing she should have mangled and then buried at the bottom of the trash can.

Enter Dusty, and therefore on to the next level of the game, where the humble key of Level 1 now becomes a powerful and magical object, equivalent to the One Ring, the Master of all the Rings of Power, which must be conveyed back to Mordor and destroyed in the Fire from which it came, must be melted down before it can be used for evil purpose. But this was no game. These horrors were real. The blood, when it came, would be thick, warm, and wet, rather than a two-dimensional arrangement of red pixels.

Martie turned away from the van and hurried into the house.

The car key wasn’t hanging on the Peg-Board, where it should have been.

The sweating glass of unfinished ginger ale and a cork coaster were the only things on the kitchen table.

Draped over a chair: her raincoat. Two deep pockets. A few Kleenex in one. The paperback book in the other.

No key.

In the garage, Dusty was calling her. He must be out of the van, picking his way through the debris that she had left on the floor. Each repetition of her name was louder than the previous one, closer.

Out of the kitchen, into the hail, past the dining room, living room, into the foyer, Martie fled toward the front door, with the sole intention of putting distance between herself and Dusty. She was unable to think ahead to the consequence of this mad flight, to where she would ultimately go, to what she would do. Nothing mattered except getting far enough away from her husband to ensure that she couldn’t harm him.

The foyer carpet, small and Persian, slid on the polished-oak tongue and groove, and for a moment she was floor-surfing. Then she wiped out and went down hard on her right side.

When her elbow rapped the oak, wasps of pain took flight along the nerves of her forearm, swarming in her hand. More pain buzzed along her ribs, stung through her hip joint.

The most shocking pain was the least acute: a quick jabbing in her right thigh, sharp but short-lived pressure. She had been poked by something in the right-hand pocket of her jeans, and she knew at once what it was.

The car key.

Here was incontestable proof that she couldn’t trust herself. On some level, she must have known the key was in her pocket, when she had checked the Peg-Board, when she had scanned the table, when she had frantically searched her raincoat. She’d deceived herself, and there was no reason to have done so unless she intended to use the key to blind, to kill. Within her was some Other Martine, the deranged personality she feared, a creature who was capable of any atrocity and who intended to fulfill the hateful premonition: the key, the eye, thrust and twist.

Martie scrambled up from the foyer floor and to the windowed front door.

At the same instant, Valet leaped against the outside of the door, paws planted at the base of the leaded-glass pane, ears pricked and tongue lolling. The many squares, rectangles, and circles of beveled glass, punctuated by jewel-like prisms and round glass beads, transformed his furry face into a cubist portrait that looked both amusing and demonic.

Martie reeled back from the door, not because Valet frightened her, but because she was afraid of harming him. If she were truly capable of hurting Dusty, then the poor trusting dog was not safe, either.

In the kitchen, Dusty called, “Martie?”

She didn’t answer.

“Martie, where are you? What’s wrong?”

Up the stairs. Quickly, silently, two steps at a time, half limping because pain lingered in her hip. Clutching at the railing with her left hand. Digging in a pocket with her right.

She reached the top with the key buried in her fist, just the silvery tip poking out from her tightly clenched fingers. Little dagger.

Maybe she could toss it out a window. Into the night. Throw it into thick shrubbery or over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, where she couldn’t easily retrieve it.

In the shadowy upstairs hail, which was lit only by the foyer light rising through the stairwell, she stood in indecision, because not all the windows were operable. Some were fixed panes. Of those that could be opened, many were sure to be swollen after a long day of rain, and they wouldn’t slide easily.

Time was running out. Dusty would find her at any moment.

She didn’t dare delay, couldn’t risk trying a window that more likely than not would be stuck, and have Dusty come upon her while she still held the key. At the sight of him, she might snap, might commit one of the unthinkable atrocities with which her mind had been preoccupied throughout the afternoon. Okay, then the master bathroom. Flush the damn thing down the toilet.

Crazy.

Just do it. Move, move, do it, crazy or not.

On the front porch, muzzle to the jeweled window, the usually quiet Valet began barking.

Martie dashed into the master bedroom, switched on the overhead light. She started toward the bathroom—but halted when her gaze, as swift and sharp as a guillotine, fell on Dusty’s nightstand.

In her frenzied attempt to make the house safe, she had thrown out gadgets as innocuous as potato peelers and corncob holders, yet she had not given a thought to the most dangerous item in the house, a weapon that was nothing but a weapon, that did not double as a rolling pin or a cheese grater: a .45 semiautomatic, which Dusty had purchased for self-defense.

This was one more example of clever self-deception. The Other Martie—the violent personality buried within her for so long, but now disinterred—had misdirected her, encouraged her hysteria, kept her distracted until the penultimate moment, when she was least able to think clearly or act rationally, when Dusty was near and drawing nearer, and now she was permitted—oh, encouraged—to remember the pistol.

Downstairs in the foyer, Dusty spoke to the retriever through the window in the front door—”Settle! Valet, settle!”—and the dog stopped barking.

When Dusty had first purchased the pistol, he had insisted that Martie take firearms training with him. They had gone to a shooting range ten or twelve times. She didn’t like guns, didn’t want this one,

even though she understood the wisdom of being able to defend herself in a world where progress and savagery grew at the same pace. She had become surprisingly competent with the weapon, a thoroughly customized stainless-steel version of the Colt Commander.

Down in the foyer, Dusty said, “Good dog,” rewarding Valet’s obedience with praise. “Very good dog.”

Martie wanted desperately to dispose of the Colt. Dusty wasn’t safe with the gun in the house. No one in the neighborhood was safe if she could get her hands on a pistol.

She went to the nightstand.

“Martie, honey, where are you, what’s wrong?” He was on the stairs, ascending.

“Go away,” she said. Although she tried to shout, the words came out in a thin croak, because her throat was tight with fear and because she was out of breath—but perhaps also because the murderess within her didn’t really want him to leave.

In the drawer, between a box of tissues and a remote control for the television, the pistol gleamed dully, fate embodied in a chunk of beautifully machined steel, her dark destiny.

Like a deathwatch beetle, its mandibles tick-tick-ticking as it quarried tunnels deep within a mass of wood, the Other Martie squirmed in Martie’s flesh, bored through her bones, and chewed at the fibers of her soul.

She picked up the Colt. With its single-action let-off, highly controllable recoil, 4.5-pound trigger pull, and virtually unjammable seven-round magazine, this was an ideal close-up, personal-defense piece.

Falling off a roof, Dusty had not been this scared, because now he was frightened for Martie, not for himself.

Her face, before she dropped the crowbar and ran away, had been as stark as the face of an actor in a Kabuki drama. White-greasepaint skin, pale and smooth. Eyes darkly outlined, not with mascara but with anguish. Red slash of a mouth.

Even above the engine noise, he’d heard her warning, the terror scraping her voice raw.

Debris in the garage. A mess in the kitchen. Trash can on the back porch, at the open door, stuffed full of everything but trash. He couldn’t extract meaning from any of it.

The silver candlesticks on the dining-room table appeared to be as translucent as they were reflective, as though carved from ice.

The living room was filled with the wintry glitter of glass bibelots, brass fireplace tools, porcelain lamps. The grandfather clock had frozen time at 11:00.

On their honeymoon, they had found the clock in an antique shop

After silencing Valet, Dusty decided to leave the dog on the front porch for now, and he quickly climbed the stairs. Although he ascended into increasingly warmer air, he brought with him the chill that had pierced him at the sight of Martie’s tortured face.

He found her in the master bedroom. She was standing beside the bed, with the .45 pistol.

In a whispery voice, pitched high with anxiety, a voice almost like that of a frightened child, Martie was reciting the Hail Mary, fingering another round out of the magazine, as if the bullets were rosary beads and she were paying penance with prayer.

Watching Martie from the doorway, Dusty felt his heart swell with fear for her, swell and swell impossibly until the pressure made his chest ache.

She flung another bullet, which cracked off the dresser—and then saw him in the doorway. Already sufficiently white-faced for a Kabuki stage, she grew even paler.

“Martie—”

“No!” she gasped, as he stepped off the threshold.

“It’s only me, Martie.”

“Get out of here, go, go, go.”

“Why are you afraid of me?”

“Martie, what—”

“Don’t get close to me, don’t, don’t trust me,” she said, her voice as thin, shaky, and urgent as that of a high-wire walker losing balance. “I’m all screwed up, totally screwed.”

“Honey, listen, I’m not going anywhere until I know what’s happened here, what’s wrong,” Dusty said as he took another step toward her.

With a despairing wail, she threw the bullet and the half-empty magazine in different directions, neither at Dusty, and then ran to the bathroom.

He pursued her.

“Please,” Martie pleaded, determinedly trying to close the bathroom door in his face.

Only a minute ago, Dusty would not have been able to imagine any circumstances in which he would have used force against Martie; now his stomach fluttered queasily as he resisted her. Inserting one knee between the door and the jamb, he tried to shoulder into the room.

She abruptly stopped resisting and backed away.

The door banged open so hard that Dusty winced as he stumbled across the threshold.

Martie retreated until she bumped against the entrance to the shower stall.

Catching the bathroom door as it rebounded from the rubber stop, Dusty kept his attention on Martie. He fumbled for the wall switch and clicked on the fluorescent panel in the soffit above the twin sinks.

Hard light ricocheted off mirrors, porcelain, white-and-green ceramic tile. Off nickel-plated fixtures as shiny as surgical steel.

Martie stood with her back to the glass-enclosed shower. Eyes shut. Face pinched. Hands fisted against her temples.

Her lips moved rapidly but produced not a sound, as if she had been stricken mute by terror.

Dusty suspected that she was praying again.

He took three steps, touched her arm.

As dire blue and full of trouble as a hurricane sea, her eyes snapped open. “Get away!”

Rocked by her vehemence, he relented.

The seal on the shower door popped with a twonk, and she eased

backward over the raised sill, into the stall. “You don’t know what I’ll do, my God, you can’t imagine, you can’t conceive how vicious, how cruel.”

“You should be, you’ve got to be.”

Bewildered, he said, “Tell me what’s wrong.”

The radiant patterns of striations in her blue eyes resembled cracks in thick glass, her black pupils like bullet holes at the center.

Explosive shatters of words broke from her: “There’s more to me than you see, another me down inside somewhere, full of hate, ready to hurt, cut, smash, or if maybe there’s no Other and there’s just me alone, then I’m not the person I always thought I was, I’m something twisted and horrible, horrible.”

In his worst dreams and in the most desperate moments of his waking life, Dusty had never been this profoundly frightened, and in his private image of himself as a man, he had not allowed for the possibility that he could be so utterly humbled by fear as he was now.

He sensed that Martie, as he had always known her, was slipping away from him, inexplicably but inexorably being sucked down into a psychological vortex stranger than any black hole at the far end of the universe, and that even if some aspect of her remained when the vortex closed, she would be as enigmatic as an alien life-form.

Martie backed away from the glass door, until she wedged herself into a corner of the shower, shoulders cramped forward, arms crossed over her breasts, hands fisted in her armpits. All her bones seemed to be surfacing—knees, hips, elbows, shoulder blades, skull— as if her skeleton might secede from its union with her flesh.

When Dusty stepped into the shower, Martie said, “Don’t, oh, please, please, don’t,” her voice resonating hollowly along the tile walls

“I can help you.”

Weeping, face wrenched, mouth soft and trembling, she said, “Baby, no. Stay back.”

“Whatever this is about, I can help you.”

He dropped to his knees.

“Key, the key!” She extracted her fists from under her clamping arms and raised them to her face. Her clenched fingers sprang open, revealing an empty right hand, then an empty left, and Martie looked amazed, as if a magician had caused a coin or a wadded silk scarf to vanish from her grasp without her sensing a thing. “No, I had it, still have it, the car key, somewhere!” Frantically she patted the pockets of her jeans.

He recalled seeing the car key on the floor near the nightstand. “You dropped it in the bedroom.”

She regarded him with disbelief, but then appeared to remember. “I’m sorry. What I would’ve done. Thrust, twist. Oh, Jesus, God.” She shuddered. Shame welled in her eyes and washed across her face, imparting faint color to her unnaturally chalky skin.

When Dusty tried to put his arms around her, Martie resisted, urgently warning him not to trust her, to shield his eyes, because even if she didn’t possess the car key, she had acrylic fingernails sharp enough to gouge his eyes, and then suddenly she attempted to tear off those nails, clawing at her hands, acrylic scraping against acrylic with the insectile click-click-click of beetles swarming over one another. At last Dusty stopped trying to put his arms around her and just, damn it, put them around her, overwhelmed her, forced his loving embrace upon her, drew her fiercely against him, as though his body were a lightning rod with which he could ground her to reality. She went stiff, retreating into an emotional carapace, and though she was already physically drawn in upon herself, she curled tighter now, so it seemed the tremendous power of her fear would press her ever inward, condensing her, until she became as solid as stone, as hard as diamond, until she imploded into a black hole of her own making and vanished into the parallel universe where she’d briefly imagined that the car key had gone when it had been in neither of her fists. Undeterred, Dusty held her, rocked slowly back and forth with her on the floor of the shower, telling her that he loved her, that

he cherished her, that she was not an evil Orc but a good Hobbit, telling her that her Hobbitness could be proved by taking one look at the curious, unfeminine, but charming toes that she had inherited from Smilin’ Bob, telling her anything he could think to tell her that might make her smile. Whether she smiled or not, he didn’t know, for her head was tucked down, face hidden. In time, however, she ceased resistance. After a while longer, her body unclenched, and she returned his embrace, tentatively at first, but then less tentatively, until by degrees she opened entirely and clung to him as he clung to her, with a desperate love, with an acute awareness that their lives had changed forever, and with an unnerving sense that they now existed under the shadow of a great looming unknown.

After watching the evening news, Susan Jagger went through the apartment, synchronizing all the clocks with her digital wristwatch. She performed this task every Tuesday evening at the same hour.

In the kitchen, clocks were built into the oven and microwave, and another hung on the wall. A stylish, battery-operated Art Deco clock stood on the fireplace mantel in the living room, and on the nightstand beside her bed was a clock radio.

On average, none of these timepieces lost or gained more than a minute during the week, but Susan took pleasure in keeping them running tick for tick.

Through sixteen months of near isolation and chronic anxiety, she had relied on ritual to save her sanity.

After the clocks were synchronized, Susan went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. A tomato-and-endive salad. Chicken marsala.

Cooking was her favorite work of the day. She followed recipes

with scientific exactitude, measuring and combining ingredients as carefully as a bombmaker handling explosive, unstable chemicals. Culinary rituals and religious rituals, like no others, could calm the heart and quiet the mind, perhaps because the former fed the body and the latter fed the soul.

This evening, however, she wasn’t able to concentrate on dicing, grating, measuring, stirring. Her attention repeatedly strayed to the silent telephone. She was eager to hear from Martie, now that she’d at last found the courage to mention the mysterious night visitor.

Before recent events, she’d thought she could reveal anything to Martie with complete comfort, without feeling self-conscious. For six months, however, she’d been unable to speak of the sexual assaults committed against her while she slept.

Eric was no sorcerer with the ability to steal in and out of the apartment—and in and out of Susan herself—utterly undetected.

Although Eric might be as weak and morally confused as Martie said, Susan was reluctant to consider that he might hate her enough to do these things to her, and hatred was undeniably at the heart of this abuse. They had loved each other, and their separation had been marked by regret, not by anger.

If he wanted her, even without the obligation to stand by her in time of need, she might welcome him. There was no reason, then, why he should scheme so elaborately to take her against her will.

Having shared this house with her and having used this top floor as his home office, Eric might know a way to circumvent the doors and windows—as unlikely as that seemed. No one else was sufficiently familiar with the place to come and go undetected.

Her hand trembled, and salt spilled from the measuring spoon.

Turning from the dinner preparations, she blotted her suddenly damp palms on a dish towel.

At the apartment door, she checked the dead bolts. Both were engaged. The security chain was in place.

She leaned with her back against the door.

On the phone, Martie had seemed to believe her.

Convincing others, however, might not be easy.

Evidence supporting her contention of rape was inconclusive. Sometimes she experienced vaginal tenderness, but not always. Bruises the size of a man’s fingertips occasionally appeared on her thighs and breasts, but she couldn’t prove they were the work of a rapist or that she hadn’t sustained them during ordinary physical activity.

Immediately on waking, she always knew when the phantom intruder had visited her during the night, even if she wasn’t sore or bruised, even before she grew aware of the deposit he left in her, because she felt violated, unclean.

Feelings, however, were not proof.

The semen was the only evidence that she had been with a man, but it did not absolutely confirm rape.

Besides, presenting her stained panties to the authorities—or, worse yet, submitting to a vaginal swab in a hospital emergency room—would involve more embarrassment than she’d be able to endure in her current condition.

Now, after checking the dead bolts yet again, Susan impatiently reached for the telephone. She couldn’t wait a minute longer for Martie’s considered response. She needed to be reassured that her best friend, if no one else, believed in the phantom rapist.

Susan keyed the first four digits of Martie’s number—but hung up. Patience. If she appeared fragile or too needy, she might seem less believable.

Returning to the marsala sauce, she realized she was too nervous to be lulled by culinary rituals. She wasn’t hungry, either.

She opened a bottle of Merlot, poured a glassful, and sat at the kitchen table. Lately, she was drinking more than usual.

After sipping the Merlot, she held the glass up to the light. The dark ruby liquid was clear, apparently uncontaminated.

For a while, she had been convinced that someone was drugging her. That possibility was still troubling but not as likely as it had once seemed.

Rohypnol—which the news media had dubbed the date-rape drug—might explain how she was able to remain unconscious, or at least oblivious, even during rough intercourse. Mix Rohypnol into a woman’s drink, and she appears to be in an advanced stage of inebriation: disoriented, pliant—defenseless. The drugged state ultimately gives way to genuine sleep, and upon waking, she has little or no memory of what took place during the night.

In the morning, however, after her mysterious visitor ravaged her, Susan never experienced any symptoms of Rohypnol hangover. No queasy stomach, no dry mouth, no blurring of vision, no throbbing headache, no lingering disorientation. Routinely, she woke clear-headed, even refreshed, though feeling violated.

Nevertheless, she had repeatedly changed grocers. Sometimes Susan relied on Martie to do her shopping, but for the most part she ordered groceries and other supplies from smaller family-owned markets that offered home delivery. Few provided that extra service these days, even for a charge. Although Susan had tried all of them, paranoically certain that someone was lacing her food with drugs, changing vendors didn’t bring an end to the postmidnight assaults.

In desperation, she had sought answers in the supernatural. The mobile library brought her lurid books about ghosts, vampires, demons, exorcism, black magic, and abductions by extraterrestrials.

Susan had been particularly fascinated by the legend of the incubus. This evil spirit visited women in their sleep and had sex with them while they dreamed.

Fascination had never become conviction. She hadn’t descended so far into superstition that she had slept with copies of the Bible at all four corners of her bed or while wearing a necklace of garlic.

Ultimately, she ceased researching the supernatural, because as she delved into those irrational realms, her agoraphobia intensified.

Carrying the wine with her, Susan set out on a circuit of the apartment, to ascertain that all possible entrances were secured.

Both windows in the dining room faced the residence next door, which crowded close to Susan’s house. They were locked.

In the living room, she switched off the lamps. She sat in an armchair, sipping Merlot, while her eyes adjusted to the darkness.

When her night vision improved and the Merlot lubricated the little engine of fortitude in her heart, she went to the middle pane of the three big ocean-facing windows. After a brief hesitation and a deep breath, she raised the pleated shade.

Immediately in front of the house, the paved promenade lay under the false frost of widely separated streetlamps. Though the hour was not yet late, the promenade was nearly deserted in the January chill. A young couple skated by on Rollerblades. A cat scurried from one drift of shadows to another.

Thin tendrils of mist wound between the few palm trees and the streetlamps. In the still air, the fronds hung motionless, so the creeping mist seemed to be alive, advancing with silent menace.

With the stars lost above the low clouds, with darkness and fog partitioning the world into small spaces, Susan should have been able to stand at the window for hours, insulated from her fear, but her heart began to race. Agoraphobia was not the cause of her sudden apprehension; rather, she was overcome by a sense of being watched.

Since the night assaults had begun, she was increasingly plagued by this new anxiety. Scopophobia: fear of being watched.

Surely, however, this wasn’t just another phobia, not just an unreasonable fear, but an entirely rational one. If her phantom rapist was real, he must at times keep her home under surveillance, to be sure that he’d find her alone when he paid a visit.

Nevertheless, she was concerned about acquiring new layers of fear atop her agoraphobia, until eventually she would be bound up like an Egyptian mummy, wrapped by smothering shrouds of anxiety, paralyzed and effectively embalmed alive.

The promenade was deserted. The palm boles weren’t wide enough to conceal anyone.

For three nights in a row, Susan hadn’t been assaulted. This all too human incubus was due. He exhibited a pattern of need, more regular than—but as reliable as—the pull of the moon on the blood tides of a werewolf

Often she had tried to stay awake on the nights she expected him. When she succeeded, exhausted and grainy-eyed by dawn, he never showed. Usually, if her willpower failed her and she dozed off, he paid a visit. Once, she fell asleep fully dressed, in an armchair, and she woke fully dressed, but in bed, with the faint scent of his sweat clinging to her and with his hateful, sticky issue clotted in her panties. He seemed to know, by some sixth sense, when she was sleeping and most vulnerable.

On the generally flat beach, a few low dunes rose at the outer limit of visibility, curving smoothly away into darkness and mist. An observer might be watching from behind one of them, although he would have to be lying prone in the sand to remain hidden.

She felt his gaze upon her. Or thought she felt it.

Susan quickly lowered the pleated shade, covering the window.

Furious with herself for being so shamefully timid, shaking more with anger and frustration than with fear, sick of being a helpless victim, after having been anything but a victim for most of her life, she wished fervently that she could overcome her agoraphobia and go outside, storm across the beach, kick through the sand to the crest of each dune, and either confront her tormentor or prove to herself that

he was not out there. But she didn’t have the courage to stalk the stalker, wasn’t able to do anything but hide and wait.

Magnifying glass.

In the bedroom closet, above the hanging clothes, on the top shelf, was a vinyl carrying case containing a pair of high-power binoculars. In better days, when she had not been unnerved by the very sight of the sunlit world in all its vastness, she had enjoyed watching sailboat regattas staged along the coast and larger ships bound for South America or San Francisco.

With a two-step folding stool borrowed from the kitchen, she hurried to the bedroom. The binoculars were where she expected to find them.

Stored on the same shelf, among other stuff, was an item that she had forgotten. A video camera.

The camcorder had been one of Eric’s short-lived enthusiasms. Long before he moved out, he had lost interest in taping and editing home movies.

An electrifying possibility short-circuited Susan’s plan to survey the dunes for a concealed observer.

Leaving the binoculars untouched, she lifted down the hard-plastic case containing the video camera and associated gear. She opened it on the bed.

In addition to the camcorder, the case contained a spare battery pack, two blank tapes, and an instruction book.

She had never used the camera. Eric had done all the taping. Now she read the instruction book with keen interest.

As usual when pursuing a new hobby, Eric had not been saris-fled with ordinary tools. He insisted on owning the best, state-of-the-art equipment, cutting-edge gadgetry. This handheld video camera was compact but nevertheless provided the finest available lenses, near flawless image and sound recording, and

whisper-quiet operation that would not register through the microphone.

Instead of accepting only twenty- or thirty-minute tapes, it could accommodate a two-hour cassette. It also featured an extended-recording mode, using fewer inches of tape per minute, which allowed three hours of recording on a two-hour tape, though the resultant image was said to be ten percent less clear than that produced at standard speed.

The camcorder was so energy efficient and the rechargeable battery pack was so powerful that two to three hours of operation could be expected, depending on how much you used the image monitor and the various other power-draining features.

According to the built-in gauge, the installed battery pack was dead. Susan tested the spare pack, which held a partial charge.

The glass of Merlot was on an end table in the living room. She raised it as if making a silent toast, and this time she drank not for solace but in celebration.

For the first time in months, she genuinely felt that she was in control of her life. While she knew that she was taking just a single small step to resolve only one of the many grievous problems that plagued her, knew that she was far from truly being in control, Susan didn’t temper her excitement. At least she was doing something, at long last, and she desperately needed to be lifted by this rush of optimism.

In the kitchen, as she cleaned up the preparations for chicken marsala and took a pepperoni pizza from the freezer, she wondered why she hadn’t thought of the camcorder weeks or months ago. Indeed, she began to realize that she had been surprisingly passive, considering the horror and abuse she’d endured.

Oh, she had sought therapy. Twice a week for almost sixteen months now. That was no small accomplishment, the struggle to and from each session, the perseverance in the face of limited results, but submitting to therapy was the very least she could have done when her life was falling apart. And the key word was submitting, because she’d deferred to Ahriman’s therapeutic strategies and advice with uncharacteristic docility, considering that in the past she had dealt

with physicians as skeptically as she did with high-pressure car salesmen, double-checking them through her own research and by seeking second opinions.

As Susan paced the kitchen, waiting for the pizza to be ready, her bafflement at her long passivity grew into amazement. Looking over the past year with new detachment, she could almost believe she’d been living under a warlock’s evil spell that had clouded her thinking, sapped her willpower, and shackled her soul with dark magic.

Well, the spell was broken. The old Susan Jagger was back— clearheaded, energized, and ready to use her anger to change her life.

He was out there. Maybe he was even watching from the dunes this very minute. Maybe he would skate past her house on Rollerblades now and then, or jog past, or ride past on a bike, to all appearances only one more California fun freak or exercise fanatic. But he was out there, for sure.

The creep hadn’t visited her for three successive nights, but he followed a pattern of need that all but assured he would come to her before dawn. Even if she could not fend off sleep, even if she was somehow drugged and unaware of what he was doing to her, she would know all about him in the morning, because with a little luck, the hidden camcorder would capture him in the act.

If the tape revealed Eric, she would kick his sorry ass until her shoe would need to be surgically removed from his cheeks. And then get him out of her life forever.

Returning to the table for her glass of wine, she wondered what if... what if...

Nonsense.

She raised the glass of Merlot for a sip—and took half of it in one thick swallow.

Like a shrine to Martha Stewart, goddess of the modern American home. Two floor lamps with fringed silk shades. Two big armchairs with footstools, facing each other across a tea table. Needlepoint pillows on the chairs. The living-room fireplace to one side.

This was Martie’s favorite spot in the house. Many nights during the past three years, she and Dusty had sat here with books, quietly reading, each lost in a separate fiction, yet as intimate as if they had been holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes.

In the other chair, Dusty tried to settle back in an assumption of calm consideration and analysis, but he slid repeatedly to the edge of his seat.

Occasionally halted by embarrassment, more often silenced because she couldn’t help pausing to marvel at the weird details of her own demented behavior, Martie recounted her ordeal in short installments, resuming her story when Dusty gently encouraged her with questions.

The very sight of Dusty calmed her and gave her hope, but Martie sometimes could not meet his eyes. She gazed into the cold fireplace as if hypnotic flames licked the ceramic logs.

Surprisingly, the decorative set of brass fireplace tools didn’t alarm her. A small shovel. Pointed tongs. A poker. Only a short while ago, the sight of the poker alone would have plucked arpeggios of terror from her harp-string nerves.

Embers of anxiety remained aglow in her, but right now she was more afraid of another crippling panic attack than of her potential to do violence.

Good Valet lay by her chair, rising now and then to rest his chin on her bent legs, submitting to a smoothing hand on his head, commiseration in his soulful eyes.

Twice she gave the dog small cubes of ice from her drink. He crunched them with a strangely solemn pleasure.

When Martie finished her account, Dusty said, “What now?”

“Dr. Closterman, in the morning. I made an appointment today, coming back from Susan’s, even before things got really bad for me.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“I want a full physical. Complete blood workup. A brain scan, in case maybe there’s a tumor.”

“There’s no tumor,” Dusty said with a conviction based solely on hope. “There’s nothing serious wrong with you.”

“There’s something.”

“I’d accept a brain tumor,” she said.

“Accept?”

“If the alternative is mental illness. They can cut out the tumor, and there’s a chance of being what you were.”

“It’s not that, either,” he said, and the lines in his face grew deeper. “It’s not mental.”

“It’s something,” she insisted.

Sitting in bed, Susan ate pepperoni pizza and drank Merlot. This was the most delicious dinner she had ever known.

She was sufficiently perceptive and self-aware to realize that the ingredients of the simple meal had little or nothing to do with its special succulence and flavor. Sausage, cheese, and well-browned crust were not as tasty as the prospect of justice.

Freed from her peculiar spell of timidness and helplessness, she was in fact less hungry for justice than for a thick cold slice of vengeance. She had no illusions about her primitive capacity to take delight in retribution. After all, her teeth, like those of every human being, included four canines and four incisors, the better to rip and tear.

If she had developed agoraphobia as an insulating response to the pain of Eric’s adultery, then perhaps he deserved some payback for that. But if he were her phantom visitor, mercilessly screwing with her mind and her body, he was a far different man from the one she’d thought he’d been when she married him. Not a man at all, in fact, but a creature, a hateful thing. A serpent. With evidence, she would use the law to chop him, as a woodsman might use an ax on a rattlesnake.

As she ate, Susan studied the bedroom, seeking the best place in which to secrete the camcorder.

Martie sat at the kitchen table, watching as Dusty cleaned up the mess that she had made.

When he dragged the trash can off the porch, into the kitchen, the contents rattled and chimed like the tools in a knacker’s bag.

Martie held her second glass of Scotch with both hands as she raised it to her lips.

After closing the door, Dusty loaded the knives, forks, and other eating utensils into the dishwasher.

The sight of the sharp blades and pointed tines, the clink and steely scrape of them against one another, did not alarm Martie. Her throat thickened, however, and the warm Scotch trickled slowly down, as though melting through a clog in her esophagus.

Dusty returned the Chardonnay and Chablis to the refrigerator. Those bottles would still make effective bludgeons, lacerating scalp and cracking skull bone, but Martie’s mind was no longer acrawl with the temptation to heft them, swing them.

After he slid the emptied drawers into the cabinets and put away those items that didn’t need to be washed, Dusty said, “The stuff in the garage can wait till morning.”

She nodded but said nothing, in part because she didn’t trust herself to speak. Here at the scene of her bizarre seizure, memories of madness floated upon the air, like poisonous spores, and she half expected to be recontaminated by them, whereupon she might open her mouth only to hear herself spouting lunacies.

When Dusty suggested dinner, Martie pleaded no appetite, but he insisted she must eat.

He cleaned and sliced some fresh mushrooms.

The knife looked harmless in his hands.

As Dusty sautéed the mushrooms with butter and diced onion, then stirred them into a pot with a package of sugar snap peas, Valet sat in front of the microwave, dreamy-eyed, deeply inhaling the aroma of cooking lasagna.

In light of what Martie had done here a short time ago, this cozy domesticity struck her as surreal. Like wandering across vast burning fields of sulfur and coming upon a doughnut shop in Hell.

When Dusty served dinner, Martie wondered if earlier she might have poisoned the leftover lasagna.

She couldn’t recall committing such treachery. But she still suspected that she suffered fugues: spasms of time during which she functioned as if conscious, though nothing stuck in her memory.

Certain that Dusty would eat the lasagna just to prove his trust in

her, Martie restrained herself and didn’t caution him. To guard against the dismal prospect of surviving dinner alone, she overcame her lack of appetite to eat most of what he had put on her plate.

She refused a fork, however, and ate with a spoon.

A Biedermeier pedestal stood in one corner of Susan Jagger’s bedroom. Atop the pedestal was a bronze bowl containing a miniature ming tree, which received no sunshine from the perpetually covered windows but flourished because a small plant light stood behind it.

At the base of the ming tree was lush ivy with small star-shaped leaves, which covered the potting soil and trailed over the curves of bronze. After calculating the best angle of view between bowl and bed, she placed the camcorder in the container and artfully arranged the trailers of ivy to conceal it.

She switched off the plant light, leaving on a nightstand lamp. The room couldn’t be dark if she were to get anything useful on tape.

To explain the lamp, she would appear to have fallen asleep while reading. Only a half-finished glass of wine on the nightstand and an open book, precisely tumbled among the bedclothes, would be necessary to create that impression.

She circled the room, studying the bronze bowl. The camcorder was well hidden.

From one acute angle, an amber reflection of the lamp glowed like animal eyeshine in the dark lens, as though a cyclopean lizard were peering from the loops of ivy. This telltale was so small that it wouldn’t draw the attention of either incubus or mere mortal.

Susan returned to the camcorder, slipped one finger into the ivy, searched briefly, and pressed a button.

She retreated two steps. Stood very still. Head cocked, breath held. Listening.

Though the heat was off and no furnace fan was churning, though no wind whispered in the eaves or at the windows, though the silence in the bedroom was as complete as one could hope for in this age of omnipresent mechanisms, Susan couldn’t hear the hum of the camcorder motor. Indeed, the equipment fulfilled the manufacturer's guarantee of whisper-quiet operation, and the faint sibilant

sigh of turning tape reels was completely muffled by the shrouding ivy.

Satisfied, Susan returned to the pedestal and extracted the camcorder from the ivy. She reviewed the recording on the camera’s built-in monitor.

The entire bed was visible in the frame. The entrance to the room was captured at the extreme left side of the image.

She watched herself move in and out of the shot. In and out again. Pausing to listen for the softly whirring motor.

She was surprised that she appeared so young and attractive.

These days, she didn’t see herself this clearly when she looked in mirrors. In mirrors, she perceived less of a physical reflection than a psychological one: a Susan Jagger aged by chronic anxiety, features softened and blurred by sixteen months of reclusion, gray with boredom and gaunt with worry.

This woman on the tape was slim, pretty. More important, she was full of purpose. This was a woman with hope—and a future.

Pleased, Susan replayed the recording. And here she came once more, out of the camcorder’s iron-oxide memory, moving purposefully around the bedroom, in and out of frame, pausing to listen: a woman with a plan.

Even a spoon could be a weapon if she reversed her grip on it, held it by the bowl, and stabbed with the handle. Although not as sharp as a knife, it could be used to gouge, to blind.

Fits of tremors came and went, causing the spoon to oscillate between Martie’s fingers. Twice it rattled against her plate, as though she were calling for attention before raising a toast.

She was tempted to put the spoon out of reach and eat with her hands. For fear of appearing even crazier in Dusty’s eyes than she did already, she persevered with the flatware.

Dinner conversation was awkward. Even after the detailed account she had given in the living room, he had many questions

regarding the panic attack. She grew increasingly reluctant to talk about it.

For one thing, the subject depressed her. Recalling her queer behavior, she felt helpless, as though she had been cast back to the powerless and dependent condition of early childhood.

In addition, she was troubled by an irrational but nonetheless firm conviction that talking about the panic attack would induce another one. She felt as if she were sitting on a trapdoor, and the longer she talked, the more likely she was to speak the trigger word that would release the hinges and drop her into an abyss below.

She asked about his day, and he recited a list of business errands that he usually attended to when the weather didn’t favor housepainting.

Although Dusty never lied, Martie sensed that he wasn’t giving her the full story. Of course, in her current condition, she was too paranoid to trust her feelings.

“I feel eighty-five.”

He said, “Well, I’m here to testify, you look way better than that damn lasagna.”

“Gee, mister, you sure can charm a girl.”

“You know what they say about housepainters.”

“What do they say?”

Walking the battlements of her four-room fortress, Susan Jagger satisfied herself that all the windows were locked.

The only apartment door opening to the outside world was in the kitchen. It was protected by two dead bolts and a security chain.

Of course, she had tried the chair trick before. It hadn’t foiled the intruder.

Susan remained eager to hear what analysis and advice her friend might offer, but she wasn’t going to tell Martie about the camcorder. Because maybe her phone was tapped. Maybe Eric was listening.

Two glasses of Scotch, a brick of lasagna, and the events of this terrible day left Martie half numb with exhaustion. As Dusty cleaned up the dinner dishes, she sat at the table, watching him from under heavy eyelids.

A new fear of sleepwalking was the only thing preventing her from nodding off here at the kitchen table. Somnambulism had never previously afflicted her, but then she had never suffered a panic attack until this morning, either, and now all things were possible.

If she walked in her sleep, perhaps that Other Martie would control her body. Slipping out of bed, leaving Dusty to dream on, the Other might descend barefoot through the house, as comfortable as the blind in darkness, to extract a clean knife from the utensils basket in the dishwasher.

Dusty took her hand and led her through the downstairs, turning off lights as they went. Valet padded after them, his eyes red and shining in the gloom.

Sensing a weight in one of the coat pockets, he fished out the paperback book. “Are you still reading this?” he asked.

“It's a real thriller.”

“Not all that long.” She yawned. “The writing’s good.”

He was frowning at her. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Plenty. But, right now, mostly I’m just so damn tired.”

Handing the book to her, he said, “Well, if you have trouble going to sleep, obviously a page of this is better than Nembutal.”

To sleep: perchance to walk, to knife, to burn.

Valet preceded them up the stairs.

Susan dressed for bed in simple white cotton panties—no embroidery or lace, no adornment of any kind—and a white T-shirt.

Prior to the past few months, she had favored colorful lingerie with frills. She had enjoyed feeling sexy. No more.

She understood the psychology behind her change in sleepwear. Sexiness was now linked in her mind to rape. Appliquéd lace, fimbria, furbelow, plicated selvage, bargello stitchery, point de gaze, and the like might offer encouragement to her mysterious postmidnight visitor; he might interpret frills as an invitation to further abuse.

For a while she had gone to bed in men’s pajamas, loose and ugly, and then in baggy exercise cottons. The creep hadn’t been turned off by either.

In fact, after undressing her and brutally using her, he took the time to re-dress her with attention to detail that was obvious mockery. If she had buttoned every button on her pajama top before going to bed, he buttoned each; but if she had left one unbuttoned, the

same remained unbuttoned when she woke. He retied the waistband drawstring in precisely the bow knot that she had used.

These days, simple white cotton. An assertion of her innocence. A refusal to be degraded or soiled, regardless of what he did to her.

Dusty was worried about Martie’s sudden torpor. She pleaded bone-deep weariness, but judging by her demeanor, she was succumbing less to exhaustion than to profound depression.

She moved sluggishly, not with the loose-limbed awkwardness of exhaustion, but with the grim and determined plodding of one who labored under a crushing burden. Her face was tight, pinched at the corners of the mouth and eyes, rather than slack with fatigue.

On every night in Dusty’s memory, Martie washed her face and applied a moisturizing lotion. Brushed her hair. Not this time.

Forgoing her nightly rituals, she went to bed fully dressed.

When Dusty realized she was not going to take off her clothes, he untied her laces and removed her shoes. Her socks. Skinned off her jeans. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t cooperate, either.

Getting Martie out of her blouse was too difficult, especially as she lay on her side, knees drawn up, arms crossed on her breasts. Leaving her partially dressed, Dusty pulled the covers over her shoulders, smoothed her hair back from her face, kissed her brow.

Her eyelids drooped, but in her eyes was something more stark and sharp-edged than weariness.

“Don’t leave me,” she said thickly.

“I won’t.”

“Don’t trust me.”

“But I do.”

“Because I might kill you in your sleep,” she said, and closed her eyes, which seemed to change from cornflower-blue to cyanine and then to purple madder just as her eyelids slipped shut.

He stood watching her, frightened not by her warning, not for himself, but for her.

She mumbled, “Susan.”

“What about her?”

“Just remembered. Didn’t tell you about Susan. Strange stuff. Supposed to call her.”

“You can call her in the morning.”

“What sort of friend am I?” she muttered.

“She’ll understand. Just rest now. Just rest.”

In seconds, Martie appeared to be asleep, lips parted, breathing through her mouth. The pinched lines of anxiety were gone from the corners of her eyes.

Dusty turned his attention once more to what Martie had told him of her day. As he worried at each bizarre event and quirky detail, he was overcome by the peculiar conviction that what had happened to his wife was somehow associated with what happened to his brother. He sensed parallel oddities in both events, though the precise nature of the connections eluded him. Undeniably, this was the strangest day of his life, and instinct told him that Skeet and Martie had not unraveled simultaneously by mere coincidence.

In one corner of the room, Valet was curled on his bed, a large

sheepskin-covered pillow, but he remained awake. He lay with his chin propped on one paw, intently watching his mistress sleeping in the golden lamplight.

Because Martie had never failed to keep a commitment and thus had banked a lot of moral capital, Susan didn’t feel aggrieved when the promised phone call failed to come in by eleven o’clock; however, she was uneasy. She placed her own call, got an answering machine, and grew worried.

No doubt Martie had been rocked and mystified by Susan’s claim of a phantom rapist to whom locked doors were no impediment. She’d asked to be given some time to think. But Martie wasn’t prone either to waffle or to be unnecessarily diplomatic. By now she would have arrived at some considered advice—or would have called to say she needed more convincing if she were to believe this tall, tall story.

“It’s me,” Susan told the answering machine. “What’s wrong? You okay? You think I’m nuts? It’s all right if you do. Call me.”

She waited a few seconds, then hung up.

Most likely, Martie would not have suggested a course of action with more potential for success than the camcorder sting, so Susan went forward with her preparations.

She placed a half-full glass of wine on the nightstand, not to be drunk, but as a prop.

She settled into bed with a book, sitting up against a pile of pillows. She was too nervous to read.

For a while she watched an old movie on TV, Dark Passage, but she couldn’t concentrate on the story. Her mind wandered down darker and more frightening alleyways than any that Bogart and Bacall had ever traveled.

Although Susan was preternaturally alert, she recalled other nights when apparent insomnia had abruptly given way to unnaturally deep sleep—and to victimization. If she was secretly being drugged, she couldn’t predict when the chemicals might kick in, and she did not want to wake up to discover that she had been violated and that she had failed to activate the camcorder.

At midnight, she went to the Biedermeier pedestal, slipped one finger into the ivy under the little ming tree, started the videotape

rolling, and returned to bed. If she was still awake at one o’clock, she would rewind the cassette and start recording from the beginning, and again at two and three o’clock, so in the event that she slept, there would be less of a chance that the tape would run out before the creep entered the room.

After less than a minute of silence, as she was about to pick up the book, the telephone rang. Assuming that Martie was calling, Susan answered. “Hello?”

“This is Ben Marco.”

“I’m listening,” Susan told Ben Marco.

At once her racing heart began to settle, and in her blood, the insectile twitching of fear subsided.

He said, “The winter storm—”

“The storm is you,” she replied.

“—hid in the bamboo grove—”

“The grove is me.”

“—and quieted away.”

“In the quiet, I will learn what is wanted,” Susan said.

Beautiful, really.

With the litany of the rules completed, Susan Jagger was awash

in a sea of quiet: the apartment profoundly silent around her, all hushed within her, as soundless as the lifeless void must have been only an instant before Creation, when God had not yet said, Let there be light.

When the winter storm spoke again, his soft deep voice seemed not to come from the telephone but from within Susan. “Tell me where you are.”

“In bed.”

“I believe you’re alone. Tell me if I’m correct.”

“You are.”

“Let me in.”

“Yes.”

“Quickly.”

Susan put down the phone, got out of bed, and hurried through the dark apartment.

In spite of her quickened pace, her heartbeat continued to grow slower: strong, steady, calm.

The slide bolt at the end of the brass security chain rasped out of the slot in the latch plate. When she let go, the links rattled against the door casing.

She disengaged the first dead bolt. The second.

She opened the door.

A storm he was, and wintry, too, waiting on the landing at the head of the stairs, quiet now but filled with the rage of hurricanes, a fury usually well hidden from the world but always churning in him, revealed in his most private moments, and as he crossed the threshold into the kitchen, forcing her backward, shoving the door shut behind him, he clamped one strong hand around her slender throat.

The left and right common carotid arteries, providing the principal blood supply to the neck and head, arise directly from the aorta, which itself arises from the upper surface of the left ventricle. Having so recently departed the heart, the blood surging through both vessels is particularly rich in oxygen and is driven with force.

Hand cupped around the front of Susan’s throat, fingers spread along the left side of her neck, the pad of his thumb pressed just under her jawbone and over her right carotid, Dr. Mark Ahriman held her thus for perhaps a minute, enjoying the strong, steady throb of her pulse. She was so wonderfully full of life.

If he’d wanted to strangle her to death, he could have done so without fear of resistance. In this altered state of consciousness, she would stand, docile and unprotesting, while he choked the life out of her. She would ease to her knees when she could no longer stand, and then fold quietly into a graceful mound on the floor as her heart stuttered to a stop, apologizing with her eyes for being unable to die on her feet and, therefore, requiring him to kneel with her as he finished the job.

In fact, while dying, Susan Jagger would favor Dr. Ahriman with whatever attitude and expression he requested. Childlike adoration. Erotic rapture. Impotent rage or even lamblike meekness with a glaze of bafflement, if either of those responses amused him.

He had no intention of killing her. Not here, not now—though soon.

When the time inevitably came, he wouldn’t act directly to snuff Susan, because he had great respect for the scientific-investigation division of virtually any contemporary American police agency. When wet work was required, he always used intermediaries to deliver the death blow, sparing himself the risk of suspicion.

Besides, his purest bliss came from clever manipulation, not directly from mutilation and murder. Pulling the trigger, shoving in the knife, twisting the wire garrote—none of that would thrill him as keenly as using someone to commit atrocities on his behalf.

Power is a sharper thrill than violence.

Susan’s throat beneath his hand reminded him of a long-ago thrill, of another slender and graceful throat that had been torn by a pike, and with this memory came a tintinnabulation through the bone bells of his spine.

In Scottsdale, Arizona, stands a Palladian mansion in which a willowy young heiress named Minette Luckland pounds her mother’s skull to mush with a hammer and shortly thereafter shoots her father in the back of the head while he is eating a slice of crumb cake and watching a rerun of Seinfeld. Subsequently, she leaps from a second-floor gallery, free-falling eighteen feet, impaling herself on a spear held by a statue of Diana, goddess of the moon and the hunt, which stands on aflutedplinth in the center of the entry rotunda. The suicide note, indisputably written in Minette's own neat band, claims that she has been sexually abused since childhood by both parents—an outrageous slander that Dr Ahriman had suggested to her Around Diana’s bronze feet: spatters of blood like red plum-flower petals on white marble floor

Now, standing half naked in the shadowy kitchen, green eyes reflecting the faint green light of the digital clock in the nearby oven, Susan Jagger was even lovelier than the late Minette. Although her face and form were the stuff of an erotomaniac’s sweat-drenched dreams, Ahriman was less excited by her looks than by the knowledge

that in her lithe limbs and supple body was a lethal potential as great as that unleashed in Scottsdale so many years ago.

Her right carotid artery throbbed against the doctor’s thumb, her pulse slow and thick. Fifty-six beats per minute.

She was not afraid. She was calmly awaiting use, as though she were an unthinking tool—or, more accurately, a toy.

Neither term was adequately defining.

Once Ahriman recited the haiku, Susan’s personality was more deeply and firmly repressed than if she were hypnotized. In this peculiar condition, she was no longer Susan Jagger in any meaningful sense, but a nonentity, a meat machine whose mind was a blank hard-drive waiting for whatever software Ahriman chose to install.

If she had been in a classic fugue state, which is a serious personality disassociation, she would have appeared to function almost normally, with a few eccentric behaviors but with far less detachment than she now exhibited.

“Susan,” he said, “do you know who I am?”

“Do I?” she asked, her voice fragile and distant.

“Am I your psychiatrist, Susan?”

In the gloom, he could almost see the puzzlement on her face. “Are you?”

Until she was released from this state, she would respond only to commands.

He said, “Tell me your name.”

Receiving this direct instruction, she was free to provide whatever knowledge she possessed. “Susan Jagger.”

“Tell me who I am.”

“Dr. Ahriman.”

“Are you?”

“Tell me my profession.”

“You’re a psychiatrist.”

This more-than-trance-not-quite-fugue state had not been easily engineered. Much hard work and professional dedication had been required to remake her into this pliant plaything.

Eighteen months ago, before he had been her psychiatrist, on three separate carefully orchestrated occasions, without Susan’s knowledge, Ahriman had administered to her a potent brew of drugs:

Rohypnol, phencyclidine, Valium, and one marvelous cerebrotropic substance not listed in any published pharmacopoeia. The recipe was his own, and he personally compounded each dose from the stock in his private and quite illegal pharmacy, because the ingredients must be precisely balanced if the desired effect were to be achieved.

The drugs themselves had not reduced Susan to her current obedient condition, but each dose had rendered her semiconscious, unaware of her situation, and supremely malleable. While she had been in this twilight sleep, Ahriman had been able to bypass her conscious mind, where volitional thinking occurred, and speak to her deep subconscious, where conditioned reflexes were established and where he met no resistance.

What he had done to her during those three long sessions would tempt tabloid newspapers and writers of spy novels to use the word brainwashing, but it was nothing as twentieth-century as that. He had not torn down the structure of her mind, with the intention of rebuilding it in a new architecture. That approach—once favored by the Soviet, the Chinese, and the North Korean governments, among others—was too ambitious, demanding months of around-the-clock access to the subject in a dreary prison environment, with lots of tedious psychological torture, not to mention a tolerance for the wretch’s annoying screams and cowardly pleading. Dr. Ahriman’s IQ was high, but his boredom threshold was low. Besides, the rate of success using traditional brainwashing techniques was uninspiring and the degree of control seldom total.

Rather, the doctor had gone down into Susan’s subconscious, into the cellar, and he had added a new chamber—call it a secret chapel—of which her conscious mind remained unaware. There, he conditioned her to worship one god to the exclusion of all others, and that god was Mark Ahriman himself. He was a stern deity, preChristian in his denial of free will, intolerant of the slightest disobedience, merciless with transgressors.

Thereafter, he had never again drugged her. There was no need to do so anymore. In those three sessions, he had established the control devices—the Marco name, the haiku—that instantly repressed her personality and took her to the same deep realms of her psyche to which the chemicals had taken her.

Now, with his hand still upon Susan’s throat, he said, “I don’t think I’ll be myself this time. Something kinky tonight. Do you know who I am, Susan?”

“Who are you?”

Her voice remained distant, devoid of emotion, because he had not yet told her how she was required to feel about this scenario. “Yes, Daddy.”

Her carotid pulse, under his right thumb, remained slow.

“Tell me the color of my hair, Susan.”

Although the kitchen was too dark for her to determine his hair color, she said, “Blond.”

Ahriman’s hair was salt-and-pepper, but Susan’s father was indeed a blond.

“Tell me the color of my eyes.”

“Green like mine.”

Ahriman’s eyes were hazel.

With his right hand still pressed to Susan’s throat, the doctor leaned down and kissed her almost chastely.

Her mouth was slack. She was not an active participant in the kiss; in fact, she was so passive that she might as well have been catatonic if not comatose.

Biting gently at her lips, then forcing his tongue between them, he kissed her as no father should ever kiss a daughter, and although her mouth remained slack and her carotid pulse did not accelerate, he sensed her breath catch in her throat.

“How do you feel about this, Susan?”

“How do you want me to feel?”

Again he kissed her, and this time she tried to close her mouth to him; she relented, however, and her mouth softened, opened. She put her hands against his chest, to fend him off, but her resistance was weak, childlike.

Under his thumb, the pulse in her right carotid artery raced like that of a hare in the shadow of a hound.

“Daddy, no.”

The reflection of green light in Susan’s green eyes glistered with a new watery depth.

Those shimmering fathoms produced a subtle fragrance, faintly bitter, briny, and this familiar scent caused the doctor to swell with fierce desire.

He lowered his right hand from her throat to her waist, holding her close.

“Please,” she whispered, managing to make that one word both a protest and a nervous invitation.

Ahriman breathed deeply, then lowered his mouth to her face. The reliability of a predator’s sense of smell was confirmed: Her cheeks were wet and salty.

“Lovely.”

With a series of quick little kisses, he moistened his lips on her damp skin, and then explored his flavored lips with the tip of his tongue.

Both hands around her waist now, he lifted her and carried her backward, until he was pressing her between his body and the refrigerator.

“Please” again, and then once more “please,” the dear girl so conflicted that eagerness and dread spiced her voice in equal measure.

Susan’s weeping was accompanied by neither whimper nor sob, and the doctor savored these silent streams, seeking to slake the thirst

that he could never satisfy. He licked a salty pearl from the corner of her mouth, licked another from the flared rim of a nostril, and then suckled on the droplets beaded across her eyelashes, relishing the flavor as though this would be his sole sustenance for the day,

Letting go of her waist, stepping back from her, he said, “Go to your bedroom, Susan.”

Sinuous shadow, she moved like hot tears, clear and bitter.

The doctor followed, admiring her graceful walk, to her bed in Hell.

Valet dozed, twitching and snuffling in the company of phantom rabbits, but Martie lay in stone-still silence, as though she were a death sculpture upon a catafalque.

Sitting up in bed, barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, Dusty once more sorted through the fourteen pages that had come from the notepad in Skeet’s kitchen, brooding on the name Dr Yen Lo in all thirty-nine renditions.

That name, when spoken, had seemed to traumatize Skeet, causing him to lapse into a twilight consciousness in which he answered every question with a question of his own. Open eyes jiggling as in REM sleep, he responded directly—if often cryptically—only to questions that were framed as statements or commands. When Dusty’s frustration had led him to say Ah, give me a break and go to sleep, Skeet dropped into an abyss as abruptly as a narcoleptic responding instantaneously to the flipping of an electrochemical switch in the brain.

Martie had spoken of her suspicion that she was “missing time,” from her day, though she could not identify precisely when any gap or gaps had occurred. Fearful that she had opened the gas valve in the fireplace without lighting the ceramic logs, she had repeatedly returned to the living room with an urgent conviction that a furious explosion was imminent. Although the valve had always been tightly closed, she continued to be troubled by a perception that her memory had been nibbled like a holey woolen scarf beset by moths.

Dusty had witnessed his brother’s blackout. And he sensed truth in Martie’s fear of having fallen into a fugue.

Perhaps a link.

This had been an extraordinary day. The two people dearest to Dusty’s heart had suffered quite different but equally dramatic episodes of aberrant behavior. The odds of such serious—even if temporary—psychological collapse striking twice, this close, were surely a great deal smaller than the one-in-eighteen-million chance of winning the state lottery.

To Dusty, however, who perceived mysterious design in everything from the color of daffodils to Valet’s pure joy in pursuit of a ball, there was no such thing as coincidence. The link was tantalizing—though difficult to fathom. And frightening.

He put the pages of Skeet’s notepad on his nightstand and picked up a notepad of his own. On the top page, he had printed the lines of the haiku that his brother had referred to as the rules.

Skeet was the waves. According to him, the blue pine needles were missions. The clear cascades were Dusty or Yen Lo, or perhaps anyone who invoked the haiku in Skeet’s presence.

To grasp the purpose of the haiku, he had to understand, at the very least, what Skeet had meant by missions.

Dusty was certain he precisely remembered the haiku and the kid’s odd interpretation, because he was blessed with a photographic and audio-retentive memory of such high reliability that he cruised through high school and one year of college with a perfect 4.0 grade average, before deciding that he could experience life more fully as a housepainter than as an academic.

Dusty considered synonyms. Task. Work. Chore. Job. Calling. Vocation. Career Church.

None of them furthered his understanding.

From the big sheepskin pillow in the corner, Valet whimpered anxiously, as though the rabbits in his dreams had grown fangs and were now doing the dog’s work while he played rabbit in the chase.

Martie was too zonked to be roused by the dog’s thin squeals.

Sometimes, however, Valet’s nightmares escalated until he woke with a terrified bark.

“Easy boy. Easy boy,” Dusty whispered.

Even in dreams, the retriever seemed to hear his master’s voice, and his whimpering subsided.

“Easy. Good boy. Good Valet.”

Although the dog didn’t wake, his feathery plumed tail swished across the sheepskin a few times before curling close around him once more.

Martie and the dog slept on peacefully, but suddenly Dusty sat up from the pillows piled against the headboard, the very thought of sleep banished by a rattling insight. Mulling over the haiku, he’d been fully awake, but by comparison to this wide-eyed state, he might as well have been drowsing. He was now hyperalert, as cold as if he had ice water for spinal fluid.

He had been reminded of another moment with the dog, earlier in the day.

The phone rings. Someone peddling subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times.

At the time, he had attributed his uncharacteristic memory lapse to stress. Taking a header off a roof, watching your brother suffer a breakdown before your eyes: This stuff was bound to mess with your mind.

If he had been on the phone five or ten minutes instead of a few seconds, however, he couldn’t possibly have been speaking with anyone in the Times subscription-sales operation. What the hell would they have talked about for so long? Typefaces? The cost of newsprint? Johannes Gutenberg—What a cool guy!—and the invention of movable type? The tremendous effectiveness of the Times as

a puppy-training aid in Valet’s early days, its singular convenience, its remarkable absorbency, its admirable service as an environment-friendly and fully biodegradable poop wrap?

A task that he could not remember.

Missing time.

Ants with urgent purpose, busy bustling multitudes, seemed to be swarming up his legs, down his arms, across his back, and although he knew that no ants had invaded the bed, that what he felt was the nerve endings in his skin responding to the sudden dimpling from a case of universal gooseflesh, he brushed at his arms and at the back of his neck, as if to cast off an army of six-legged soldiers.

32

Tear-damp flush of face, white cotton so sweetly curved, bare knees together. Susan was sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting.

Ahriman sat across the room from her, in an armchair upholstered with peach-colored moire silk. He was in no hurry to have her.

The art of Susan Jagger’s form was twofold: physical, of course, and psychological. Her face and body were exceptionally beautiful. But there was beauty in her mind, too—in her personality and in her intellect.

As a toy, she also had a twofold function, and the first was sexual. Tonight and for a few more nights, Ahriman would use her savagely and at length.

Her second function was to suffer and die well. As a plaything, she had already given him considerable delight with her courageous if hopeless battle to overcome agoraphobia, her anguish and despair as rich as marzipan. Her brave determination to keep her sense of humor and to win back her life was pathetic and therefore delectable. Soon he would enhance and complicate her phobia, sending her into

a swift and irreversible decline, and then he would enjoy the final— and sharpest—thrill that she was capable of providing.

Now she sat tearful and timid, conflicted by the prospect of imagined incest, repulsed and yet full of a sick sweet yearning, as programmed. Trembling.

From time to time, her eyes jiggled, the telltale REM that marked the deepest state of personality submersion. It distracted the doctor and compromised her beauty.

Susan already knew the roles they were playing tonight, knew what was expected of her in this erotic scenario, so Ahriman brought her closer to the surface, though nowhere near to full consciousness. Just far enough to put an end to the spasms of rapid eye movement.

“Susan, I want you to move out of the chapel now,” he said, referring to that imaginary place in her deepest subconscious where he had taken her for instruction. “Come out and move up the stairs, but not too far, one flight, where a little more light filters down. There, right there.”

Her eyes were like clear ponds made murky by the reflections of gray clouds on their surfaces, suddenly touched by a few faint beams of sunshine, and now revealing greater depths.

“What you’re wearing still appeals to me,” he said. “White cotton. The simplicity.” Several visits ago, he had instructed her to dress for bed in this fashion until he suggested something different; the look excited him. “The innocence. Purity. Like a child, yet so incredibly ripe.”

The roses in her cheeks blossomed brighter, and she lowered her eyes demurely. Tears of shame, like beads of dew, quivered on the petals of the blush.

She actually saw her father when she dared to look at the doctor. Such was the power of suggestion when Ahriman spoke to her one-on-one in the deep sanctity of that mind chapel.

When they were finished playing tonight, he would instruct her to forget all that had happened from the moment he phoned until he left her apartment. She would recall neither his visit nor this fantasy of incest.

If he chose to do so, however, Ahriman could concoct for Susan a detailed history of sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Many hours would be required to weave that lurid narrative through the tapestry of her real memories, but thereafter he could instruct her to

believe in her lifelong victimization and gradually to “recover” those repressed traumas during her therapy sessions.

If her belief drove her to report her father to the police, and if they asked her to submit to a lie-detector test, she would respond to each question with unwavering conviction and precisely the correct shadings of emotion. Her respiration, blood pressure, pulse, and her galvanic skin response would convince any polygraph examiner that she was telling the truth, because she would be convinced that her vile accusations were indeed factual in every detail.

“Look at me, Susan.”

She raised her head. Her eyes met his, and the doctor recalled a bit of verse by e. e. cummings: In your eyes there lives / a green egyptian noise.

“Next time,” he said, “I’ll bring my camcorder, and we’ll make another videotape. Do you remember the first one I shot of you?”

Susan shook her head.

Her gaze slid away from him. She stared at the miniature ming tree in the pot atop the Biedermeier pedestal.

He said, “One more tape to remember you by. Next time. I’ve been giving my imagination a workout. You’ll be a very dirty girl next time, Susie. It’ll make the first tape look like Disney.”

Keeping a video record of his most outrageous puppetry was not wise. He stored this incriminating evidence—currently totaling 121 tapes—in a locked and well-hidden vault, although if the wrong people suspected its existence, they would tear his house apart board by board, stone by stone, until they found his archives.

He took the risk because he was at heart a sentimentalist, with a nostalgic yearning for days past, old friends, discarded toys.

“Look at me, Susan.”

She continued to stare at the potted plant on the pedestal.

“Don’t be willful. Look at your father now.”

Undoubtedly, one evening long after Susan Jagger is dead, the nostalgic doctor will think fondly of her, and will be overcome by a wistful desire to hear her musical voice again, to see her lovely face, to relive the many good times they had together. This is his weakness.

He will indulge himself, on that evening, by resorting to his video archives. He’ll be warmed and gladdened to see Susan engaged in acts so sordid, so squalid, that they transform her almost as dramatically as a lycanthrope is transformed in the fullness of the moon. In these wallows of obscenity, her radiant beauty dims sufficiently to allow the doctor to see clearly the essential animal that lives within her, the pre evolutionary beast, groveling and yet cunning, fearful and yet fearsome, darkling in her heart.

Besides, even if he did not get so much pleasure from reviewing these home movies, he would maintain his videotape archives, because he is by nature an indefatigable collector. Room after room in his rambling house is dedicated to displays of the toys that he has so tirelessly acquired over the years: armies of toy soldiers; charming hand-painted, cast-iron cars; coin-operated mechanical banks; plastic playsets with thousands of miniature figures, from Roman gladiators to astronauts.

“Get up, girl.”

She rose from the bed.

“Turn.”

Slowly she turned, slowly for his examination.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “I want more of you on tape for posterity. And perhaps a little blood next time, a minor bit of self-mutilation. In fact, bodily fluids in general could be the theme. Very messy, very degenerate. That should be fun. I’m sure that you agree.”

Again, she favored the ming tree over his eyes, but this was a passive disobedience, for she looked at him again when commanded to do so.

“If you think that will be fun, tell me so,” he insisted.

“Yes, Daddy. Fun.”

He instructed her to get on her knees, and she settled to the floor.

“Crawl to me, Susan.”

Like a gear-driven figure on a mechanical bank, as though she had a coin gripped in her teeth and were following a rigorous track toward a deposit slot, she approached the armchair, face painted with realistic tears, a superb example of her kind, an acquisition that would delight any collector.

The Moment When Dusty Had Noticed the Napping Dog bad been scissored from the earlier Moment When the Kitchen Phone Had Rung, and no matter how many times he replayed the scene in his mind, he could not tie together those severed threads of his day. One moment the dog stood, tail wagging, and the next moment the dog was waking from a short sleep. Missing minutes. Spent talking to whom? Doing what?

“Easy. It’s okay. Easy now,” he whispered, lightly placing a hand on her shoulder, trying to gentle her out of the nightmare and into untroubled sleep again, much as he had done for Valet earlier.

She would not be gentled. As her groans became whimpers, she shuddered, kicking feebly at the entangling sheets, and as whimpers skirled into shrill cries, she thrashed, abruptly sat up, flung off the bedclothes, and shot to her feet, no longer squealing in terror, but choking, gagging thickly, on the queasy verge of regurgitation, vigorously scrubbing at her mouth with both hands, as though repulsed by something on the menu in a dream feast.

Up and moving almost as explosively as Martie, Dusty started around the bed, aware of Valet alert beyond her.

She swung toward him: “Stay away from me!”

Such emotion rushed through her voice that Dusty halted, and the dog began to shake, the hair standing straight up along the length of his withers.

Still wiping at her mouth, Martie looked at her hands, as if she expected to see them gloved in fresh blood—and perhaps not her own. “Oh, God, oh, my God.”

Dusty moved toward her, and again she ordered him to stay away, no less fiercely than before. “You can’t trust me, you can’t get near me, don’t think you can.”

“It was only a nightmare.”

“This is the nightmare.”

“Martie—”

Convulsively, she bent forward, gagging on the memory of the dream, then letting out a miserable groan of disgust and anguish.

Despite her warning, Dusty went to her, and when he touched her, she recoiled violently, shoving him away. “Don’t trust me! Don’t, for Christ’s sake, don’t.”

Rather than step around him, she scrambled monkeylike across the disheveled bed, bounded off the other side, and hurried into the adjoining bathroom.

A short sharp bleat escaped the dog, a plucked-wire sound that twanged through Dusty and struck in him a fear that he had not known before.

Seeing her like this a second time was more terrifying than the first episode. Once could be an aberration. Twice was a pattern. In patterns could be seen the future.

He went after Martie and found her at the bathroom sink. The cold water gushed into the basin. The door of the medicine cabinet, which had been open, was swinging shut of its own accord.

“It must’ve been worse than usual this time,” he said.

“What?”

“The nightmare.”

“It wasn’t the same one, nothing as pleasant as the Leaf Man,” she said, but clearly she had no intention of elaborating.

She popped the cap off a bottle of an effective nonprescription sleeping aid that they rarely used. A slurry of blue caplets spilled into her cupped left hand.

At first, Dusty thought she was intending to overdose, which was ridiculous, because even a full bottle probably wouldn’t kill her— and, anyway, she must know that he would knock them out of her hand before she could swallow so many.

But then she let most of the pills rattle back into the bottle. Three were left on her palm.

“Two’s the maximum dosage,” he said.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the maximum dosage. I want to be out cold. I’ve got to sleep, got to rest, but I’m not going to go through another dream like that, not another one like that.”

Her black hair was damp with sweat and tangled like the crowning snakes of whatever Gorgon she had encountered in her dream. The pills were to vanquish monsters.

Water slopped into the drinking glass, and she chased the three caplets with a long swallow.

At her side, Dusty didn’t interfere. Three pills didn’t warrant paramedics and a stomach pump, and if she was a little groggy in the morning, she might be somewhat less anxious, as well.

He saw no point in suggesting that deeper slumber might not be as dreamless as she expected. Even if she slept in the scaly arms of nightmares, she would be more rested in the morning than if she didn’t sleep at all.

As she lowered the glass from her lips, Manic caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her reflection strummed a shiver from her, which the cold water had been unable to induce.

As winter freezes the blueness out of a pond, so fear had frozen much of the color out of Martie. Face as pale as ice. Lips less pink than they were mallow-purple, with dry peels of zinc-gray skin that had been rubbed loose by her scrubbing hands.

“Oh, God, look what I am,” she said, “look what I am.”

Dusty knew that she was not referring to her damp and tangled hair or to her blanched features, but to something hateful that she imagined she saw in the depths of her blue eyes.

At his touch, she erupted away from him with such alarm that she

crashed into the bathroom wall hard enough to rattle the shower door in its frame.

“Don’t get near me! For God’s sake, don’t you realize what I could do, all the things I could do?”

Half nauseated by worry, he said, “Manic, I’m not afraid of you.”

“Not far from a kiss to a bite, your tongue in my mouth.”

“Martie, please—”

“A kiss to a bite. So easy to tear off your lips. How do you know I couldn’t? How do you know I wouldn’t?”

If she hadn’t already reached a full-blown panic attack, she was running downhill toward one, and Dusty didn’t know how to stop her, or even how to slow her.

“Look at my hands,” she demanded. “These fingernails. Acrylic nails. Why do you think I couldn’t blind you with them? You think I couldn’t gouge out your eyes?”

“Martie. This isn’t—”

Tidal emotion swept through Dusty, terrible pity and fierce love, crosscurrents and rips.

He reached for Manic, and she squeezed past him, out of the bathroom. She slammed the door between them.

When he followed her into the bedroom, he found her at his open closet. She was riffling through his shirts, rattling the hangers on the metal pole, searching for something.

The tie rack. Most of the rack pegs were empty. He owned only four neckties.

She pulled a plain black tie and a red-and-blue striped number from the closet and held them out to Dusty. “Tie me.”

“What? No. Good God, Manic.”

“So do I. No.”

“Ankles together, wrists together,” she said urgently.

“No.”

Valet was sitting up in his bed, twitchy eyebrows punctuating a series of worried expressions as his attention bounced from Martie to Dusty to Manic.

She said, “So if I go psycho, total blood nuts, during the night—”

“—total blood nuts, then I’ll have to get loose before I can screw up anybody. And when I’m trying to get loose, that’ll wake you if you’ve fallen asleep.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

Dusty shook his head.

“One of those pills usually does the job. You took three. You don’t need to be tied.”

“I’m not going to trust pills, not pills alone, no way. Either you help me with this, or I’ll puke up the pills, stick a finger down my throat and puke ‘em right now.”

Reason wasn’t going to sway her. She was as high on fear as Skeet on his drug cocktail, and hardly more rational than the kid had been on the Sorensons’ roof.

Sitting in an ineffective tangle of ties, sweating, shaking, she began to cry. “Please, baby, please. Please help me. I’ve got to sleep, I’m so tired, I need some rest, or I’m going to go bugshit. I need

some peace, and I’m not going to have any peace if you don’t help me. Help me. Please.”

Tears moved him as fury couldn’t.

When he went to her, she lay back on the bed and covered her face with her hands, as though ashamed of the helplessness to which fear had reduced her.

Dusty trembled as he bound her ankles together.

“Tighter,” she said through her mask of hands.

Although he obliged, he didn’t draw the knots as tight as she would have preferred. The thought of hurting her, even inadvertently, was more than he could bear.

She held her clasped hands toward him.

Using the black necktie, Dusty hitched wrist to wrist tightly enough to secure her until morning, but he was careful not to cut off her circulation.

As he bound her, she lay with her eyes shut, head turned to one side and away from him, perhaps because she was mortified by the disabling intensity of her fear, perhaps because she was embarrassed by her disheveled appearance. Perhaps. But Dusty suspected that she was trying to hide her face largely because she equated tears with weakness.

The daughter of Smilin’ Bob Woodhouse—who had been a genuine war hero, as well as a hero of another kind more than once in the years following the war—was determined to live up to the legacy of honor and courage she had inherited. Of course, life as a young wife and a video-game designer in a balmy California coastal town didn’t provide her with frequent opportunities for heroics. This was a good thing, not a reason to move to a perpetual cauldron of violence like the Balkans or Rwanda, or the set of the Jerry Springer Show. But living in peace and plenty, she could honor her father’s memory only through the small heroics of daily life: by doing her job well and paying her way in the world, by commitment to her marriage in good times and in bad, by giving all possible support to her friends, by having true compassion for life’s walking wounded, like Skeet, while living with honesty and truthfulness and enough self-respect to avoid becoming one of them. These small heroics, never acknowledged with awards and stirring marches, are the fuel and the lubrication that keep the machine of civilization humming, and in a world rife with temptations to be self-indulgent, self-centered, and

self-satisfied, there are surprisingly more small heroes than might be expected. When you stood in the shadow of great heroics, however, as Manic did, then merely living a decent life—lifting others by your example and by your acts of kindness—might make you feel inadequate; and maybe tears, even in moments of extreme tribulation, might seem to be a betrayal of your father’s legacy.

So Dusty knotted the black tie with formal, solemn silence.

When Martie was securely tied, she turned onto her side, closed eyes still damming a lake of tears, and as she turned, Valet padded to the bed, craned his neck, and licked her face.

“Lasagna or pure doggy love,” Manic said, “doesn’t matter to me. I know my baby boy loves me.”

“So does your big boy,” Dusty said.

At last she turned her head to look at him. “That’s what kept mc sane today. I need what we’ve got.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and held her bound hands.

After a while her eyes fell shut under a weight of weariness and patent medicine.

Dusty glanced at the nightstand clock, which reminded him about the issue of missing time. “Dr. Yen Lo.”

Without opening her eyes, Manic said thickly, “Who?”

“Dr. Yen Lo. You’ve never heard of him?”

“No.”

“Clear cascades.”

“Huh?”

“Into the waves scatter.”

Manic opened her eyes. They were dreamy, gradually darkening with clouds of sleep. “Either you’re making no sense, or this stuff is kicking in.”

“Pretty,” she mumbled, and she closed her eyes again.

Valet had settled on the floor near the bed instead of returning to his sheepskin pillow. He wasn’t dozing. From time to time he raised his head to look up at his sleeping mistress or to survey the shadows in farther corners of the room. He lifted his pendant ears as much as they would lift, as if listening to faint but suspicious sounds. His damp black nostrils flared and quivered as he tried to identify the plaited odors on the air, and he growled softly. Gentle Valet seemed to be trying to remake himself into a guard dog, though he remained puzzled as to what, exactly, he was guarding against.

Watching Mat-tie sleep, her skin still ashen and her lips as unnaturally dark as a fresh purple bruise, Dusty became strangely convinced that his wife’s descent into long-term mental instability wasn’t the greatest threat, as he had thought. Instinctively, he sensed that death stalked her, not madness, and that she was already half in the grave.

He was, in fact, overcome by a preternatural sense that the instrument of her death was here in the bedroom this very minute, and with prickles of superstition stippling the nape of his neck, he rose slowly from the edge of the bed and looked up with dread, half expecting to see an apparition floating near the ceiling: something like a swirl of black robes, a hooded form, a grinning skeletal face.

Although nothing but smoothly troweled plaster hung overhead, Valet let out another low, protracted growl. He had gotten to his feet beside the bed.

Manic slept undisturbed, but Dusty lowered his attention from the ceiling to the retriever.

Valet’s nostrils flared as he drew a deep questing breath, and as if thus inflated, his golden hackles rose, bristled. Black lips skinned back, baring formidable teeth. The retriever seemed to see the deadly presence that Dusty could only sense.

“Valet?”

Even in spite of the dog’s thick winter coat, Dusty could see the muscles tighten in his shoulders and thighs. Valet assumed an aggressive stance totally out of character for him.

“What’s wrong, fella? It’s only me. Just me.”

The low growl faded. The dog was silent but tense, alert.

Dusty took a step toward him.

The growl again.

“Just me,” Dusty repeated.

The dog seemed unconvinced.

34

When at last the doctor was finished with her, Susan Jagger lay on her back, thighs pressed together demurely, as if in denial of how widely they had been spread. Her arms were crossed modestly over her breasts.

She was still crying, but not silently as before. For his own pleasure, Ahriman had allowed her some vocalization of her anguish and shame.

Buttoning his shirt, he closed his eyes to hear broken bird sounds. Her feather-soft sobs: lonely pigeons in rafters, misery of windblown gulls.

When he first moved her to the bed, he had used the techniques of hypnotic-regression therapy to return her to the age of twelve, to a time when she was untouched, innocent, a rosebud without thorns. Her voice acquired a tender tone, higher pitched; her phrasing was that of a precocious child. Her brow had actually become smoother, her mouth softer, as if time had indeed run backward. Her eyes did not become a brighter green, but they grew clearer, as though sixteen years of hard experience had been filtered from them.

Then, behind the mask of her father, he had deflowered her. She was at first allowed to resist feebly, then more actively, initially frightened and confused in her rediscovered sexual innocence. Bitter resistance was soon sweetened with tremulous hunger. At the doctor's suggestion, Susan was seized by quickening animal need; she rocked her hips and rose to him.

Throughout what followed, Ahriman shaped her psychological state with murmured suggestions, and always, always, her thrilling girlish cries of pleasure were tempered by fear, shame, sorrow. To him, her tears were a more essential lubricant than the erotic oils that her body secreted to facilitate his entry. Even in ecstasy, tears.

Now, as he finished dressing, Ahriman studied her flawless face.

Moonlight on water, eyes brimming ponds of spring rain—dark fish in the mind.

The doctor had no illusions about his gifts. Although by all measures of intelligence, he was a high-range genius, he nevertheless was a player, not a creator. He had a talent for games, for using toys in new and imaginative ways, but he was no artist.

Likewise, although he had been interested in the sciences since childhood, he didn’t possess the temperament to be a scientist: the patience, the acceptance of repeated failures in a quest for ultimate success, the preference for knowledge over sensation. The respect given to most scientists was a prize the young Ahriman coveted, and the authority and quiet superiority with which they often conducted themselves—high priests in this culture that worshiped change and progress—were attitudes that came naturally to Ahriman. The gray, joyless atmosphere of laboratories had no appeal for him, however, nor did the tedium of serious research.

Some psychologists strove to hold their field to this standard of proof. Ahriman pitied them. They operated under the illusion that their authority and their power were linked to the discovery of timeless truths, when in reality, truth was an annoying constraint on authority and power.

Psychology, in Ahriman’s view, was an appealing field because you needed only to compile a series of subjective observations, find the proper prism through which to view a set of statistics, and then you could leap over the hypothesis and the theory, declaring the discovery of a law of human behavior.

Science was tedium, work. To young Ahriman, psychology clearly was play, and people were the toys.

Having entered college at thirteen, he acquired his doctorate of psychology by his seventeenth birthday. Because a psychiatrist is even more widely admired and highly esteemed than a psychologist, and because the greater authority of the tide would facilitate the games that he wished to play, Ahriman added a medical degree and other necessary credentials to his résumé.

When he was a little boy, he was as filled with wonder at the sight of tears as other children were affected by rainbows, starry skies, and fireflies. Upon achieving puberty, he discovered that the mere sight of tears, more than hard-core pornography, enflamed his libido.

He himself had never cried.

Now fully dressed, the doctor stood at the foot of Susan’s bed and

studied her tear-stained face. Desolate pools, her eyes. Her spirit floated in them, almost drowned. The objective of his game was to finish the drowning. Not this night. But soon.

“Tell mc your age,” he said.

“Twelve,” she replied in the voice of a schoolgirl.

“Sixteen.”

He brought her all the way forward to the present, to the hour and minute on the bedside clock, and then he instructed her to get dressed.

Her nightclothes were scattered on the floor. She retrieved them with the slow, deliberate movements of anyone in a trance.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, as she drew the white cotton panties up her slender legs, Susan suddenly bent forward as though she’d taken a blow in the solar plexus, breath exploding from her. She inhaled with a shudder, and then spat in disgust and horror, saliva glistening like snail trails on her thighs, and spat again, as though she were desperate to rid herself of an intolerable taste. Spitting led to gagging, and between these wretched sounds were two words that she wrenched from herself at great cost—”Daddy, why, Daddy, why?”—because although she no longer believed that she was twelve years old, she remained convinced that her beloved father had brutally raped her.

To the doctor, this final unexpected spasm of grief and shame was lagniappe, a little dinner mint of suffering, a chocolate truffle after cognac. He stood before her, breathing deeply of the faint but astringent, briny fragrance arising from her cascade of tears.

When he placed a hand paternally upon her head, Susan flinched from his touch, and Daddy, why? deteriorated into a soft and wordless wail. This muffled ululation reminded him of the eerie puling of distant coyotes in a warm desert night even farther in the past than Minette Luckland impaled on the spear of Diana out there in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Although Susan Jagger’s soft quaverous cries of grief and shame were a tonic, and though the memories of the Pastore family that her tortured voice had resurrected were refreshing, Dr. Ahriman was not a young man now, as he’d been in his New Mexico days, and he needed to get at least a few hours of sound sleep. The day ahead

would require vigor and an especially clear mind, because Martine and Dustin Rhodes would become far bigger players in this complex game than they had been thus far. Consequently, he ordered Susan to overcome her emotions and finish getting dressed.

When she was in her panties and T-shirt once more, he said, “Get to your feet.”

She rose.

Her attention had shifted from him.

He followed her gaze to the ming tree in the bronze pot atop the Biedermeier pedestal.

“Horticulture,” he said approvingly, “is a therapeutic pastime for an agoraphobic. Ornamental plants allow you to remain in touch with the natural world beyond these walls. But when I’m talking to you, I expect your attention to remain on me.”

She looked at him again. She was no longer weeping. The last of her tears were drying on her face.

An oddness about her, subtle and indefinable, nagged at the doctor. The levelness of her stare. The way her lips were pressed together, mouth pinched at the corners. Here was a tension unrelated to her humiliation and shame.

“Spider mites,” he said.

He thought he saw worry crawling through her eyes.

“They’re hell on a ming tree, spider mites.”

Unmistakably, what spun across her face was a web of worry, but surely not about the health of her houseplants.

Sensing trouble, Ahriman made an effort to clear the postcoital haze from his mind and concentrate on Susan. “What are you worried about?”

“What am I worried about?” she asked.

He rephrased the question as a command: “Tell me what you’re worried about.”

When she hesitated, he repeated the command, and she said, “The video.”

35

Valet’s hackles smoothed. He stopped growling. He became his familiar, tail-wagging, affectionate self, insisted upon a cuddle, and then returned to his bed, where he dozed off as though he had never been bothered.

Bound hand and foot at her insistence, even more profoundly subdued by three sleeping pills, Martie was unnervingly still and silent. A few times, Dusty raised his head from the pillow and leaned close to her, worried until he heard her faint respiration.

Although he expected to lie awake all night, and therefore left his nightstand lamp aglow, eventually he slept.

A dream stirred his sleep, blending dread and absurdity into a strange narrative that was disturbing yet nonsensical.

eyes that he didn’t cry out or sit up in bed to orient himself. He lay very still, on his back, staring at the ceiling.

His heart didn’t flutter. It pounded. As far as he could tell, his heart was still his private domain, where nothing roosted except his own hopes, anxieties, loves, and prejudices.

Valet snored softly.

Beside Dusty, Martie enjoyed the deep slumber of a good woman—albeit goodness was in this case assisted by three doses of sleep-inducing antihistamines.

Ordinarily, he didn’t analyze his dreams.

Freud, however, had been convinced that fishy expressions of the subconscious could be seined from dreams to provide a banquet for a psychoanalyst. Dr. Derek Lampton, Dusty’s stepfather, fourth of Claudette’s four husbands, also cast his lines into that same sea and regularly reeled in strange, squishy hypotheses that he force-fed to his patients without regard for the possibility that they might be poisonous.

36

“The video,” Susan repeated, in response to Ahriman’s inquiry, and once more she looked away from him, toward the ming tree.

The doctor commanded her to look at him, and after a hesitation, she once more shifted her attention from the ming tree to his eyes.

He instructed her to descend the steps of her subconscious, until she returned to the mind chapel, from which he had previously allowed her to ascend a short distance in order to enhance their play session.

When she was once more in that deep redoubt, her eyes jiggled briefly. Her personality had been filtered from her and set aside, as a chef would strain the solids out of beef broth to make bouillon, and now her mind was a pellucid liquid, waiting to be flavored according to Ahriman’s recipe.

He said, “You will forget your father was here tonight. Memories of his face where you should have seen mine, memories of his voice when you should have heard mine, are now dust, and less than dust, all blown away. I am your doctor, not your father. Tell me who I am, Susan.”

Her whispery voice seemed to echo from a subterranean room:

“Dr. Ahriman.”

“As always, of course, you will have absolutely no accessible memory of what happened between us, absolutely no accessible memory of my presence here tonight.”

In spite of his best efforts, somewhere memory survived, perhaps in an unknowable realm below the subconscious. Otherwise, she would not suffer shame at all, because no recollection of these depravities or those of other nights would remain. Her lingering shame was, in the doctor’s view, proof of a sub-subconscious—a level even beneath the id—where experience left an indelible mark. This deepest of all memory was, Ahriman believed, virtually inaccessible and of no danger to him; he needed only to wipe clean the slates of her conscious and subconscious to be safe.

Some would have wondered if this sub-subconscious might be the soul. The doctor was not one of them.

“If nevertheless you have any reason to feel that you have been sexually assaulted, any soreness or other clue, you will suspect no one other than your estranged husband, Eric. Tell me now whether or not you fully understand what I’ve just said.”

A spasm of REM accompanied her reply, as if the specified memories were being shaken out of her through her oscillating eyes: “I understand.”

“But you are strictly forbidden from confronting Eric with your suspicions."

“Forbidden. I understand.”

“Good.”

“Please lead me to the kitchen,” he requested, yawning around his words.

In the kitchen, as thirsty as any player would be after a long and demanding game, Ahriman said, “Tell me what beer you have?”

“Tsingtao.”

“Open one for me.”

While in this apartment, the doctor took care to touch as seldom as possible those surfaces on which fingerprints could be left.

Other options included arranging to have Susan murdered by her estranged husband or even by her best friend. If Eric snuffed her, a homicide investigation would ensue—even if he phoned the cops from the scene, confessed, blew his own brains out, and fell dead beside his wife, with all the forensic evidence supporting the conclusion that an ugly domestic altercation was to blame. Then the Scientific Investigation Division would move in, with their pocket protectors and bad haircuts, seeking fingerprints with powders, iodines, silver nitrate solutions, ninhydrin solutions, cyanoacrylate

His well-placed friends could ensure that he was not easily brought to trial. Evidence would disappear or be altered. Police detectives and prosecutors in the district attorney’s office would repeatedly screw up, and those obstructionists who tried to conduct a credible investigation would have their lives complicated and even ruined by all manner of troubles and tragedies that would appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with Dr. Ahriman.

His friends would not be able to prevent him from falling under suspicion, however, or be able to protect him from sensationalistic speculations in the media. He would become a celebrity of sorts. That was not acceptable. Fame would cramp his style.

When he accepted the bottle of Tsingtao from Susan, he thanked her, and she said, “You’re welcome.”

Regardless of the circumstances, the doctor believed that good manners should be observed. Civilization is the greatest game of all, a wonderfully elaborate communal tournament in which one must play well in order to have the license to pursue secret pleasures; mastering its rules—manners, etiquette—is essential to successful gamesmanship.

Politely, Susan followed him to the door, where he paused to communicate his final instructions for the night. “Assure me that you’re listening, Susan.”

“I’m listening.”

“Be calm.”

“I’m calm.”

“Be obedient.”

“Yes.”

“The winter storm—”

“The storm is you,” she replied.

“—hid in the bamboo grove—”

“The grove is me.”

“—and quieted away.”

“In the quiet, I will learn what is wanted,” Susan said.

return to bed, lie down, switch off the lamp, and close your eyes. Then, in your mind, you will leave the chapel where you are now. When you close the chapel door behind you, all recollection of what has happened from the moment you picked up the telephone and heard my voice until you wake in bed will have been erased—every sound, every image, every detail, every nuance will vanish from your memory, never to be recovered. Then, counting to ten, you will ascend the stairs, and when you reach ten, you will regain full consciousness. When you open your eyes, you will believe you have awakened from a refreshing sleep. If you understand all that I’ve said, please tell me so.”

“I understand.”

“Good night, Susan.”

“Good night,” she said, opening the door for him.

He stepped out onto the landing and whispered, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

She softly closed the door.

Like an invading armada that meant to steal all memory of the world from those sleeping in their cozy homes, galleons of heavy fog sailed in from the sea, plundering all color first, then detail, depth, and shape.

From the other side of the door came the sound of the security chain sliding into the latch-plate slot.

The first dead bolt snapped shut, followed a moment later by the second.

Smiling, nodding with satisfaction, the doctor drank a little beer and stared at the steps in front of him, waiting. Glistening dewdrops, cold on the gray rubber treads: tears on a dead face.

Now she would be padding barefoot back to bed.

Without need of the handrail, as nimble as a boy, Dr. Ahriman went down the steep stairs, turning up the collar of his coat as he descended.

The bricks on the front patio were wet and as dark as blood. As far as he could discern in the fog, the boardwalk beyond the patio appeared to be deserted.

The gate in the white picket fence squeaked. In this earthbound

cloud bank, the sound was muffled, too slight even to prick the ears of a cat on guard for mice.

Departing, the doctor averted his face from the house. He had been equally discreet upon arrival.

No lights had shone at the windows earlier. None were visible now. The retirees renting the lower two floors were no doubt snug under their blankets, as oblivious as their parakeets dozing in covered cages.

Nevertheless, Ahriman took sensible precautions. He was the lord of memory, but not everyone was susceptible to his mind-clouding power.

Its voice muted by the dense mist, the lazy surf crumbling to shore was less a sound than a vibration, less heard than felt as a tingle in the chilly air.

Palm trees hung limp. Condensation dripped from the points of every blade of every frond, like clear venom from the tongues of serpents.

He paused to look up at the fog-veiled crowns of the palms, suddenly uneasy for reasons he could not identify. After a moment, puzzled, he took another swallow of beer and continued along the boardwalk.

His Mercedes was two blocks away. He encountered no one en route.

Parked under a huge, dripping Indian laurel, the black sedan plinked, tinked, and tatted like an out-of-tune xylophone.

In the car, as he was about to start the engine, Ahriman paused again, still uneasy, brought closer to the source of his uneasiness by the tuneless music of water droplets snapping steel. Finishing the beer, he stared out at the massive overhanging canopy of the laurel, as if revelation awaited him in the complex patterns of those branches.

When revelation didn’t come, he started the car and drove west on Balboa Boulevard, toward the head of the peninsula.

At three o’clock in the morning, traffic was light. He saw only three moving vehicles in the first two miles, their headlights ringed by fuzzy aureoles in the fog. One was a police car, heading down the peninsula, in no hurry.

Across the bridge to Pacific Coast Highway, glancing at the westernmost channel of the huge harbor to his right, where yachts loomed like ghost ships at docks and moorings in the mist, and then south along the coast, all the way into Corona Del Mar, he puzzled over the cause of his uneasiness, until he came to a stop at a red traffic light and found his attention drawn to a large California pepper tree, lacy and elegant, rising out of low cascades of red bougainvillea. He thought of the potted ming tree with the sprays of ivy at its base.

The traffic light changed to green.

So green, her eyes riveted on the ming tree.

The doctor’s mind raced, but he kept his foot hard on the brake pedal.

Only when the light turned yellow did he finally drive through the deserted intersection. He pulled to the curb in the next block, stopped, but didn’t switch off the engine.

An expert on the nature of memory, he now applied his knowledge to a meticulous search of his own recollections of events in Susan Jagger’s bedroom.

Tense, listening for movement, she wondered if she had spoken both numbers or whether her ten had been a reply.

A minute passed, another, with no sound but her low breathing, and then, when she held her breath, no sound at all. She was alone.

Finally she sat up in bed and switched on the lamp.

She raised her hands to her face and smelled them. She sniffed her right forearm, as well, and then her left.

His scent. Unmistakable. Partly sweat, partly the lingering fragrance of his preferred soap. Perhaps he used a scented hand lotion, as well.

If she could trust her memory, this was not how Eric smelled. Yet she remained convinced that he, and no other, was her too-real incubus.

Even without the residual scent, she would have known that he

had paid her a visit while she slept. A soreness here, a tenderness there. The faint ammonia odor of his semen.

When she threw back the covers and got out of bed, she felt his viscid essence continuing to seep from her, and she shuddered.

At the Biedermeier pedestal, she parted the concealing runners of ivy to reveal the camcorder under the ming tree. At most, the cassette could contain a few remaining feet of unused tape, but the camera was still recording.

Her curiosity and eagerness for justice were suddenly outweighed by her disgust. She put the camcorder on the nightstand and hurried into the bathroom.

Often, upon awakening to the discovery that she had been used, Susan’s disgust settled into nausea, and she purged herself, as if by emptying her stomach she could turn back the clock to just prior to dinner and, therefore, to a time hours before she had been violated. Now, however, the nausea passed when she reached the bathroom.

She wanted to take a long and extremely hot shower with lots of fragrant soap and shampoo, scrubbing herself vigorously with a loofah sponge. She was tempted, in fact, to shower first and watch the video later, because she felt dirtier than ever before, intolerably filthy, as though she were smeared with a vile grime she couldn’t see, acrawl with hordes of microscopic parasites.

The videotape first. The truth. Then the cleansing.

Although she was able to delay her shower, repulsion drove her to strip out of her clothes and wash her privates. She scrubbed her face, too, and then her hands, and she gargled with a mint-flavored mouthwash.

She tossed the T-shirt into the clothes hamper. The panties, with his odious ooze, she placed atop the closed lid of the hamper, because she didn’t intend to launder them.

If she had captured the intruder on videotape, she probably had all the evidence she needed to file rape charges. Preserving a semen sample for DNA testing was nonetheless wise.

Her condition and demeanor on the tape would no doubt convince the authorities that she had been drugged—not a willing participant, but a victim. Yet when she called the police, she would ask them to take a blood sample from her as soon as possible, while traces of the drug remained in her system.

Once she knew the camcorder had worked, that the image was good, and that she had irrefutable proof against Eric, she would be tempted to phone him before ringing the cops. Not to accuse him. To ask why. Why this viciousness? Why this secretive scheming? Why would he jeopardize her life and sanity with some devil’s brew of narcotics? Why such hatred?

She wouldn’t make that call, however, because alerting him might be dangerous. It was forbidden.

Forbidden. What an odd thought.

In the bedroom again, she dressed in a clean T-shirt and fresh panties. The thought of being naked while watching the hateful video was intolerable.

She sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the camera from the nightstand. She rewound the cassette.

The preview window on the camcorder provided a three-inch-square image. She saw herself returning to the bed after starting the tape, which she’d done a few minutes past midnight.

The single bedside lamp provided adequate—though not ideal— light for videotaping. Consequently, the clarity of the image on the small preview window was not good.

She saw herself as she had been at midnight, returning to the bed after resetting the tape in the camcorder, saw herself get into bed and switch off the TV.

Susan frowned. She had no recollection of having received a phone call.

At best the videotape could provide her with only one side of the

From the moment she had taken the call, there had been subtle changes in her face and body language that she perceived but could not easily define. Subtle as those changes were, however, as she watched herself leaving this bedroom, she seemed to be watching a stranger.

She waited half a minute, and then fast-forwarded through the tape until she saw movement.

Astonishment left Susan breathless. Stiller than stone, colder, too, she was suddenly deaf to the audio portion of the tape, deaf to her own heartbeat, as well. She sat like a marble maiden sculpted for the focal point of a boxwood-hedge parterre in a formal garden, and here misplaced.

After a moment, astonishment spawned disbelief, and she inhaled sharply. She pressed the pause button on the remote control.

In the frozen image, she sat on the edge of the bed, rather as she was sitting now. Ahriman stood over her.

She pressed rewind, reversing herself and the doctor out of the room. Then she touched play and watched the shadows in the hallway resolve into people once more, half convinced that this time Eric would follow her across the threshold. Because Dr. Ahriman—his being here was impossible. He was ethical. Widely admired. So professional. Compassionate. Concerned. Simply impossible: here, like this. She would have been no more disbelieving if she had seen her own father on the tape, and less shocked if what followed her into the room had been a demonic incubus with horns sprouting from its forehead, eyes as yellow and radiant as those of a cat. Tall, self-assured, and hornless, here came Ahriman once more, puncturing disbelief.

were ever so slightly misaligned, as if they were being distorted by some inner pressure that had only just begun to build. Studying his face, Susan at last recognized the attitude: smugness.

This wasn’t the prim-mouth, pinched-eye, cocked-head smugness of a moralizing preacher or of a temperance-sotted prude announcing his disdain for all those who drank, who smoked, and who ate a high-cholesterol diet. Here, instead, was the smirking superiority of an adolescent. Once he passed through the bedroom doorway, Ahriman had the lazy posture, the loose-limbed movements, and the cockiness of a schoolboy who believed that all adults were morons—and a shiny, hot-eyed stare of squirmy pubescent need.

This criminal and the psychiatrist whose office she attended twice each week were physically identical. The difference between them was entirely one of attitude. And yet the difference was so alarming that her heart rapped hard and fast.

Her disbelief gave way to anger and to a sense of betrayal so intense that she spat out a series of expletives, in a bitter voice unlike her own, as if she suffered from Tourette’s syndrome.

On the tape, the doctor moved out of frame to the armchair.

Watching this record of her humiliation was almost more than Susan could bear, but she did not press stop, because watching fed her anger, and that was good right now. Anger gave her strength, empowered her after sixteen months of feeling powerless.

She fast-forwarded until she and the doctor returned to the frame. They were naked now.

Grim-faced, using the fast-forward button several times, she watched a series of depravities interspersed with periods of ordinary sex that seemed, by comparison, as innocent as teenagers necking.

How he could effect this control of her, how he could erase such shocking events from her mind—these mysteries seemed as deep as the origins of the universe and the meaning of life. She was overcome by a feeling of unreality, as though nothing in the world was what it appeared to be, all of it just an elaborate stage setting and the people merely players.

This trash on the TV was real, however, as real as the stains in the underwear that she had left on the hamper lid in the bathroom.

Leaving the tape running, she turned away from the television

and went to the phone. She keyed in two digits—9, 1—but not the second 1.

If she called the police, she would have to open the door to let them into the apartment. They might want her to go with them somewhere, to make a full statement, or to a hospital emergency room to be examined for indications of rape that later would be useful evidence in court.

Although strong with anger, she was not nearly strong enough to overcome her agoraphobia. The mere thought of going outside was enough to bring the familiar panic back into her heart.

The prospect of going outside with strangers, however, was too distressing to contemplate, even if those strangers were policemen. She needed the support of a friend, someone she trusted with her life, because going outside felt as close to death as anything but dying itself.

She called Martie and got the answering machine. She knew their phone didn’t ring through to their bedroom at night, but one of them might be awakened by the ringing down the hall, might go to Martie’s office out of curiosity, to see who was phoning at this ungodly hour.

After the beep, Susan said, “Martie, it’s me. Martie, are you there?” She paused. “Listen, if you’re there, for God’s sake, pickup.” Nothing. “It isn’t Eric, Martie. It’s Ahriman. It’s Ahriman. I’ve got the bastard on videotape. The bastard—after the good deal he got on his house. Martie, please, please, call me. I need help.”

Suddenly sick to her stomach again, she hung up.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Susan clenched her teeth and put one cold hand on the nape of her neck, the other on her abdomen. The spasm of nausea passed.

She glanced at the television—and looked at once away.

She pulled open the top drawer in her nightstand and withdrew the pistol that she kept for protection.

As far as she knew, Ahriman never visited her twice in one night. As far as she knew.

She started to laugh, choked on the laugh, sought refuge in the wine, realized none was left, and put down the empty glass in favor of the handgun. “Martie, please. Call, call.”

The telephone rang.

She set the gun aside and snatched up the phone.

“Yeah,” she said.

Before she could say more, a man said, “Ben Marco.”

“I’m listening.”

38

Having rebuilt the dream in his memory, Dusty walked through it as though touring a museum, leisurely contemplating each Gothic image. Heron at the window, heron in the room. Silent strikes of lambent lightning in a thunderless, rainless storm. Brass tree with glucose fruit. Martie meditating.

Studying the nightmare, Dusty was increasingly convinced that a monstrous truth was concealed in it, like a scorpion waiting in the smallest container in a stack of Chinese boxes. This particular stack contained a lot of boxes, however, many of them tricky to open, and the truth remained hidden, poised to sting.

Eventually, frustrated, he got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Martie was sleeping so soundly, was cuffed and hobbled so securely by Dusty’s neckties, that she was unlikely either to wake up or to leave the room while he was away from her side.

A few minutes later, as he was washing his hands at the bathroom sink, Dusty was visited by a revelation. It was not a sudden insight into the meaning of the dream, but an answer to a question over which he’d been puzzling earlier, before Martie had awakened and demanded to be tied hand and foot.

Skeet’s haiku.

The pine needles were missions, Skeet had said.

Trying to make sense of this, Dusty had made a mental list of synonyms for mission, but nothing he’d come up with had furthered his understanding. Task. Work. Chore. Job. Calling. Vocation. Career Church.

Now, as he held his hands under the hot water, rinsing the soap from them, another series of words poured into his mind. Errand. Charge. Assignment. Instructions.

Dusty stood at this sink almost as Skeet had stood with his hands under the near-scalding water in the bathroom at New Life, brooding about the word instructions.

The fine hairs on the back of his neck suddenly felt as stiff as tightly stretched piano wires, and a reverberant chill like a silent glissando shivered down the keys of his spine.

The name Dr. Yen Lo, when spoken to Skeet, had elicited a formal reply: I’m listening. Thereafter, he’d answered questions only with questions.

Skeet had answered questions only with questions of his own, as if seeking to be told what he should think or do, but he had responded to statements as though they were commands, and to actual commands as though they came directly from the lips of God. When, in frustration, Dusty had said, Ab, give me a break and go to sleep, his brother had fallen instantly unconscious.

Skeet had referred to the haiku as “the rules,” and Dusty later had thought of the poem as a mechanism of some kind, a simple device with a powerful effect, the verbal equivalent of a nail gun, though he had not been quite sure what he meant by that.

Now, as he continued to explore the ramifications of the word instructions, he realized that the haiku might better be defined not as a mechanism, not as a device, but as a computer operating system, the software that allows the instructions to be received, understood, and followed.

As Dusty shut off the water, he thought he heard the faint ringing of a phone.

Dripping hands raised as though he were a surgeon fresh from a scrub sink, he stepped out of the bathroom, into the bedroom, and listened. The house was silent.

If a call had come in, it would have been picked up after the second ring by the answering machine in Martie’s office.

Most likely, he had imagined the ringing. No one ever called them at this hour. Nevertheless, he ought to check it out before he returned to bed.

In the bathroom once more, drying his hands on a towel, he turned the word programmed over and over in his mind, considering all the ramifications of it.

Staring into the mirror, Dusty saw not his reflection but a replay of the strange events in Skeet’s room at New Life Clinic.

Then his memory wound time backward to the previous morning, to the roof of the Sorensons’ house.

Skeet claimed to have seen the Other Side. An angel of death had shown him what waited beyond this world, and the kid had liked what he’d seen. Then the angel had instructed him to jump. Skeet’s very word: Instructed.

That icy glissando again, along Dusty’s spine. Another of the Chinese boxes had been opened, though yet another box lay inside it. Each box smaller than the last. Perhaps not many layers of the puzzle were left to be resolved. He could almost hear the scorpion scuttle: the sound of a nasty truth waiting to sting when the last lid was lifted.

39

The soft shush of surf, conspiratorial fog cover his return.

Dew on the gray steps. Snail on the second wet tread. Crushed hard underfoot.

Ascending, the doctor whispered into his cell phone: “The winter storm—”

Susan Jagger said, “The storm is you.”

“—hid in the bamboo grove—”

“The grove is me.”

“—and quieted away.”

“In the quiet, I will learn what is wanted.”

Arriving at the landing outside her door, he said, “Let me in.”

“Yes.”

“Quickly,” he said, and then terminated the call and pocketed the phone.

He glanced worriedly toward the deserted boardwalk.

Hanging in the fog, cascades of dead-still palm fronds, like cold dark fireworks.

With a rattle and scrape, the bracing chair was removed from under the doorknob in the kitchen. The first dead bolt. The second. The clatter of the security chain being disengaged.

When Susan greeted him demurely, without a word but with an obedient half bow, as though she were a geisha, Ahriman stepped

inside. He waited while she closed the door again and engaged one of the locks, and then he instructed her to lead him to her bedroom.

Earlier, every time she had looked away from him, she had turned her eyes toward the potted ming tree. And each time, before her gaze was drawn to that bit of greenery, Ahriman had first made reference either to the videotape he’d shot of her or to the tape he intended to shoot on his next visit. When she appeared to be tense and racked by worry, he directed her to reveal the source of her anxiety, and when she said simply, The video, he made the obvious assumption. Obvious and perhaps wrong. His suspicion had been aroused, almost too late, by the fact that she always looked toward the ming tree: not at the floor, as might be expected when bowed by shame, and not at the bed where so much of her humiliation had occurred, but always at the ming tree.

Now, following her into the bedroom, he said, “I want to see what’s in that pot, under the ivy.”

Dutifully, she led him toward the Biedermeier pedestal, but the doctor stopped short when he saw what was playing on the TV.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

He would have been damned, in fact, if he had not recognized the cause of his suspicion, if he had finally driven home and gone to bed without returning here.

“Come to me,” he said.

As Susan approached, the doctor made fists of his hands. He wanted to punch her pretty face.

Girls. They were all alike.

As a boy, he’d seen no use for them, had wanted nothing to do with them. Girls had made him sick with all their coy manipulations. The best thing about them was that he could make them cry without much effort—all those beautiful, salty tears—but then they always ran to their mothers or fathers to tattle. He was good at defending himself against their hysterical accusations; adults tended to find him charming and convincing. He had soon realized, however, that he

must learn discretion and not let his thirst for tears control him the way that a taste for cocaine controlled more than a few people in the Hollywood crowd with which his father worked.

Eventually, victimized by his hormones, he discovered that he needed girls for more than their tears. He learned, too, how easily a handsome lad like him could play games that put girls’ hearts in his hands, allowing him to wring more tears from them through calculated romance and betrayal than, as a younger boy, he had ever gotten from them by pinching, poking, boxing ears, and pushing them into mud puddles.

When Susan stopped before him, the doctor raised one fist.

She appeared free of fear. Her personality was now so deeply repressed that she was unable to exhibit emotion until instructed to do so.

“I should beat your face in.”

he was jaded; but as a boy, he still had a delightfully raw sense of wonder, was still thrilled by every nuance of the imaginative abuse of power.

“I should just beat your stupid face so hard you’ll be ugly forever.”

Deep under his spell, Susan remained serene. A spasm of REM seized her for a few seconds, but it was unrelated to his threat.

Discretion and restraint were now essential. Ahriman dared not strike her. Her death, if properly staged, was unlikely to generate a homicide investigation. Bruised and battered, however, she would not be a credible suicide.

“I don’t like you anymore, Susie. I don’t like you at all.”

She was silent, because she hadn’t been instructed to reply.

“I assume that you haven’t yet called the police. Tell me if that’s correct.”

“That’s correct.”

“Have you spoken to anyone about that videotape on the TV?”

“Have I?”

Cautioning himself that her response was not defiant, that this was only how she was programmed to reply to questions when she was far down in the mind chapel, the doctor lowered his fist and slowly unclenched it. “Tell me, yes or no, if you have spoken to anyone about that videotape on the TV”

Relieved, he took her by the arm and led her to the bed. “Sit down, girl.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, knees pressed together, hands folded in her lap.

For a few minutes the doctor quizzed her, phrasing his questions as statements and commands, until he understood why she had set the trap with the camcorder. She had been after evidence against Eric, not against her psychiatrist.

Although her memory was erased after each of their assignations, Susan was certain to suspect that she had been sexually used, and if the doctor did not choose to sponge up and take with him every drop of sweat and passion that he produced, Susan was also certain to find evidence to support her suspicion. Ahriman chose not to be obsessive about postcoital cleanup, because that would diminish the thrill of power and compromise the pleasing illusion that his awesome con-

trol was absolute. There would be little fun in either a food fight or bloody murder if, afterward, one were required to wash the walls and mop the floor.

He was an adventurer, after all, not a housekeeper.

He had numerous techniques with which to mitigate or misdirect Susan’s suspicion. For one thing, he could have suggested to her that upon waking she would simply ignore all signs of physical abuse, be unaware of even the most obvious evidence of intercourse.

In a more playful mood, the doctor could have implanted in her the conviction that she was being visited by a yellow-eyed spawn of the brimstone pit determined to breed with her and bring forth the Antichrist. By seeding dreamlike memories of an evil night-lover with a coarse leathery body, sulfurous breath, and a forked black tongue, he literally could have made her life a living Hell.

From his many other options, the doctor had chosen to direct Susan’s suspicion toward her estranged husband. This current game, for which he’d mentally composed a particularly bloody and intricate scenario, was meant to end in a storm of violence that would make nationwide news. The precise details of the final inning were constantly being revised in the doctor’s mind, although Eric might be either a significant perpetrator or a victim.

By encouraging Susan to focus her suspicion on Eric and then forbidding her to confront him, Ahriman had crafted a clockspring of psychological tension. Week by week, the spring wound tighter, until Susan could barely contain the tremendous emotional energy coiled in it. Consequently, desperate to relieve that tension, she had sought proof of her estranged husband’s guilt, sufficient evidence to make it possible for her to go directly to the police and avoid the forbidden confrontation with Eric himself.

Ordinarily, this situation would not have arisen, because the doctor never toyed with anyone as long as he had played with Susan Jagger. He had begun to drug and condition her a year and a half ago, for God’s sake, and she had been his patient for sixteen months. Usually he grew bored in six months, sometimes in as few as two or three. Then either he cured the patient, stripping away the phobia or the obsession that he’d implanted in the first place, thereby adding to his singular reputation as a therapist—or he devised a death colorful enough to be satisfying to a gamesman of his experience. Bewitched by Susan’s exceptional beauty, he had dallied far too long, allowing her stress to build, until she was driven to this act of entrapment.

Girls. They were always trouble, sooner or later.

Rising from the edge of the bed, Ahriman ordered Susan to stand, as well, and she obeyed.

“You’ve really messed up my game,” he said, impatient with her now. “I’ll have to figure out a whole new ending.”

“Susan, tell me where you keep the nearest pen and notepaper.”

“Beside the bed.”

“Get them, please.”

When he followed her around the bed, he saw the pistol on the nightstand.

She appeared to have no interest in the gun. She opened the nightstand drawer and withdrew a ballpoint pen and a lined notepad the size of a stenographer’s tablet. At the top of each page in the pad was her photograph, plus the logo and phone numbers of the real-

estate company for which she had worked before agoraphobia had ended her career.

“Put the gun away, please,” he directed, with no fear whatsoever that she would use the weapon on him.

She placed the pistol in the nightstand and closed the drawer. Turning to Ahriman, she held out the pen and the notepad.

He said, “Bring them with you.”

“Where?”

“Follow me.”

The doctor led her to the dining room. There, he instructed her to switch on the chandelier and sit at the table.

Still staring into the bathroom mirror, reviewing yet again his rooftop conversation with Skeet, trying to marshal details that would lend credibility to his incredible theory that his brother had been programmed, Dusty realized that he was finished with sleep for the night. Mosquito swarms of questions buzzed through his mind, their bites more ruinous of sleep than pots of black coffee boiled to the thickness of molasses.

Who would have programmed Skeet? When? How? Where? For what possible purpose? And why Skeet, of all people: self-admitted feeb, druggie, sweet loser that he was?

The whole thing smelled-smacked-reeked of paranoia. Perhaps this crazy-ass theory would make sense in the world of paranormal talk radio, in which Fig Newton lived while painting houses—and in fact during most of his waking hours—in that unreal but widely cherished America where scheming extraterrestrials were busily crossbreeding with hapless human females, where transdimensional beings were reputed to be responsible for both global warming and outrageous credit-card interest rates, where the President of the United States had been secretly replaced by a look-alike android assembled in Bill Gates’s basement, where Elvis was alive and living on an elaborate space station built and operated by Walt Disney, whose brain had been transplanted into a host body that we now

know as the rap star and movie titan, Will Smith. But the idea of a programmed Skeet didn’t make sense here, not here in the real world, where Elvis was thoroughly dead, where Disney was dead, too, and where the closest things to horny extraterrestrials were the aging cast of Star Trek on Viagra.

Dusty would have laughed off his harebrained theory. . . assuming that Skeet had not said he’d been instructed to take a header from the Sorensons’ roof, assuming the kid hadn’t dropped into that eerie trance at New Life Clinic, assuming all of them—Skeet, Martie, and Dusty himself—had not been missing bits of time from their day, and assuming their lives hadn’t abruptly fallen apart with such uncanny simultaneity and with the cataclysmic weirdness of a two-part X Files episode. If laughs were dollars, if chuckles were quarters, and if smiles were pennies, Dusty would at the moment be flat broke.

Certain that insomnia would be his companion until dawn, he decided to shave and shower while Martie was still deep in a drugged sleep. When she woke, if she was once more gripped by that grotesque fear of herself, she wouldn’t want him to let her out of his sight, for fear she would somehow wrench loose of her restraints and creep up on him with homicidal intent.

A few minutes later, smooth-cheeked, Dusty switched off his electric razor—and heard muffled cries of distress coming from the bedroom.

When he reached Martie’s side, he found her whimpering in her sleep, dreaming again. She strained at her bonds and murmured, “No, no, no, no.”

Stirred from dog fantasies no doubt full of tennis balls and bowls of kibble, Valet raised his head to crack a wide and toothy yawn worthy of a crocodile, but he did not growl.

Martie rolled her head back and forth on her pillow, grimacing and softly groaning, like a feverish malaria patient wandering the land of delirium.

Dusty blotted her damp brow with a few Kleenex, smoothed her hair away from her face, and held her stylishly shackled hands until she quieted.

In which nightmare was she snared? The one that had plagued her on several other occasions over the past half year, involving the

hulking figure composed of dead leaves? Or the new spook show from which she awakened earlier, choking and gagging and scrubbing at her mouth with both hands?

As Martie settled into silent sleep once more, Dusty wondered if her recurring dream of the Leaf Man might be as meaningful as his encounter with the lightning-chased heron had seemed to him.

Though at first consideration, their dreams appeared to be utterly different from each other, analysis revealed disturbing similarities.

Increasingly mystified rather than enlightened, Dusty pondered the points of intersection, nightmare to nightmare.

He wondered if Skeet had been dreaming recently.

“There’s something to it,” Dusty muttered.

Valet blew air again.

Restlessly circling the room, Ahriman composed a wonderfully poignant farewell to life, which Susan took down in her graceful handwriting. He knew exactly what to put in and what to leave out in order to convince even the most skeptical police detective that the note was authentic.

Handwriting analysis would, of course, leave little or no room for doubt, but the doctor was meticulous.

He was distracted by Susan, as well. Perhaps because he would never possess her again, she seemed more beautiful to him than at any previous moment of their relationship.

Some truth in his lousy haiku: She was broken, this once-fine toy. Although she still looked great, she was badly damaged, and he couldn’t simply fix her with a little glue, as he might have repaired a plastic figurine from a classic Marx playset like Roy Rogers Rodeo Ranch or Tom Corbett Space Academy.

Girls. They always let you down when you’re counting on them.

Filled with a strange mix of sentimental yearning and sullen resentment, Ahriman finished composing the suicide note. He stood over Susan to watch as she signed her name at the bottom.

Her long-fingered hands. The gracefully looping pen. Last words without tears.

Shit.

“Tell me where you usually store the camcorder.”

Her eyes jiggled. Then her gaze steadied. “In a box on the top shelf of that closet,” she said, pointing.

She had to bring a two-step folding stool from the kitchen to complete the task.

Next, he instructed her to use a hand towel from the bathroom to wipe down the nightstands, the headboard of the bed, and anything else he might have touched while in the bedroom. He monitored her to ensure that she did a thorough job.

Because he was careful to avoid touching most surfaces in the apartment, Ahriman had little concern that his prints would be found anywhere but in Susan’s two most private chambers. When she finished in the bedroom, he stood in the doorway of the bathroom for about ten minutes, watching as she polished tile, glass, brass, and porcelain.

towel that was folded and hung in precisely the same manner. The doctor valued neatness.

When he saw the folded white cotton panties on the hamper lid, he had almost instructed her to toss them in with the other laundry, but instinct had led him to question her about them. When he learned that they had been set aside to provide a DNA sample to the police, he was shocked.

He could have instructed her to wash the panties in the sink, but he decided that prudence required him to take them when he left, remove them from the apartment altogether.

The doctor wasn’t an expert on the latest forensic techniques of practical homicide investigation, but he was reasonably sure that latent fingerprints on human skin lasted only a few hours or less. They could be lifted with the use of lasers and other sophisticated equipment, but he knew simpler procedures might also be effective. Kromekote cards or unexposed Polaroid film, pressed firmly to the skin, will transfer the incriminating print; when the card or film is dusted with black powder, a mirror image of the latent print appears and must then be reversed through photography. Magnetic powder applied with a Magna Brush directly to the skin is acceptable in a pinch, and the iodine-silver transfer method is an alternative if a fuming gun and silver sheets are close at hand.

He didn’t expect Susan’s body to be found for five or six hours, perhaps much longer. By then, the early stages of decomposition would have eradicated all the latent prints on her skin.

Nevertheless, he had touched virtually every plane and curve of her body—and often. To be a winner at these games, one had to play with energetic enthusiasm but also with a detailed knowledge of the rules and with a talent for strategy.

He suggested that Susan draw a hot bath. Then step by step he walked her through the remaining minutes of her life.

While the tub was filling, she got a safety razor from one of the

She twisted open the razor and extracted the single-edge blade. She put the blade on the flat rim of the bathtub.

She undressed for the bath. Naked, she didn’t look broken, and Ahriman wished he could keep her.

Waiting for further instruction, Susan stood beside the bathtub, watching the water gush out of the faucet.

Studying her reflection in the mirror, Ahriman took pride in her tranquility. Intellectually, she was aware that she would soon be dead, but because of the excellent work he’d done with her, she lacked the capacity for genuine and spontaneous emotional response while in this state of total personality submersion.

The doctor regretted that the time inevitably came when each of his acquisitions must be discarded and allowed to go the way of all flesh.

The bath was ready. She turned off both faucets.

She added scented salts to the water.

The doctor was surprised, because he had not instructed her to spice the bath. Evidently, she always did so before stepping into the tub, and this act was essentially a conditioned reflex that required no volitional thinking. Interesting.

Writhing vines of steam, rising from the water, now bloomed with the faint fragrance of roses.

Sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, careful not to touch anything with his hands, Ahriman instructed Susan to enter the bath, to sit, and to bathe herself with special thoroughness. There was no longer any danger that a laser, Kromekote card, Magna Brush, or fuming gun could turn up incriminating fingerprints on her skin. He was counting on the action of her bath to flush out and disperse all of his semen, as well.

No doubt, in the bedroom and elsewhere in the apartment, he had left behind hairs and fibers from his clothing that could be gathered in a police-lab vacuum. Without good fingerprints, however, or other direct evidence that could put him on a list of suspects, they would not be able to trace these scraps of evidence back to him.

Besides, because he had taken such pains to present the police with a convincing tableau and a solid motivation for suicide, they were not likely to pursue even a cursory homicide investigation.

He would have liked to watch Susan bathe a while longer, for she was an enchanting sight; however, he was weary, sleepy. Furthermore, he wanted to leave the apartment well before dawn, when there was only a small chance of encountering witnesses.

“Susan, please pick up the razor blade.”

The doctor preferred flamboyant destruction. Easily bored, he saw no thrill in a poisoned cup of tea, in a simple hangman’s noose— or, in this case, in the severance of a radial artery or two. The real fun was in shotguns, large-caliber handguns, axes, chain saws, and explosives.

Her pistol had interested him. But a gunshot would wake the retirees downstairs, even if they had gone to bed martini-sotted, as usual.

Disappointed but determined not to surrender to his taste for the

theatrical, Ahriman told Susan how to grip the blade, precisely where to cut on her left wrist, and how hard to press. Before the mortal slice, she scored her flesh lightly, and then lightly again, producing the hesitation marks that the police were accustomed to seeing in more than half of such suicides. Then, with no expression on her face and with only pure green beauty in her eyes, she made a third cut, much deeper than the first two.

She dropped the blade. Lowered her arms into the water.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

The doctor waited with her for the end. He could have walked out, confident that in this obedient state, even unchaperoned, she would sit calmly in the tub until she died. Already in this game, however, fate had thrown him a couple of change-up pitches, and he was going to remain alert for another.

Yearning for greater drama, Ahriman considered bringing Susan out of the mind chapel and up a flight or two of stairs, nearer to full consciousness, where she could better appreciate her plight. Although he could control her at higher levels of awareness, there was a slim but real chance that an involuntary cry of terror or despair would escape her, just loud enough to wake pensioners and parakeets downstairs.

He waited.

She sat in silence, no more touched by emotion than the tub that contained her, and the doctor was, therefore, shocked to see a single tear track down her face.

When the drop had descended the length of her face, another—

larger than the first, enormous—welled from the same eye, and there could be no question that this was the genuine article.

This second tear was not followed by a third. The dry lips of Death had kissed away the excess moisture in her eyes.

When Susan’s mouth sagged open, as though with awe, the second—and last—tear trembled and fell from her delicate jaw into the bathwater, with the faintest detectable plink like a note struck from the highest octave on a piano keyboard rooms and rooms away.

He rather liked that one.

Leaving the lights on, of course, Ahriman picked up her soiled underwear from the hamper lid and stepped out of the bathroom, into the bedroom, where he retrieved the videotape.

In the living room, he paused to enjoy the subtle scent of citrus potpourri seeping from the ceramic jars. He had always meant to ask Susan where she’d purchased this particular melange, so that he could acquire some for his own home. Too late.

At the kitchen door, fingers safely wrapped in Kleenex, he twisted the thumbturn on the only lock that she had engaged following his arrival. Outside, after quietly pulling the door shut, he used the spare key from the secretaire to engage both dead bolts.

He could do nothing about the security chain. This one detail should not make the authorities unduly suspicious.

Again, he reached his Mercedes without encountering anyone, and on the pleasant drive home, he found the streets only slightly busier than they had been forty-five minutes earlier.

His hilltop house stood on two acres in a gated community: a sprawling, futuristic, artful stack of square and rectangular forms, some in polished poured-in-place concrete and others clad in black granite, with floating decks, deep cantilevered roofs, bronze doors,

and floor-to-ceiling windows so massive that birds were knocked unconscious against them not just one at a time but in flocks.

The doctor parked in the eighteen-car subterranean garage and took the elevator up to the ground floor.

The rooms and hallways were of grand proportions, with polished black granite floors. The antique Persian rugs—in lustrous shades of teal, peach, jade, ruby—were exquisitely patinaed by lifetimes of wear; they seemed to float upon the black granite as if they were magic carpets in flight, the blackness beneath them not stone, but the deep abyss of night.

In corridors and major chambers, lights came on to preset scenes as he entered, triggered by motion sensors managed by thousand-year universal clocks. In smaller rooms, lamps answered to vocal commands.

The young internet billionaire had computerized all the house systems in obsessive detail. When he had seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, no doubt he had been under the impression that Hal was the hero.

In his lacewood-paneled study, the doctor phoned his office and left a voice-mail message for his secretary, asking her to cancel and reschedule his ten- and eleven-o’clock appointments to next week. He would be in after lunch.

There were no patient sessions filled on the second half of his Wednesday calendar. He had left his afternoon open for Dustin and Martine Rhodes, who would call in the morning, desperate for help.

Eighteen months ago, the doctor had realized that Martie could be one of his key toy soldiers in a marvelous game more elaborate than any he had played heretofore. Eight months ago, he served his witches’ brew of drugs to her in coffee, with a chocolate biscotto on the side, and programmed her during three of Susan’s office visits, as Susan herself had long previously come under his thrall.

Since then, Martie had awaited use, unaware that she’d been added to Ahriman’s collection.

Tuesday morning, eighteen hours ago, when Martie came to the

office with Susan, the doctor at last put her into play, escorting her down into her mind chapel, where he implanted the suggestion that she could not trust herself, that she was a grave danger to herself and others, a monster capable of extreme violence and unspeakable atrocities.

After he wound her up and sent her off with Susan Jagger, she must have had an interesting day. He looked forward to hearing the gaudy details.

He had not yet used Martie sexually. Although she was not as beautiful as Susan, she was quite attractive, and he looked forward to seeing just how completely and deliciously sordid she could be if she really tried. She was not yet in sufficient misery to have much erotic appeal for him.

Soon.

Exhausted yet restless, he walked the house for a while, after instructing the computer to precede him neither with blazes of light nor with softly luminous preset scenes. He wanted darkness in those spaces that had a view, and a single lamp dimmed so far as to be nearly extinguished in those chambers that did not benefit from the nighttime panorama of Orange County.

On the vast flatlands below these hills, although most of the county’s multitudes were still asleep, millions of lights glimmered even at this hour. View windows admitted just enough ambient light for the doctor to make his way with catlike surety, and he found the golden glow appealing.

Standing at a huge sheet of glass in the dark, basking in the incoming radiance, gazing at this urban sprawl that lay before him

like the biggest playset in the world, he knew how God would feel, looking down on Creation, if there had been a god. The doctor was a player, not a believer.

Sipping cherry Coke, he roamed room to room, along passage-ways and galleries. The huge house was a labyrinth in more ways than one, but eventually he returned to the living room.

Here, more than eighteen months ago, he acquired Susan. On the day that escrow closed, he had met her here to receive the house keys and the thick operating manual for the computerized systems. She was surprised to find him with two champagne flutes and a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon. From the day they’d met, the doctor had been careful never to suggest that his interest in her went beyond her real-estate expertise; even with champagne in hand, he had struck a note of such erotic indifference that she didn’t feel she, a married woman, was being romanced. Indeed, from the moment he’d met her and decided to have her, he had scattered hints, like breadcrumbs to a pigeon, that he was gay. Because he was so happy with his spectacular new house and because she wasn’t displeased by the fat commission she’d earned, she saw no harm in celebrating with a glass of champagne—although hers was, of course, spiked.

Here in the wake of her death, conflicting emotions bedeviled Ahriman. He regretted the loss of Susan, all but swooned to the tug of a sweet sentimentality, but also felt wronged, betrayed. In spite of all the great good times they’d had together, she would still have ruined him if she’d had the chance.

At last he resolved his inner conflict, because he realized that she was just a girl like other girls, that she hadn’t deserved all the time and attention he had lavished on her. To brood about her now would be to concede that she’d had a power over him no one else had ever exercised.

He was the collector, not her. He possessed things; they did not possess him.

“I’m glad you’re dead,” he said aloud in the dark living room. “I’m glad you’re dead, you stupid girl. I hope the razor hurt.”

After vocalizing his anger, he felt ever so much better. Oh, really, a thousand percent.

Although Cedric and Nella Hawthorne, the couple who managed the estate, were currently in residence, Ahriman was not concerned about being overheard. The Hawthornes were surely abed in

their three-room apartment in the servants’ wing. And regardless of what they might see or hear, he need not be concerned that they would ever remember anything that would endanger him.

Then he took the elevator up to the next floor and followed the hallway to the master-bedroom suite.

He brushed his teeth, flossed meticulously, and dressed in black silk pajamas.

Nella had turned down the bed. White Pratesi sheets with black piping. Plenty of plump pillows.

As usual, on his nightstand was a Lalique bowl full of candy bars, two each of his six favorite brands. He wished he hadn’t brushed his teeth.

Before turning in, he used the bedside Crestron touch-screen to access the automated-house program. With this control panel, he could operate lights throughout the residence, air-conditioning and heating room by room, the security system, landscape-surveillance cameras, pool and spa heaters, and numerous other systems and devices.

He entered his personal code to access a vault page that listed six wall safes of various sizes distributed throughout the residence. He touched master bedroom on the screen, and the image of a keypad replaced the list of locations.

When he keyed in a seven-digit number, a pneumatically driven section of granite on the face of the fireplace slid aside, revealing a small, embedded steel safe. Ahriman entered the combination on the keypad, and across the room, the lock released with an audible click.

He put the jar on a brushed-steel and zebrawood desk and sat down to study its contents.

After a few minutes, he could no longer resist the siren call of the candy bowl. He pondered the contents of the Lalique container and finally selected a Hershey’s bar with almonds.

He would not brush his teeth again. Falling asleep with the taste of chocolate in his mouth was a sinful pleasure. Sometimes he was a bad boy.

last, while he thoughtfully studied the jar. Although he didn’t hurry through the snack, he had gained not a scintilla of new insight from his father’s eyes by the time he finished the final crumbs of chocolate.

Hazel, they were, but with a milky film over the irises. The whites were no longer white, but pale yellow faintly marbled with pastel green. They were suspended in formaldehyde, in the vacuumsealed jar, sometimes peering through the curved glass with a wistful expression and sometimes with what seemed to be unbearable sorrow.

Ahriman had been studying these eyes all his life, both when they had been seated in his father’s skull and after they had been cut out. They held secrets that he wished to know, but they were, as ever, all but impossible to read.

Due to the lingering effects of three caplets of the sleep aid, Martie appeared to be unable to work herself into a state of panic, even after she was freed from the neckties, out of bed, and on her feet.

Her hands trembled almost nonstop, however, and she became alarmed when Dusty got too close to her. She still believed that she might suddenly claw out his eyes, chew off his nose, bite off his lips, and have a thoroughly unconventional breakfast.

Undressing to shower she had an agreeably heavy-eyed, pouty look, which Dusty found appealing as he watched her from a distance that she deemed just barely safe. “Very erotic, smoldering. With that look, you could make a guy run barefoot across a tack-covered football field.”

“I don’t feel erotic,” she said, her voice husky. She pouted without calculation but with powerful effect. “I feel like birdshit.”

“Curious.”

“Not me.”

“What?”

Skinning out of her underwear, she said, “I don’t want to go the way of the cat.”

“No,” he said, “I meant your choice of words. So you feel like birdshit—why in particular bird?”

She yawned. “Is that what I said?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I feel like I’ve dropped a long way and splattered all over everything.”

She didn’t want to be alone to shower.

Dusty watched from the bathroom doorway while Martie spread the bath mat, opened the door of the shower stall, and adjusted the water. When she stepped into the stall, he moved into the room and sat on the closed lid of the toilet.

As Martie began to soap herself, Dusty said, “We’ve been married three years, but I feel like I’m at a peep show.”

A bar of soap, a squeeze bottle of shampoo, and a tube of cream conditioner were objects so lacking in lethal potential that she was able to finish bathing without being seized by terror.

Dusty got the hair dryer out of a vanity drawer, plugged it in for her, and then retreated to the doorway once more.

“Then it’ll just fizz up, and you’ll hate the way it looks, and you’ll bitch all day.”

“I don’t bitch.”

“Well, you certainly don’t whine.”

“Damn right I don’t.”

“Complain?” he suggested.

“All right. I’ll admit to that.”

“You’ll complain all day. Why don’t you want to use the hair dryer? It’s not dangerous.”

“I don’t know. It sort of looks like a gun.”

“It’s not a gun.”

“I didn’t claim any of this was rational.”

“I promise if you turn it up to maximum power and try to blow-dry me to death, I won’t stand still for it.”

“Bastard.”

“You knew that when you married me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Calling you a bastard.”

He shrugged. “Hey, call me anything you want, as long as you don’t kill me.”

Gas flames weren’t as blue as her eyes when anger brightened them. “That’s not funny.”

“I refuse to be afraid of you.”

“You’ve got to be,” she said plaintively.

“Nope.”

She glared at him, finally reached for the hair dryer, but then snatched her hand back. She tried again, recoiled again, and began to shake not with fear as much as with frustration and quiet anguish.

Dusty was afraid she might cry. Last night, the sight of her in tears had knotted his guts.

She shrank from him. “Stay away.”

He plucked a towel off the rack and offered it to her. “Do you agree this wouldn’t be any homicidal maniac’s weapon of choice?”

Her gaze actually traveled the length of the towel as though she were warily calculating its murderous potential.

Accepting the towel, she looked skeptical.

“No, really,” he said. “What could you do except snap my ass with it?”

“There’d be some satisfaction in that.”

“But there’s at least a fifty-percent chance I’d survive.” When she seemed hesitant, he said, “Besides, I’ve got the hair dryer. You try anything, I’ll give you a case of chapped lips you won’t forget.”

“I feel like such a schiump.”

“You’re not.”

From the doorway, Valet chuffed.

Dusty said, “The vote is two to one against schlumpdom.”

“Let’s get this over with,” she said grimly.

“Face the sink and keep your back to me if you think I’ll be safer that way.”

She faced the sink, but she closed her eyes rather than look at herself in the mirror.

Though the bathroom wasn’t cold, Martie’s bare back was stippled with gooseflesh.

With a brush, Dusty repeatedly pulled her thick, black, glorious

Ever since they’d been together, Dusty enjoyed watching Martie groom herself. Whether she was shampooing her hair, painting her nails, applying her makeup, or massaging suntan lotion into her skin, she approached the task with an easy, almost lazy, meticulousness that was catlike and wonderfully graceful. A lioness, confident of her appearance but not vain.

Always, Martie had seemed strong and resilient, and Dusty had never worried about what might happen to her if fate dealt him an early death while he was climbing across some high roof. Now, he worried—and his worrying felt to him like an insult to her, as if he pitied her, which he didn’t, couldn’t. She was still too Martie to elicit pity. Yet now she appeared alarmingly vulnerable, neck so slender, shoulders so fragile, the vertebrae linked with such delicacy in the spinal cleft of her back, and Dusty feared for this dear woman to an extent that he must never allow her to perceive.

As the great philosopher Skeet once put it, Love is hard.

Something strange happened in the kitchen. In fact, virtually everything that happened in the kitchen was strange, but the last thing, just before they left the house, was the strangest of all.

First: Martie was rigid in one of the dinette chairs, hands trapped under her thighs, actually sitting on her hands, as though they would seize anything within reach and hurl it at Dusty if they were not restrained.

Because she was having blood drawn and tests conducted, she was required to fast from nine o’clock the previous night until the doctor was finished with her later this morning.

She was upset about lingering in the kitchen while Valet wolfed his morning kibble and while Dusty drank a glass of milk and ate a doughnut, though not because she resented their freedom to indulge. “I know what’s in those drawers,” she said with anxiety evident in her voice, meaning knives and other sharp utensils.

Dusty winked lecherously. “I know what’s in your drawers, too.”

“If I do, we might as well both kill ourselves now.”

Though her frown deepened, he knew she recognized the wisdom of what he’d said.

"There you stand, drinking whole milk, eating a glazed doughnut with cream filling. Looks like you’re already halfway to harakin.”

Finishing the milk, he said, “I figure the best way to live a normal—and probably long—life is to listen to everything the health Nazis say, then do exactly the opposite.”

“What if tomorrow they say cheeseburgers and french fries are the healthiest diet you can eat?”

“Then it’s tofu and alfalfa sprouts for me.”

They were not going to be able to take Valet on his morning constitutional. Martie refused to stay here alone while Dusty went out with the dog. And if she accompanied them, she would no doubt be terrified of pushing Dusty in front of a truck and feeding Valet into some gardener’s portable woodchipper.

“There’s a pretty funny aspect to all this,” Dusty said.

“We’re both probably right.”

“Martie, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way—”

“I have all the faith in the world in Dr. Closterman—”

“—but I think we really should consider—”

“—getting a second opinion—”

“—and as much as I hate the idea—”

“—not from another medical doctor—”

“—I think I need to be evaluated—”

“—but from a therapist—”

They spoke the name in unison—and gaped at each other in the ensuing silence.

Then Martie said, “I guess we’ve been married too long.”

“Much longer, and we’ll start to look like each other.”

“I’m not nuts, Dusty.”

“I know you’re not.”

“But give him a call.”

He went to the phone and obtained Ahriman’s office number from the information operator. He left a request for an appointment on the doctor’s voice mail and recited his cell-phone number.

At Skeet’s apartment, the bedroom was as barren of decoration and as starkly furnished as any monk’s cell.

“You had enough on your mind,” Dusty said as he searched under the neatly folded clothes in the bottom drawer of a dresser so plain it might have been crafted by a strict religious order that thought Shaker furniture was sinfully ornate.

“What’re you looking for—his stash?”

“We’ve got to be at Dr. Closterman’s office in forty minutes.”

“Plenty of time,” Dusty said, elevating his search to a higher drawer.

“Did he show up at work stoned?”

“Yeah. He jumped off the Sorensons’ roof.”

“My God! How bad was he hurt?”

“Not at all.”

“It’s a long story,” Dusty said, opening the top drawer on the

dresser. He wasn’t going to tell her that he had gone off the roof with Skeet, not while she was in her current condition.

“What are you hiding from me?” she demanded.

“Martie, let’s not play games with semantics, okay?”

Closing the last dresser drawer, he said, “That was low. I’m not keeping anything from you.”

“I guess what I’m hunting for,” he said, instead of answering her question, “is evidence that Skeet’s mixed up in some cult.”

Because he’d already searched the single nightstand and under the bed, Dusty stepped into the adjoining bathroom, which was small, clean, and completely white. He opened the medicine cabinet and quickly sorted through the contents.

From the bedroom, in an anxious and accusatory tone, Martie said, “You don’t know what I might be doing out here.”

“Looking for an ax?”

“Bastard.”

“We’ve been down that road.”

“Yeah, but it’s a long one.”

When he came out of the bathroom, he saw that she was shaking and as pale as—though prettier than—something that lived under a rock. “You okay?”

“What do you mean—cult?”

Though she cringed when he approached her, he took her by the arm, drew her out of the corner, and led her into the living room. “Skeet said he jumped off the roof because an angel of death told him he should.”

“Maybe. But you know how those cults operate—the brainwashing and all.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Brainwashing.”

In the living room, she backed into another corner and clamped her hands in her armpits again. “Brainwashing?”

“Rub-a-dub, cerebrum in a tub.”

The living room contained only a sofa, an armchair, a coffee table, an end table, two lamps, and a set of shelves on which were stored both books and magazines. Dusty cocked his head to scan the titles on the spines of the books.

From her corner, Martie said, “What’re you hiding from me?”

“There you go again.”

“You wouldn’t think he was mixed up in a cult—brainwashed, for God’s sake—just because of what he said about some angel of death.”

“There was an incident at the clinic.”

“New Life?”

“Yeah.”

“What incident?”

“What incident?” Martie repeated.

“Went into a trance.”

“What do you mean, a trance?”

“You know, like a magician, one of those stage hypnotists, casts on you and then makes you cluck like a chicken.”

“Skeet was clucking like a chicken?”

As Dusty continued along the shelves, the titles began to make him terribly sad. He realized that perhaps his brother sought refuge in these make-believe kingdoms because they were all cleaner, better, more-ordered fantasies than the one in which the kid lived. In these books, spells worked, friends were always true and brave, good and evil were sharply defined, good always won—and no one became drug-dependent and screwed up his life.

“Quacking like a duck, gobbling like a turkey?” Martie asked from her corner exile.

“What?”

“You are exasperating.”

“It’s a gift,” he said, leaving the magazines and books for a quick look through the small kitchen.

“Don’t leave me alone here,” she pleaded.

“Then come along.”

“No was;” she said, obviously thinking about knives and meat forks and potato mashers. “No way. That’s a kitchen.”

"I’m not going to ask you to cook.”

The combination kitchen and dining area was open to the living room, all one big California floor plan, so Martie was in fact able to see him pulling open drawers and cabinet doors.

She was silent for half a minute, but when she spoke, her voice was shaky. “Dusty; I’m getting worse.”

“To me, babe, you just keep getting better and better.”

Squinch became startled realization, and her eyes widened as she said, “You’re my Martie.”

“That doesn’t sound like another insult.”

“And I’m your Susan.”

“Oh, this is no good. We’ll have to change all our monogrammed towels.”

“For a year, I’ve treated her like you’re treating me. Jollying her along, always needling her out of her self-pity, trying to keep her spirits up.”

“You’ve been a real bitch, huh?”

Smiling, Dusty held out his right hand toward her. “We’ve got to be going.”

One step out of her corner, she stopped, unable to come farther. “Dusty; I don’t want to be Susan.”

“I know.”

“You won’t,” he promised.

“I’m scared.”

Rather than follow her customary preference for bright colors, Martie had gone to the dark side of her wardrobe. Black boots, black jeans, a black pullover, and a black leather jacket. She looked like a mourner at a biker’s funeral. In this stark outfit, she should have appeared to be tough, as hard and as formidable as night itself. Instead, she seemed as ephemeral as a shadow fading and shrinking under a relentless sun.

“I’m scared,” she repeated.

This was a time for truth, not for jollying, and Dusty said, “Yeah. Me, too.”

Overcoming the fear of her imagined homicidal potential, she took his hand. Hers was cold, but touching was progress.

“I’ve got to phone Susan,” she said. “She was expecting me to call last night.”

“We’ll phone her from the car.”

A gardener early to work, was bundling hedge trimmings into a burlap tarpaulin. A handsome young Hispanic with eyes as dark as mole sauce, he smiled and nodded.

Lying on the lawn, near him, were a small pair of hand clippers and a large pair of two-hand shears.

At the sight of the blades, Martie let out a strangled cry. She wrenched her hand free of Dusty’s and ran, not toward those

makeshift weapons but away from them, to the red Saturn that was parked at the curb.

“Disputa?” the gardener asked Dusty sympathetically, as if he himself had a regrettable amount of experience arguing with women.

“Infinidad,” Dusty replied as he hurried past, and he was all the way to the car before he realized he had meant to say enfermedad, meaning “illness,” but had instead said “infinity.”

The gardener stared after him, not frowning with puzzlement, but nodding solemnly, as though Dusty’s wrong word choice were in fact an indisputable profundity.

Thus are reputations for wisdom raised on foundations flimsier than those of castles built on air.

By the time Dusty got behind the wheel of the car, Martie was in the passenger’s seat, doubled over as far as the dashboard would allow, shuddering, groaning. Her thighs were pressed together, trapping her hands as though they itched with the desire to make mayhem.

When Dusty pulled his door shut, Martie said, “Is there anything sharp in the glove box?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know.”

“Hurry;” she pleaded.

“All right.”

“But don’t drive too fast.”

“Okay.”

“Of course, you won’t.”

“I might,” she insisted. “I will. You don’t want to see what’s in my head, the pictures in my head.”

The residual effect of three caplets of sleep-aid medication was fading from her by the second, while Dusty’s heartburn from the cream-filled, glazed doughnut was steadily growing.

“Oh, God,” she groaned. “God, please, please, don’t let me see these things, don’t make me see them.”

Huddled forward in abject misery, apparently sickened by the violent images spurting unwanted through her mind, Martie gagged, and soon the gagging evolved into fierce spasms of retching that would have brought up her breakfast if she had eaten any.

The morning traffic on these surface streets was moderately heavy, and Dusty weaved from lane to lane, sometimes taking risks to wedge into a gap, ignoring the angry looks of other motorists and the occasional hard bark of a horn. Martie appeared to be on an emotional toboggan run, rocketing along slick ice, with a panic attack at the end of the chute. Dusty wanted to be as close to Dr. Closterman’s office as possible if she hit the wall and ricocheted into a crack-up like the one he had witnessed the previous night.

Although dry heaves racked her with greater force than ever; she achieved no relief, not merely because her stomach was empty; but because she needed to disgorge the undisgorgeable vomitous images churning in her mind. Perhaps her mouth flooded with saliva, as is usual during bouts of nausea, because more than once she spat on the floorboards.

Between fits of retching, she gasped vehemently for breath, her throat surely parched and half raw from the sheer force of these inhalations. Shudders shook Martie, too, and with such violence that Dusty was shivered by a sympathetic cold revulsion, even though he could not imagine what ghastly visions plagued her.

He drove faster yet, weaving with greater aggression from lane to lane, taking bigger risks, to the accompaniment of more blaring horns and, now, the frequent squeal of brakes. He almost hoped that a policeman would pull him over. Considering Martie’s condition, any cop was likely to forgo issuing a traffic citation and, instead, provide an emergency escort, with siren.

Worsening condition. For the moment, her convulsive retching passed, but she began to rock back and forth in her seat, groaning, thumping her forehead against the padded dashboard, softly at first, slow and easy, as though to distract herself from the hobgoblins that seethed through her mind, but then with greater force, faster, and faster still, no longer groaning but grunting like a football player slamming into a tackling dummy, faster; harder: “Uh, uh, uh, uh, uuuhhh.”

Dusty spoke to her; urged her to calm down, to hang on, to remember that he was here for her, that he trusted her; and that everything was going to be all right. He didn’t know if she could hear him. Nothing he said appeared to comfort her.

He wanted desperately to reach out to her and gentle her with his touch, but he suspected that during this seizure, any contact would have the opposite effect of what he intended. His hand upon her shoulder might send her into even greater paroxysms of terror and revulsion.

Dr. Closterman’s offices were in a medical high-rise adjacent to the hospital. Both buildings rose in the next block, the tallest structures in sight.

At the medical complex, the surrounding parking lots were shaded by aisles of big carrotwood trees. He searched for and found a space close to the office high-rise, under a canopy of branches.

Even after he braked to a halt and put the car in park, Dusty felt as though he were still moving. A morning breeze shivered leaf shadows across the windshield, while interleaved blades of sunshine fluttered against the curve of glass and seemed to tumble away to each side as if they were bright scraps of foliage spinning into his wake on a slipstream.

She was no longer grunting or cursing, no longer quarreling with herself. Worse, bending forward once more, she began to scream. Shrill shrieks punctuated by hard swallows of air, like a swimmer in trouble. Terror in her cries. But also outrage, disgust, shock. Screams that shuddered with revulsion, as those of a swimmer who had felt

something strange sliding past beneath the water; something cold and slick and terrible.

“Martie, what? Talk to me. Martie, let me help.”

Maybe her cries and the booming of her heart and the rush of blood in her ears didn’t allow her to hear him, or maybe there was simply nothing he could do, therefore no reason to answer him. She was struggling against riptides of powerful emotion that seemed to be dragging her out into deep waters, toward a drowning abyss that might be madness.

Against his better judgment, Dusty touched her. She reacted as he had been afraid she would, shrinking from him, swatting his hand off her shoulder, jamming herself up against the passenger’s door; still irrationally convinced that she was capable of blinding him or worse.

A young woman, crossing the parking lot with two small children, heard Martie’s screams, came closer to the Saturn, frowning-peering, and locked eyes with Dusty, her gaze darkening as if she saw in him the evil of every tower sniper; schoolboy assassin, serial strangler, mad bomber, and head-collector who had made the news in her lifetime. She pulled her kids close to her and moved them more quickly toward the hospital, probably seeking a security guard.

Although Dusty had seen not one frame of the spook show that had stuttered through the sprockets of Martie’s mind, the ordeal of observation, in itself, had left him weak. His mouth was dry. His heart raced. He raised his hands to watch them tremble, and then blotted his damp palms on his jeans.

The keys still dangled from the ignition. He plucked them out, muffled their jingle in his clenched hand, and stuffed them into one of his pockets before Martie could raise her bowed head and catch sight of them.

He was not concerned that she would grab the keys and stab at his face in a furious determination to blind him, as she claimed to

have seen herself doing in a vision. He was no more afraid of her now than he had been before this latest episode.

In the immediate aftermath of her seizure, however, perhaps a glimpse of the keys would be enough to send her tumbling down the stairs of panic yet again.

Silent now except for her hard breathing, she sat up straighter and lowered her hands from her head.

“I can’t take much more like that,” she whispered.

“It’s over.”

“For now, anyway.”

Though intellectually he rejected the possibility that he was losing her, in his heart he knew that she was slipping away from him, captive of a force that he could not understand and against which he could offer no defense.

No. Dr. Ahriman could help her. Could, would, must.

Perhaps Dr. Closterman, with MRIs and EEGs and PET scans and all the abbreviations and acronyms of high-tech medicine, would identify her condition, isolate the cause, and provide the cure.

But if not Closterman, then surely Ahriman.

From out of a wilderness of wind-stirred leaf shadows, as blue as the two jewels in the sockets of a jungle-wrapped stone goddess, Martie’s eyes met his. No illusions in her gaze. No superstitious surety that all would be well in this best of all possible worlds. Just a stark appreciation of her dilemma.

Somehow she overcame the dread of her lethal potential. She extended her left hand to him.

“Poor Dusty,” she said. “A druggie brother and a crazy wife.”

“You’re not crazy.”

“Whatever happens to you,” he said, “won’t happen just to you. It happens to both of us. We’re in this together.”

“Butch and Sundance.”

“Mickey and Minnie.”

He didn’t smile. Neither did she. But with characteristic fortitude, Martie said, “Len go see if Doc Closterman learned any damn thing at all in medical school.”

From the spare chair in the corner of the examination room, Dusty said, “She seems to get younger week by week.”

To Martie, Closterman said, “Does he spread it on this heavy all the time?”

“I have to shovel out the house every morning.” She smiled at Dusty. “I love it.”

Closterman was in his late forties but, unlike Martie, looked— and no doubt tested—older than his age, and not solely because of his prematurely white hair. Double chins and dewlaps, generous jowls and a proud knob of a nose, eyes pink in the corners with a perpetual bloodshot sheen from too much time in salt air and wind and sun, and a tan that would leave any dermatologist hoarse from lecturing—

all marked him as a dedicated gourmet, deep-sea fisherman, wind-surfer, and probably connoisseur of beer. From his broad brow to his broader belly, he was a living example of the consequences of ignoring the sound advice that he unabashedly doled out to his patients.

Doc—his surfer handle—had a mind as sharp as a scalpel, the bedside manner of a favorite grandfather with a storybook in hand, and a dedication to his practice that would have shamed Hippocrates, yet Dusty preferred him over all other possible internists less for those fine qualities than for his very human, if medically unsound, indulgences. Doc was that rare expert without arrogance, free of dogma, able to view a problem from a fresh perspective rather than through the lenses of preconception that often blinded others who claimed high expertise, humbled by an awareness of his weaknesses and his limitations.

“Gloriously healthy,” Closterman proclaimed as he entered notes in Martie’s file. “Tough constitution. Like your dad.”

Sitting on the edge of the examination table, in a paper gown and rolled red kneesocks, Martie did indeed appear to be as healthy as any aerobics instructor on one of those cable-television shows devoted to obsessive exercise with a host who believed that death was a personal choice rather than an inevitability.

Dusty could see the changes in Martie that Closterman, in spite of his sensitivity to his patients, couldn’t perceive. A bleak shadow in her eyes that dimmed her usually bright gaze. A persistent grim set to her mouth and a defeatist slump to her shoulders.

Although Closterman agreed to refer Martie to the hospital next door for a series of diagnostic procedures, he clearly was thinking of it as just an elaborate annual checkup, not as an essential step in diagnosing the cause of a life-threatening condition. Doe had listened to a highly abbreviated account of her bizarre behavior during the past twenty-four hours, and though she’d not described her violent visions in detail, she’d recounted enough to make Dusty wish he had not eaten that greasy doughnut. Nevertheless, as the physician finished making notes in his patient’s file, he launched into an explanation of the many sources of stress, the mental and physiological problems arising from stress, and the best techniques that one might use to deal with stress— as though Martie’s problem resulted from overwork, too little leisure, a tendency to sweat the small stuff, and a lumpy mattress.

She interrupted Closterman to ask if he would please put away the reflex hammer.

The polished-steel instrument was as small as a toy hammer and appeared to be of no use as a weapon.

Dusty moved to the edge of his chair.

Dr. Closterman looked at the ballpoint that lay atop the closed patient file. “It’s just a Paper Mate pen.”

Closterman came to his feet on the word potato, rising like a dancer in spite of his size, and now Dusty rose, too.

“First thing,” said the rattled physician, “is a prescription for Valium. How many of these episodes have there been?”

“A few,” Dusty said. “I don’t know. But this one wasn’t bad.”

“I’m disturbed going in,” Martie said.

“We’ll mellow you out, so it’s not such an ordeal.” Closterman stepped to the door, then hesitated with his hand on the knob. He glanced at Dusty. “Are you okay here?”

Dusty nodded. “These are only things she’s afraid of doing—not anything she could do. Not her, not Martie.”

“Like hell I couldn’t,” she said from behind a veil of fingers.

When Closterman had gone, Dusty moved the reflex hammer and the ballpoint beyond Martie’s reach. “Feel better?”

Between her fingers, she had seen his act of consideration. “This is mortifying.”

“Can I hold your hand?”

A hesitation. Then: “Okay.”

“This isn’t a headache,” she reminded him.

“Exactly. And headaches are a prime symptom of brain tumors. As is a retinal condition called choked disk, which I didn’t find when I examined your eyes. You mentioned vomiting and nausea. If you

were vomiting without nausea, then we’d have a classic symptom. From what you told me, you don’t actually have hallucinations—”

“We already know one,” Martie said.

“Oh? Who?”

“He’s supposed to be one of the best,” Dusty said. “Maybe you’ve heard of him. A psychiatrist. Dr. Mark Ahriman.”

“He’s been treating a friend of mine,” Martie said.

“May I ask for what condition?”

“Agoraphobia.”

“A terrible thing.”

“It’s changed her life.”

“How’s she doing?”

Martie said, “Dr. Ahriman thinks she’s nearing a breakthrough.”

“Good news,” Closterman said.

benign but conveying more mystery than mirth.

Still tweaked and crinkled, he said, “But if you find that Dr. Ahriman isn’t taking on new patients, I know a wonderful therapist, a compassionate and quite brilliant woman, who I’m sure would see you.” He picked up Martie’s file and the pen with which she could have put out his eye. “First, before there’s any talk of therapy, let’s get those tests done. They’re expecting you at the hospital, and the various departments have promised to squeeze you into their schedules

as if you were an emergency-room admission, no appointments needed. I’ll have all the results by Friday, and then we can decide what’s next. By the time you dress and get next door, that Valium will have kicked in. If you need another one before you can get the prescription filled, you’ve got the second sample. Any questions?”

He didn’t ask the question. Considering his distrust of most academics and experts—two labels Ahriman no doubt wore with pride— and considering his respect for Dr. Closterman, Dusty found his reticence inexplicable. Nevertheless, the question remained glued between his tongue and the roof of his mouth.

Minutes later, as he and Martie were crossing the quadrangle from the office tower to the hospital, Dusty realized that his reluctance to pose the question, though strange, was less puzzling than his failure to inform Dr. Closterman that he had already phoned Ahriman’s office to seek an appointment later this same day and was awaiting a callback.

Hard skreaks from overhead drew his attention. Thin gray clouds like bolts of dirty linen had been flung across the azure sky, and three fat black crows wheeled through the air, jinking now and then as if plucking fibers from that raveled, rotting mist to build nests in graveyards.

For some reasons clear and others not, Dusty thought of Poe, of a bad-news raven perched above a doorway. Although Martie, in a Valium lull, held his hand with none of her previous reluctance, Dusty thought also of Poe’s lost maiden, Lenore, and he wondered if the skreak of the crow, translated into the tongue of the raven, might be “nevermore.”

In the hematology lab, while Martie sat watching her blood slowly fill a series of tubes, she chatted with the technician, a young Vietnamese American, Kenny Phan, who had gotten the needle into her vein quickly and without a sting.

“I cause much less discomfort than a vampire,” Kenny said with an infectious grin, “and usually have sweeter breath.”

Dusty would have watched with normal interest had this been his blood being drawn, but he was squeamish at the sight of Martie’s.

Sensitive to his discomfort, she asked that he use the moment to get Susan Jagger on his cell phone.

He placed the call and waited through twelve rings. When Susan didn’t answer, he pressed end and asked Martie for the number.

“You know the number.”

This time he waited through sixteen rings before terminating the call. “She isn’t there.”

“But she must be there. She’s never anywhere else—unless she’s with me.”

“Maybe she’s in the shower.”

“No answering machine?”

“No. I’ll try later.”

Mellowed by the Valium, Martie looked thoughtful, perhaps even concerned, but not worried.

Replacing a full tube of blood with the final empty vial, Kenny Phan said, “One more for my personal collection.”

Martie laughed, this time without an underlying tremor of any darker emotion.

In spite of the circumstances, Dusty felt as though normal life might be within their grasp again, much easier to rediscover than he had imagined in the grimmer moments of the past fourteen hours.

As Kenny Phan was applying a small, purple Barney the Dinosaur adhesive bandage to the needle puncture, Dusty’s cell phone rang. Jennifer, Dr. Ahriman’s secretary, was calling to confirm that the psychiatrist would be able to rearrange his afternoon schedule to see them at one-thirty.

“That’s a bit of luck,” Martie said with evident relief when Dusty gave her the news.

“Yeah.”

Dusty, too, was relieved—curiously so, considering that if Martie’s problem was psychological, the prognosis for a quick and full recovery might be less reassuring than if the malady had an entirely physical cause. He had never met Dr. Mark Ahriman, and yet a warm sense of security, a comforting flame, had been lit in him by the call from the psychiatrist’s secretary—which was also a curious and surprising reaction.

If the problem wasn’t medical, Ahriman would know what to do. He would be able to uncover the roots of Martie’s anxiety.

Dusty’s reluctance to put his trust entirely in experts of any kind was borderline pathological, and he was the first to admit as much. He was somewhat dismayed with himself for being so eager to hope that Dr. Ahriman, with all his degrees and his best-selling books and his exalted reputation, would possess a nearly magical ability to set things right.

Evidently he was more like the average sucker than he had wanted to believe he could be. When everything he cared most about—Martie and their life together—was at risk, and when his own knowledge and common sense were inadequate to solve the problem, then in his abject fear, he turned to the experts not merely with a pragmatic degree of hope but also with something uncomfortably close to faith.

All right, okay. So what? If he could just have Martie back in charge of herself as she had been, healthy and happy, he would humble himself before anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Still all in black but with purple Barney on her arm, Martie left the hematology lab hand-in-hand with Dusty. An MRI scan was next.

The corridors smelled of floor wax, disinfectant, and a faint underlying scent of illness.

A nurse and an orderly approached, rolling a gurney on which lay a young woman no older than Martie. She was connected to an IV drip. Compresses had been applied to her face; they were spotted with fresh blood. One of her eyes was visible: open, gray-green, and glazed with shock.

Dusty looked away, feeling that he had violated this stranger’s privacy, and he tightened his hold on Martie’s hand, superstitiously certain that in this injured woman’s glassy stare was more bad luck poised to jump, quick as a blink, from her to him.

Tweaked and crinkled, the inscrutable smile of Closterman rose Cheshire-like in Dusty’s memory.

This was the sum of his exercise regimen, three times a week, yet he was as fit as he had been twenty years ago, with a thirty-two-inch waist and a physique that women liked. He credited his genes and the fact that he had the good sense not to let stress accumulate.

The jar of formaldehyde was still here. He had not returned it to the safe before retiring for the night.

His father had continued to provide generous support, but the doctor had been increasingly reluctant to accept his old man’s largesse. How embarrassing it was to be dependent at twenty-eight, especially considering his considerable academic achievements. Besides, as open as Josh Ahriman’s wallet had been, the allowance that he provided was not sufficient for the doctor to live in the style he desired or to finance research he wished to conduct.

His movies were box-office gold because the sentiment in them was sincere. Although he had the requisite ruthlessness and duplicity to succeed big-time in Hollywood, Dad also possessed a sensitive soul and such a tender heart that he was one of the championship criers of his time. He wept at funerals even when the deceased was someone for whose death he had often and fervently prayed. He wept unashamedly at weddings, at anniversary celebrations, at divorce proceedings, at bar mitzvahs, at birthday parties, at political rallies, at cockfights, on Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July and Labor Day—and most copiously, bitterly, on the anniversary of his mother’s death, when he remembered it.

In this he was to be disappointed. After trimming away Dad’s eyelids and then gently extracting his eyes, the doctor discovered each lacrimal gland where he expected it: in orbit, superior and lateral to the eyeball. The glands were of normal size, shape, and design. The superior and inferior lacrimal ducts serving each eye were likewise unremarkable. Each lacrimal sac—seated in a groove of lacrimal bone, behind the tarsal ligament and tricky to tease out intact—measured thirteen millimeters, which was the median size for an adult.

Because the lacrimal apparatus was tiny, composed of very soft tissue, and damaged in the doctor’s limited autopsy, he had not been able to save any of it. He had only the eyeballs now, and in spite of his diligent preservation efforts—fixative, vacuum-packaging, regular maintenance—he could not entirely prevent their gradual deterioration.

When Ahriman bumped the leg of the desk with his knee, the eyes rolled slowly in the formaldehyde and seemed to follow the progress of the last fried pecan as he conveyed it to his mouth.

“They had to rebuild half of it after the fire,” Martie said. “Sixty apartments burned down.”

“Fifteen years. And they replaced the roofs on the buildings that weren’t destroyed, because it was the old cedar shingles that allowed the blaze to spread so fast.”

“Doesn’t look haunted, does it?”

“Ought to be. Nine died, three of them small children. Seems funny. . . how it looks so nice now, you know, like that night must’ve been just a dream.”

Although Dusty knew all the details, Martie wanted to talk about the fire. All she had of her father now were memories, and by talking about them, she kept them fresh. “It was already an inferno when the pumpers got here. They couldn’t hope to knock it down fast. Smilin’ Bob went in there four times, four times into the fiery smoky hellish heart of it, and each time he came out. He was the worse for it, but he always came out with people who wouldn’t have survived otherwise, carrying some of them, leading others. One whole family of five, they were disoriented, blinded by smoke, trapped, encircled by fire, but out he came with them, all five safe. There were other heroes there, every man on every crew called to the scene, but none of them could keep at it the way he could, eating the smoke as though it was tasty, all but reveling in the heat like he would a sauna, just going at it and going at it—but that’s how he always was. Always was. Sixteen people saved because of him, before he collapsed and they packed him out of here in an ambulance.”

That night, rushing with her mother to the hospital, and then at Smilin’ Bob’s bedside, Martie had been in the grip of a fear she had thought would crush her. His face red with a first-degree burn. And streaked with black: particles of soot pounded so deep into his pores by the concussive force of an explosion that they could not be easily washed out. Eyes bloodshot, one swollen half-shut. Eyebrows and most of his hair singed away, and a mean second-degree burn on the back of his neck. Left hand and forearm cut by glass, stitched and bandaged. And his voice so scary—scratchy, raw, weak as it had never been before. Words wheezing out of him and with them the sour odor of smoke, the scent of smoke still on his breath, the stink of it coming out of his lungs. Martie, thirteen, had only that morning felt grown-up and had been impatient for the world to admit that she was an adult. But there in the hospital, with Smilin’ Bob brought down so hard, she suddenly felt insignificant and vulnerable, as helpless as a four-year-old kid.

“He reached for my hand with his good one, the right, and he was so exhausted he could hardly hold on to me. And in that awful voice, that smoky voice, he says, ‘Hey, Miss M.,’ and I say, ‘Hey.’ He tried to smile, but his face hurt pretty bad, so it was a weird smile that didn’t do anything to cheer me up. He says, ‘I want you to promise me something,’ and I just nod, because, God, I would promise to cut off my arm for him, anything, and he must know that. He wheezes and coughs a lot, but he says, “When you go to school tomorrow,

don’t you brag about your dad did this, your dad did that. They’ll be asking you, and they’ll be repeating things said on the news about me, but don’t you bask in it. Don’t you bask. You tell ‘em I’m here. . . eating ice cream, tormenting nurses, having a high old time, collecting as much sick pay as I can get before they figure out I’m goldbricking.’”

“I don’t know what happened to him in Vietnam,” Martie said. “He never talked about it. When I was eleven, I found his medals in a box in the attic. He told me he’d won them because he’d been the fastest typist in the division commander’s secretarial pool, and when that didn’t wash, he said they used to have Bake-Offs a lot in Nam, and he made a fabulous bundt cake. But even at eleven, I knew they don’t give you multiple Bronze Stars for bundt cakes. I don’t know if he was as fine a man when he went to Nam as when he came out, but for some reason I think that maybe he was better for what he suffered, that it made him very humble, so gentle and so generous—so full of love for life, for people.”

“And what I’m so afraid. . . about this crazy thing that’s happening to me...”

“You’ll beat it, Martie.”

“No, I mean, I’m afraid that because of it. . . I’ll do something to dishonor him.”

Although she had skipped breakfast, Martie ordered only a small vanilla milk shake, sipping it slowly. She didn’t fancy having a full stomach of greasy food if she were stricken again by that devastating spook show of death images that had flashed through her mind in the car between Skeet’s apartment and Dr. Closterman’s office.

“Can’t jump. All the spring’s out of my legs,” she said, which was true, thanks to the double Valium. Indeed, her worry was soft and fuzzy around the edges, but it was worry nonetheless.

This, too, struck her as odd, and quite different from the effect of the Valium. The drug covered her anxiety, repressed it, yet she was still aware of it squirming under the chemical blanket. In this place, however, she felt a measure of her apprehension float up and away from her, not merely repressed any longer, but dissipated.

Martie didn’t know how the doctor was able to project such a reassuring air of quiet authority and competence, but she didn’t try to analyze it because the very sight of him, even more than stepping through the doorway into this room, put her at peace, and she was just grateful to feel a surge of hope.