F Paul Wilson - Novel 05 (13 page)

 
          
Move
closer to it, gliding soundlessly as if
you
are the ghost, and not all
these images. Reach down. There's no dexterity involved in picking up the
knife. The program fills in the appropriate gestures, linking the objects. Your
virtual hand closes on the palette knife, tidying the room by picking up this
lone stray object.

 
          
You
hold it, wondering why Sam dropped it. And it was dropped. You sense that.

 
          
A
door slams behind you, startling you. It sounds like a gunshot in this dead
place and you almost cry out. Someone laughs drunkenly. You turn around.

 
          
And
see your sister.

 
          
Then
—
you
are
your sister, speaking:

 
          
"They
told me bad things about you...."

 
          
Samantha
watches Liam enter her studio, catlike, looking around, nervous and unsure. His
longish, wavy red hair is tucked behind his ears; his sharp, quick, bright eyes
dart here and there. This is unknown terrain, an alien world for him. Sam finds
his disorientation amusing.

 
          
A
few feet into the studio, he stops.

 
          
"Isn't
this room a wee bit dark for a studio?" he says.

 
          
She
smiles and leans against the wall. Liam is just a dark shape in her apartment.
How old is he, thirty? Thirty-five? Hard to tell. He has deep lines cut into
his face. A weathered face. Sam imagines that it is a face cut by pain.

 
          
She
enjoys the feelings she now has, the fear mixed with excitement
—

 
          
"I
have skylights. 1 can make it very cheery during the day. If I want to, that
is. If ever I want the place 'cheery.'"

 
          
She
kicks the door shut.

 
          
The
sound echoes in the room. Sam reaches out and touches Liam's broad shoulder. He
turns
to her.

 
          
"I
didn't bring you here to see my studio," she says.

 
          
His
grin flashes back at her in the darkness.

 
          
"Didn't
you now?"

 
          
And
then he comes close, pressing Samantha to the wall, pushing her tight, snug
against the rough boards. His lips cover hers and slowly, deliberately, he
moves against her.

 
          
She
moans into his mouth, and the sound is a trigger.

           
She feels his hands on her, strong
hands traveling up her body, over her hips, her breasts, up to her neck, when
—

 
          
You
see nothing. Your sister, the man
—
gone.
Both vanished like ghosts.

 
          
What
just happened here? Somehow you slipped into the memory. No,
slipped
isn't
the word. You were ripped from your observer status and hurtled headlong into
participation. You felt his lips on yours, his hands moving over your
—

 
          
Christ,
you
felt
things. You can't let Dr. Siegal know.

 
          
How
did this happen? It's not supposed to happen. It
can't
happen. Unless
...

 
          
Dr.
Siegal's warning comes back to you:
You share not only a
history,
but
an identical set of genes as well. That's an unpredictable and possibly
dangerous combination.

 
          
Well,
he was right about the unpredictable. Hopefully he was wrong about the
dangerous part.

 
          
But
what happened to the rest of the scene?

 
          
Did
something make it end? Was
that
the event that triggered Sam's comatose
state. So many questions...

 
          
You
glance again at the black-and-blue painting-
—
or
what used to be the painting. The canvas is blank, the pigment puddled on the
floor, the painting gone.

 
          
Which
means this dead memoryscape has changed
—
at
least this part of it. And not necessarily for the better.

 
          
You
have a thought: If things are changing in here, could something be changing
outside? Are you helping or hurting in here? Mostly it seems like you're
stumbling around.

 
          
You
have no idea of time. But before you leave you want another look outside.
Maybe you could catch the rest of Sam's memory with Liam. Idle curiosity?
Careful, this is a high-order invasion of privacy.

 
          
And
for the first time the possibility of witnessing what happened to Sam
—
what was done to her
—
frightens
you. Can you stand to see it?

 
          
You
turn and move to the studio door. You glide back into the night world of the
memoryscape. It all looks pretty much the same: the ruptured axons, the twisted
structures at the nodes, like violent modern sculptures. Nothing has changed here
—
or has it? You can't be sure, but it strikes you that there
might be fewer glowing mounds on the horizon.

 
          
You
see a not-so-distant node lit by a warm glow instead of the faint sputtering
light of the others. You glide toward it. Along the way you think you see
someone standing below. You approach cautiously. For an instant you think it's
Sam and then you realize that it's only a doll made to look like Sam
—
a very
dumpy
doll of Sam. Actually, it looks like
Sam's image painted on a giant, five-foot gourd. Like one of those toy boxing
dummies.

 
          
You
touch it with the glove icon and it begins rocking back and forth. And as it
rocks it splits around the middle. The top half pops off and there's another
doll inside, only this one looks like you. You realize it's a giant matrioshka
doll, one doll nesting inside another. Sam loved these as a little girl. The
matrioshka
—
open it up and there's a
smaller doll inside. Open that and there's another one, and on and on until you
get to the center, where the tiniest doll lives, the last doll that can't be
opened.

 
          
The
last doll, the one with no secrets.

 
          
You
touch the new doll and that one splits, too, popping its top half off to reveal
another Sam, identical to the first except one-third the size. You touch this
one but nothing happens. That's it. No more dolls.

 
          
Sam,
Julie, Sam. Why? Is it supposed to mean something? Or is it just... here?

 
          
Baffled,
you move on, leaving the little Sam doll sitting in the lower half of the Julie
doll, sitting in the lower half of the Sam doll, rocking back and forth,
rocking....

 
          
You
reach the glow and see an enormous house, a squat and monstrously large estate.
A mammoth stone dollhouse sitting in the war zone of Sam's memory. It almost
looks like Eathan's Yorkshire manor, Oakwood, but it's impossibly large, larger
even than Versailles, stretching for thousands of yards.

 
          
And
yet this
could
still be Eathan's manor. It's only Sam's memory, after
all, and if it's a childhood memory, size and scale mean absolutely nothing.
The house
would
be impossibly huge.

 
          
You're
closer, and the front doors to the mansion do look familiar, the dark oak with
cut glass veiled by a heavy curtain. You reach out for the giant brass doorknob
and fee! like Alice in Wonderland, the scale is that exploded. Surely you'll
find oversized chairs inside, massive mirrors, and a plate of cookies with a
card that says
Eat me.

 
          
You
expect the doorknob to be locked, but it turns with a silkily smooth action.
The twin oaken doors glide open.

 
          
And
you see a little girl. You know her. She's you
—
or
she's Sam. Always a challenge for people to tell you apart; even you have
difficulty in some of the old pictures.

 
          
But
then the little girl raises something in her hands. A statue. A Greek-looking
figure standing on a base.

 
          
You
remember this. You remember the day little Sammi threw the
—

 
          
The
statue smashes onto the marble steps, and shatters into a hundred pieces. The
pieces quickly melt like chunks of ice on a hot skillet.

 
          
And
Sammi screams: "I
hate
you! You ruin everything! You're stupid,
Julie!"

 
          
Then
you see yourself, racing up the stairs, chasing Sammi.

 
          
But
why aren't you
in
Samantha like before? Is it because the younger you is
here as well? Does that keep you out?

 
          
So
much to learn here.

 
          
You
follow, chasing your young self. You remember this day too well, remember the
rage. You hear yourself yelling at Sammi, a cold, bloodthirsty sound: "I'm
going to
kill
you."

 
          
But
something's different. You remember this, and yet you don't. Why so angry? That
wasn't
your
statue she broke. Why should you even care?

 
          
Up
the staircase, not floating now, but pounding up the heavily carpeted steps.
But when you reach the top
—
no one there. The
second-floor hallway stretches right and left; like train tracks, the hallway
seems to stretch forever.

 
          
You
hear banging. A steady, thumping noise. You follow little Julie to the right,
moving past doors and paintings and tables with flowers on them. You'd like to
look at the paintings. They may be important. But the thumping draws you on, to
a looming closet door.

 
          
You
stop and hear the banging, the terrible pounding against the door. It can't be
a little girl making all that noise.

 
          
You
know what happens next.

 
          
You
remember.

           
Little Julie stands outside the
hall-closet door. She hears yelling coming from the other side, the dark,
locked-in side.

 
          
"Let
me out, Julie. Let me out! I don't like it in here!"

 
          
The
little you moves closer to the door.

 
          
"Then
I guess you shouldn't have hid in there, brat."

 
          
"Julie!"

 
          
Naked
terror in that voice. Panic at being locked in some-place dark and strange. The
feeling of being trapped.

 
          
You
watch little Julie turn and walk away.

 
          
The
scene happens again. Then again and again, a loop, the little girl turning away
from her pleading sister.

 
          
"Julieeeeeee!"

 
          
A
light begins flashing.

 
          
The
warning light in the readout ribbon. You check the vital signs
—
pulse, respirations, EKG, EEG
—
all
normal. The built-in time limit is up. So soon? Damn. There's so much more to
see. What happened to Sam and Liam? Are there any further changes in the
memoryscape? What are these paintings on the wall? What secrets do the hundred
rooms of this fantasy house hold?