False Memory (11 page)

21

The stainless-steel rack of knives hung from two hooks on the wall, like the totem of some devil-worshiping clan that used its kitchen for more sinister work than cooking dinner.

Without touching the knives, Martie unhooked the rack. She slid it onto a shelf in a lower cupboard and quickly closed the door.

Not good enough. Out of sight was not out of mind. The knives remained readily accessible. She must make them harder to reach.

In the garage, she found an empty cardboard box and a roll of strapping tape, and she returned to the kitchen.

When she squatted before the cabinet in which she had stowed the knives, Martie wasn’t immediately able to open the door. In fact, she was afraid even to touch it, as though this were not an ordinary cabinet but a satanic reliquary in which reposed a paring from one of Beelzebub’s cloven hooves. She had to work up the courage to retrieve the cutlery, and when at last she cautiously withdrew it from the shelf, her hands shook so badly that the blades rattled in the slots of the rack.

She dropped the knives into the box and folded shut the flaps of cardboard. She began to use strapping tape to seal the box—but then realized she would need to cut the tape.

When she opened a drawer and reached for a pair of scissors, she wasn’t able to pick them up. They would make a lethal weapon. She had seen uncountable movies in which a killer had used a pair of scissors instead of a butcher knife.

So many soft, vulnerable spots on the human body. The groin. The stomach. Between the ribs and straight into the heart. The throat. The side of the neck.

Like an official serial-killer deck of cards—
ALL OF JACK THE RIPPER’S MURDERS DEPICTED IN GRAPHIC DETAIL! EVERY JOKER FEATURES A DIFFERENT FULL-COLOR ILLUSTRATION OF JEFFREY DAHMER’S REFRIGERATED HEAD COLLECTION
!—grotesque and bloody pictures shuffled through Martie’s mind.

Slamming shut the drawer, turning her back to it, she struggled to suppress the brutal images that some demented part of her psyche dealt out with savage glee.

She was alone in the house. She could harm no one with the scissors. Except, of course, herself.

Since reacting so bizarrely to the mezzaluna in Susan’s kitchen and to the car key a few minutes thereafter, Martie had sensed that she was possessed of—or by—a strange and inexplicable new potential for violence, and she’d been afraid of what injury she might inflict on some innocent person during a spell of transient madness. Now, for the first time, she suspected that in a fit of irrationality, she might be capable of harming herself.

She stared down at the box in which she’d deposited the rack of knives. If she carried it out to the garage, put it in a corner, and piled other stuff on top of it, the box could still be retrieved in a minute. The single strip of tape—and the big roll dangling at the end of it—could be easily ripped away, the lid flaps torn open, and the knives recovered.

Although the butcher knife—all the knives—remained in the box, she could feel the weight of that weapon as if she were holding it now in her right hand: thumb pressed flat against the cold blade, fingers clenched around the wooden handle, forefinger jammed against the guard, little finger tight against the neb. This was the grip she might use if she were to strike with the knife from a low angle, swing it up, hard and fast, and drive it deep, to disembowel some unsuspecting victim.

Her right hand began to shake, and then her arm, and finally her entire body. Her hand flew open, as though she were trying to fling aside the imaginary knife; crazily, she half expected to hear the steel blade ring against the tile floor.

No, dear God, she wasn’t capable of committing such atrocities with one of these knives. She wasn’t capable of suicide, either, or of disfiguring herself.

Get a grip.

Yet she couldn’t stop thinking about shiny blades and sharp edges, slashing and gouging. She strove to put away that mental Jack the Ripper deck, but a rapid-fire game of solitaire brought a series of horrific scenes in front of her mind’s eye, one card sliding-spinning over another,
flick-flick-flick,
until a spasm of vertigo spiraled down from her head, through her chest, into the pit of her stomach.

She didn’t remember dropping to her knees in front of the box. She didn’t recall grabbing the roll of strapping tape, either, but suddenly she found herself turning the box over and over, frantically pulling the tape securely around it, again and again, first around the long circumference several times, then around the short, then diagonally.

She was frightened by the frenzy with which she addressed the task. She tried to pull her hands back, turn away from the box, but she couldn’t stop herself.

Working so fast and so intensely that she broke into a thin greasy sweat, breathing hard, whimpering with anxiety, Martie wound the entire economy-size roll around the carton in one continuous loop to avoid using the scissors. She
encased
it in the tape as thoroughly as ancient Egypt’s royal embalmers had wrapped their dead pharaohs in tannin-soaked cotton shrouds.

When she came to the end of the roll, she wasn’t satisfied, because she still knew where the knives could be found. Granted: They were no longer easy to reach. She would have to carve through the many layers of strapping tape to open the box and get at the cutlery, but she would never dare allow herself to pick up a razor blade or scissors, with which to perform the task, so she should have felt relieved. The box, however, wasn’t a bank vault; it was nothing but cardboard, and she wasn’t safe—no one was safe—as long as she knew exactly where the knives could be found and as long as there was the slightest chance that she could get at them.

A murky red mist of fear churned across the sea of her soul, a cold boiling fog arising from the darkest heart of her, spreading through her mind, clouding her thoughts, increasing her confusion, and with greater confusion came greater terror.

She carried the box of knives out of the house, onto the back porch, intending to bury it in the yard. Which meant digging a hole. Which meant using a shovel or a pick. But those implements were more than mere tools: They were also potential weapons. She could not trust herself with a shovel or a pick.

She dropped the package. The knives clattered together inside the box, a muffled but nonetheless gruesome sound.

Get rid of the knives altogether. Throw them away. That was the only solution.

Tomorrow was trash-pickup day. If she put the knives out with the trash, they would be hauled to the dump in the morning.

She didn’t know where the dump was located. Had no idea. Far out to the east somewhere, a remote landfill. Maybe even in another county. She’d never be able to find the knives again once they were taken to the dump. After the trash collectors visited, she would be safe.

With her heart rattling its cage of ribs, she snatched up the hated package and descended the porch steps.

Tom Wong timed Skeet’s pulse, listened to his heart, and took his blood pressure. The cold stethoscope diaphragm against the kid’s bare chest and the tightness of the pressure cuff around his right arm failed to elicit even a slight response from him. Not a twitch, blink, shiver, sigh, grunt, or grumble. He lay as limp and pale as a peeled, cooked zucchini.

“His pulse was forty-eight when I took it,” Dusty said, watching from the foot of the bed.

“Forty-six now.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Not necessarily. There’s no sign of distress.”

According to his chart, Skeet’s average normal pulse, when he was clean and sober and awake, was sixty-six. Ten or twelve points lower when sleeping.

“Sometimes you see sleeping pulse rates as low as forty,” Tom said, “although it’s rare.” He peeled back Skeet’s eyelids, one at a time, and examined his eyes with an ophthalmoscope. “Pupils are the same size, but it could still be apoplexy.”

“Brain hemorrhage?”

“Or an embolism. Even if it’s not apoplectic, it could be another type of coma. Diabetic. Uremic.”

“He’s not diabetic.”

“I better get the doctor,” Tom said as he left the room.

The rain had stopped, but the oval leaves of the Indian laurels wept as if with green-eyed grief.

Carrying the package of knives, Martie hurried to the east side of the house. She wrenched open the gate of the trash-can enclosure.

An observant part of her, a
sane
part of her imprisoned by her fear, was grimly aware that her posture and her movements were like those of a marionette: head thrust forward on a stiff neck, shoulders drawn up sharply, seemingly all elbows and knees, rushing forward in herky-jerky urgency.

If she were a marionette, then the puppeteer was Johnny Panic. In college, some of her friends had been devoted to the brilliant poetry of Sylvia Plath; and though Martie had found Plath’s work too nihilistic and too depressive to be appealing, she had remembered one painful observation by the poet—a convincing explanation of what motivated some people to be cruel to one another and to make so many self-destructive choices.
From where I sit
, Plath wrote,
I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all—it’s the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.

For all her twenty-eight years, Martie’s world had been largely free of panic, rich instead with a serene sense of belonging, peace, purpose, and connection with creation, because her dad had brought her up to believe that every life had meaning. Smilin’ Bob said that if you were always guided by courage, honor, self-respect, honesty, and compassion, and if you kept your mind and your heart open to the lessons that this world teaches you, then you would eventually understand the meaning of your existence, perhaps even in this world, but certainly in the next. Such a philosophy virtually guaranteed a brighter life, less shadowed by fear than the lives of those who were convinced of meaninglessness. Yet here, at last, inexplicably, Johnny Panic came into Martie’s life, too, somehow snared her in his controlling strings, and was now jerking her through this demented performance.

In the trash enclosure alongside the house, Martie removed the clamp-on lid from the third of three hard-plastic cans, the only one that was empty. She dropped the tape-encased box of knives into the can, jammed the lid on, and fumbled the steel-wire clamp into place.

She should have felt relieved.

Instead, her anxiety grew.

Fundamentally, nothing had changed. She knew where the knives were. She could retrieve them if she was determined. They would not be beyond her reach until the trash collector tossed them into his truck and drove away with them in the morning.

Worse, these knives weren’t the only instruments with which she could give expression to the new violent thoughts that terrified her. Her brightly painted house, with its charming gingerbread millwork, might appear to be a place of peace, but it was in fact a well-equipped abattoir, an armory bulging with weapons; if you had a mind for mayhem, many apparently innocent items could be used as blades or bludgeons.

Frustrated, Martie clasped her hands to her temples as though she could physically suppress the riot of frightful thoughts that churned and shrieked through the dark, twisted streets of her mind. Her head throbbed against her palms and fingers; her skull suddenly seemed elastic. The harder she pressed, the greater her inner tumult became.

Action. Smilin’ Bob always said that action was the answer to most problems. Fear, despair, depression, and even a lot of anger result from a sense that we’re powerless, helpless. Taking action to resolve our problems is healthy, but we must apply some intelligence and a moral perspective if we have any hope of doing the right and most effective thing.

Martie didn’t have a clue as to whether she was doing either the right thing or the most effective thing when she pulled the big, wheeled trash can out of the enclosure and hurriedly rolled it along the walkway toward the back of the house. Applying intelligence and sound moral principles required a calm mind, but she was swept up in a mental tempest, and those inner storm winds were gaining power by the second.