The Key to Midnight (15 page)

“You creep, you sick sonofabitch!”

They struggled on the couch. She was atop him, trying to hurt him, so badly
needing
to hurt him, but he was holding her off, and the longer that he prevented her from drawing his blood the more enraged she became.

“I know what you are,” she shrieked, “I know
exactly
what you are, oh, yes, you
rotten
bastard.”

Her heart was thudding with terror that she couldn’t understand. Her vision blurred with a fierce anger that wasn’t real, for she had nothing to be angry
about,
yet her fury was so powerful that it was shaking her to pieces.

“You’re one of
Them!”
she cried, and she had no idea what she meant by that.

“Who?”

“I hate your guts,” she said, trying to jam her knee into his crotch and break his hold on her.

“Listen, listen to me,” he demanded, holding both her wrists, struggling against her determined assault. “Listen, damn it!”

But she dared not listen, because if she listened, the walls would complete their inward journey, and she would be crushed. Listening to him was what had gotten her into this trouble in the first place.

“Stop it, Joanna!”

She rolled off the couch, pulling him with her, kicking at him, twisting in his grasp. She tore loose and scrambled to her feet. “Get out! I’ll call the police. Get the hell out of my house,” she shouted, and she could feel that her face was wrenched into a mask of blind fury.

It was an inexplicable rage—except somehow she knew that she would be all right if she could force him to leave. When he was gone, when she was alone, the walls would roll back. The air would no longer be so thick, so difficult to breathe. The terror would subside when at last he went away, and thereafter she would find peace again.

“You don’t really want me to go,” he said, getting to his own feet, calmly challenging her.

She slapped his face so hard that her hand stung as if an electrical current had blasted through it.

He didn’t move.

She slapped him again, harder, leaving the imprint of her hand on his cheek.

With no anger in his face, with an infuriating compassion in his eyes, he reached out to touch her.

She shrank back.

“Give me your hand,” he pleaded.

“Get away.”

“I’m going to lead you through this.”

“Get out of my life.”

“Give me your hand.”

She backed into one corner of the living room. Nowhere to go. He stood in front of her. Trapped.

She was shaking violently with fear. Her heart was knocking in her breast. She couldn’t get her breath; each inhalation was shaken out of her before she could draw it all the way into her lungs.

He took her hand before she realized what he’d done. She no longer had the strength to wrench away from him.

“I’m going to stay here until you close your eyes and cooperate with me,” he said quietly. “Or until the walls crush you or the ceiling presses you into the floor. Which will it be?”

She slumped against the wall.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

Tears blurred her vision so completely that she couldn’t see his face. He might have been anyone.

“Close your eyes.”

Weeping, she slid down the wall, her back in the corner, until she was sitting on the floor.

He dropped to his knees in front of her. Now he was holding both of her hands. “Close your eyes, Joanna. Please. Trust me.”

Sobbing uncontrollably, Joanna closed her eyes, and immediately she felt that she was in a coffin, one of those hulking bronze models with a lead lining, and the lid was bolted down just inches above her face. Such a narrow space, shallow and dark, as black as the heart of a moonless midnight, so utterly lightless that the darkness might have been a living thing, an amorphous entity that flowed all around her and molded to her shape, sucking the heat of life out of her.

Nevertheless, cornered and in an extreme state of helplessness, she could do nothing but keep her eyes closed and listen to Alex. His voice was a beacon that marked the way to release, to freedom.

“Keep your eyes closed. No need to look,” Alex said softly. “I’ll be your eyes. I’ll tell you what’s happening.”

She couldn’t stop sobbing.

“The walls aren’t closing in as fast as they were. Barely creeping inward now. Barely creeping... and now... now they’ve stopped altogether. The ceiling too... not descending any more. Everything’s stopped. Stable. Do you hear me, Joanna?”

“Y-yes.”

“No, don’t open your eyes yet. Squeeze them tight shut. Just visualize what I’m telling you. See the world through me.”

She nodded.

The air wasn’t normal, but it was thinner than it had been since the seizure had stricken her. Breathable. Sweet.

“Eyes closed... closed... but see what’s happening,” Alex said as softly and lullingly as a hypnotist. “The ceiling is starting to withdraw ... moving up where it belongs. The walls too... pulling back from you, back from us, away... slowly away. You understand? The room is getting larger... a lot of space now. Do you feel the room gradually getting bigger, Joanna?”

“Yes,” she said, and though hot tears were still streaming from her eyes, she was no longer sobbing.

Alex spoke to her in that fashion for several minutes, and Joanna listened closely to each word and visualized each statement. Eventually the air pressure returned to normal; she was no longer suffocating.

When her tears had dried and when her breathing had become rhythmic, relaxed, almost normal, he said, “Okay, open your eyes.”

She opened them, although reluctantly. The living room was as it should be.

“You made it all go away,” she said wonderingly. “You made it right again.”

He was still holding her hands. He gently squeezed them, smiled, and said, “Not just me. We did it together. And from now on, I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to do it alone.”

“Oh, no. Never by myself.”

“Yes, you will. Because this phobia isn’t a natural part of your psychological makeup. I’d bet everything I own that it’s just posthypnotic suggestion. You don’t need psychoanalysis to get rid of it. From now on, when a seizure hits you, just close your eyes and picture everything opening up and moving away from you.”

“But I’ve tried that before. It never worked... until now, until you....”

“Just once, you needed someone to hold your hand and force you to face up to the fear, someone who wouldn’t be driven away. Until tonight, you thought it was an interior problem, an embarrassing mental illness. Now you know it’s an
exterior
problem, not your fault, like a curse someone placed on you.”

Joanna looked at the ceiling, daring it to descend.

Alex said, “Subsequent attacks ought to be less and less fierce—until they finally stop altogether. Neither the paranoia nor the claustrophobia has any genuine roots in you. They were both grafted onto you by the bastards who transformed you from Lisa into Joanna. You’ve been programmed. Now you have the power to reprogram yourself to be like other people.”

To be like other people
...

For the first time in more than a decade, Joanna felt that she had at least some control of her life. She could at last deal with the malignant forces that had made a loner of her. From this day forward, if she wanted an intimate relationship with Alex or with anyone else, nothing within her could prevent her from having what she wanted. The only obstacles remaining were external. That thought was exhilarating, like a rejuvenation drug, water from the fountain of youth. The years dropped from her. Time ran backward. She felt as though she were a girl again. She would never hereafter cringe in fear as the ceiling descended and the walls closed in on her, nor would spells of irrational paranoia keep her from the succor and sanctuary of her friends.

The cage door had been opened. She was free.

The photographs no longer disturbed Joanna. She studied them in the same spirit of awe that people must have known when gazing into the first mirrors many centuries ago—with a superstitious fascination but not with fear.

Alex sat beside her on the sofa, reading aloud from some of the reports in the massive Chelgrin file. They discussed what he read, trying to see the information from every angle, searching for a perspective that might have been overlooked at the time of the investigation.

As the evening wore on, Joanna made a list of the ways in which she and Lisa Chelgrin were alike. Intellectually, she was more than half convinced that Alex was right, that she was indeed the missing daughter of the senator. But emotionally, she lacked conviction. Could it really be possible that the mother and father she remembered so well—Elizabeth and Robert Rand—were mere- ly phantoms, that they had never existed except in her mind? And the apartment in London—was it conceivable that she had never actually lived in that place? She needed to see the evidence in black and white, a list of reasons why she should seriously consider such outrageous concepts.

As Joanna was reading the list yet again, Alex pulled another report from the file, glanced at it, and said, “Here’s something damned curious. I’d forgotten all about it.”

“What?”

“It’s an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Morimoto.”

“Who’re they?”

“Lovely people,” Alex said. “Domestic servants. They’ve been employed by Tom Chelgrin since Lisa... since you were five years old.”

“The senator brought a couple from Japan to work in his home?”

“No, no. They’re both second-generation Japanese Americans. From San Francisco, I think.”

“Still, like you said, it’s curious. Now there’s a Japanese link between me and Lisa.”

“You haven’t heard the half of it.”

Frowning, she said, “You think the Morimotos had something to do with my ... with Lisa’s disappearance?”

“Not at all. They’re good people. Not a drop of larceny in them. Besides, they weren’t in Jamaica when Lisa disappeared. They were at the senator’s house in Virginia, near Washington.”

“So what is it exactly that you find so curious about them?”

Paging through the transcript of the Morimoto interview, he said, “Well... the Morimotos were around the house all day, every day when Lisa was growing up. Fumi was the cook. She did a little light housekeeping too. Her husband, Koji, was a combination house manager and butler. They both were Lisa’s baby-sitters when she was growing up, and she adored them. She picked up a lot of Japanese from them. The senator was all in favor of that. He thought it was a good idea to teach languages to children when they were very young and had fewer mental blocks against learning. He sent Lisa to an elementary school where she was taught French beginning in the first grade—”

“I speak French.”

“—and where she was taught German starting in the third grade.”

“I speak German too,” Joanna said.

She added those items to her list of similarities. The pen trembled slightly in her fingers.

“So what I’m leading up to,” Alex said, “is that Tom Chelgrin used the Morimotos to tutor Lisa in Japanese. She spoke it fluently. Better than she spoke either French or German.”

Joanna looked up from the list that she was making. She felt dizzy. “My God.”

“Yeah. Too incredible to be coincidence.”

“But I learned Japanese in England,” she insisted.

“Did you?”

“At the university—and from my boyfriend.”

“Did you?”

They stared at each other.

For Joanna, the impossible now seemed probable.

Joanna found the letters in her bedroom closet, at the bottom of a box of snapshots and other mementos. They were in one thin bundle, tied together with faded yellow ribbon. She brought them back to the living room and gave them to Alex. “I don’t really know why I’ve held on to them all these years.”

“You probably kept them because you were
told
to keep them.”

“Told—by whom?”

“By the people who kidnapped Lisa. By the people who tinkered with your mind. Letters like these are superficial proof of your Joanna Rand identity.”

“Only superficial?”

“We’ll see.”

The packet contained five letters, three of which were from J. Compton Woolrich, a London solicitor and the executor of the Robert and Elizabeth Rand estate. The final letter from Woolrich mentioned the enclosure of an after-tax, estate-settlement check in excess of three hundred thousand dollars.

As far as Joanna could see, that money from Woolrich blasted an enormous hole in Alex’s conspiracy theory.

“You actually received that check?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And it cleared? You got the money?”

“Every dime. And if there was such a large estate, then my father and mother—Robert and Elizabeth—must have been real people.”