Koontz, Dean - False Memory

VIP免费
2024-12-05 0 0 1.97MB 456 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
1
FALSE MEMORY
DEAN KOONTZ
This book is dedicated to
Tim Hely Hutchinson.
Your faith in my work,
a long time ago
—and now for many years— gave me heart
when I most needed it.
And to
Jane Morpeth.
Ours is the longest
editorial relationship
of my career,
which is a testament to
your exceptional patience,
kindness, and tolerance for fools!
2
AUTOPHOBIA is a real personality disorder. The term is used to describe three different conditions:
(1) fear of being alone; (2) fear of being egotistical; (3) fear of oneself. The third is the rarest of
these conditions.
This phantasm
of falling petals vanishes into moon and flowers.
—OKYO
Whiskers of the cat,
webbed toes on my swimming dog:
God is in details.
—THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS
In the real world as in dreams, nothing is quite what it seems.
—THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS
Life is an unrelenting comedy. Therein lies the tragedy of it.
—MARTIN STILLWATER
3
1
On that Tuesday in January, when her life changed forever, Martine Rhodes woke with a
headache, developed a sour stomach after washing down two aspirin with grapefruit juice,
guaranteed herself an epic bad-hair day by mistakenly using Dustin’s shampoo instead of her
own, broke a fingernail, burnt her toast, discovered ants swarming through the cabinet under the
kitchen sink, eradicated the pests by firing a spray can of insecticide as ferociously as Sigourney
Weaver wielded a flamethrower in one of those old extraterrestrial-bug movies, cleaned up the
resultant carnage with paper towels, hummed Bach’s Requiem as she solemnly consigned the
tiny bodies to the trash can, and took a telephone call from her mother, Sabrina, who still prayed
for the collapse of Martie’s marriage three years after the wedding. Throughout, she remained
upbeat—even enthusiastic— about the day ahead, because from her late father, Robert “Smilin’
Bob” Woodhouse, she had inherited an optimistic nature, formidable coping skills, and a deep
love of life in addition to blue eyes, ink-black hair, and ugly toes.
Thanks, Daddy.
After convincing her ever hopeful mother that the Rhodes marriage remained happy, Martie
slipped into a leather jacket and took her golden retriever, Valet, on his morning walk. Step by
step, her headache faded.
Along the whetstone of clear eastern sky, the sun sharpened
scalpels of light. Out of the west, however, a cool onshore breeze pushed malignant masses of
dark clouds.
The dog regarded the heavens with concern, sniffed the air warily, and pricked his pendant ears
at the hiss-clatter of palm fronds stirred by the wind. Clearly, Valet knew a storm was coming.
He was a gentle, playful dog. Loud noises frightened him, however, as though he had been a
soldier in a former life and was haunted by memories of battlefields blasted by cannon fire.
Fortunately for him, rotten weather in southern California was seldom accompanied by thunder.
Usually, rain fell unannounced, hissing on the streets, whispering through the foliage, and these
were sounds that even Valet found soothing.
Most mornings, Martie walked the dog for an hour, along the narrow tree-lined streets of Corona
Del Mar, but she had a special obligation every Tuesday and Thursday that limited their
excursion to fifteen minutes on those days. Valet seemed to have a calendar in his furry head,
because on their Tuesday and Thursday expeditions, he never dawdled, finishing his toilet close
to home.
This morning, only one block from their house, on the grassy sward between the sidewalk and
the curb, the pooch looked around shyly, discreetly lifted his right leg, and as usual made water
as though embarrassed by the lack of privacy.
Less than a block farther, he was preparing to conclude the second half of his morning business
4
when a passing garbage truck backfired, startling him. He huddled behind a queen palm, peering
cautiously around one side of the tree bole and then around the other, convinced that the
terrifying vehicle would reappear.
“No problem,” Martie assured him. “The big bad truck is gone. Everything’s fine. This is now a
safe-to-poop zone.”
Valet was unconvinced. He remained wary.
Martie was blessed with Smilin’ Bob’s patience, too, especially when dealing with Valet, whom
she loved almost as much as she might have loved a child if she’d had one. He was sweet-
tempered and beautiful: light gold, with gold-and-white feathering on his legs, soft snow-white
flags on his butt, and a lush tail.
Of course, when the dog was in a doing-business squat, like now, Martie never looked at him,
because he was as self-conscious as a nun in a topless bar. While waiting, she softly sang Jim
Croce’s “Time in a Bottle,” which always relaxed him.
As she began the second verse, a sudden chill climbed the ladder of her spine, causing her to fall
silent. She was not a woman given to premonitions, but as the icy quiver ascended to the back of
her neck, she was overcome by a sense of impending danger.
Turning, she half expected to see an approaching assailant or a hurtling car. Instead, she was
alone on this quiet residential street.
Nothing rushed toward her with lethal purpose. The only moving things were those harried by
the wind. Trees and shrubs shivered. A few crisp brown leaves skittered along the pavement.
Garlands of tinsel and Christmas lights, from the recent holiday, rustled and rattled under the
eaves of a nearby house.
Still uneasy, but feeling foolish, Martie let out the breath that she’d been holding. When the
exhalation whistled between her teeth, she realized that her jaws were clenched.
She was probably still spooked from the dream that awakened her after midnight, the same one
she’d had on a few other recent nights. The man made of dead, rotting leaves, a nightmare figure.
Whirling, raging.
Then her gaze dropped to her elongated shadow, which stretched across the close-cropped grass,
draped the curb, and folded onto the cracked concrete pavement. Inexplicably, her uneasiness
swelled into alarm.
She took one step backward, then a second, and of course her shadow moved with her. Only as
she retreated a third step did she realize that this very silhouette was what frightened her.
Ridiculous. More absurd than her dream. Yet something in her shadow was not right: a jagged
distortion, a menacing quality.
Her heart knocked as hard as a fist on a door.
In the severe angle of the morning sun, the houses and trees cast distorted images, too, but she
saw nothing fearsome in their stretched and buckled shadows—only in her own.
She recognized the absurdity of her fear, but this awareness did not diminish her anxiety. Terror
courted her, and she stood hand in hand with panic.
5
The shadow seemed to throb with the thick slow beat of its own heart. Staring at it, she was
overcome with dread.
Martie closed her eyes and tried to get control of herself.
For a moment, she felt so light that the wind seemed strong enough to sweep her up and carry her
inland with the relentlessly
advancing clouds, toward the steadily shrinking band of cold blue sky. As she drew a series of
deep breaths, however, weight gradually returned to her.
When she dared to look again at her shadow, she no longer sensed anything unusual about it. She
let out a sigh of relief.
Her heart continued to pound, powered not by irrational terror anymore, but by an
understandable concern as to the cause of this peculiar episode. She’d never previously
experienced such a thing.
Head cocked quizzically, Valet was staring at her.
She had dropped his leash.
Her hands were damp with sweat. She blotted her palms on her blue jeans.
When she realized that the dog had finished his toilet, Martie slipped her right hand into a plastic
pet-cleanup bag, using it as a glove. Being a good neighbor, she neatly collected Valet’s gift,
turned the bright blue bag inside out, twisted it shut, and tied a double knot in the neck.
The retriever watched her sheepishly.
“If you ever doubt my love, baby boy,” Martie said, “remember I do this every day.”
Valet looked grateful. Or perhaps only relieved.
Performance of this familiar, humble task restored her mental balance. The little blue bag and its
warm contents anchored her to reality. The weird incident remained troubling, intriguing, but it
no longer frightened her.
2
Skeet sat high on the roof, silhouetted against the somber sky, hallucinating and suicidal. Three
fat crows circled twenty feet over his head, as if they sensed carrion in the making.
Down here at ground level, Motherwell stood in the driveway, big hands fisted on his hips.
Though he faced away from the street, his fury was evident in his posture. He was in a head-
cracking mood.
Dusty parked his van at the curb, behind a patrol car emblazoned with the name of the private-
security company that served this pricey, gated residential community. A tall guy in a uniform
was standing beside the car, managing to appear simultaneously authoritative and superfluous.
The three-story house, atop which Skeet Caulfield contemplated his fragile mortality, was a ten-
thousand-square-foot, four-million-dollar atrocity. Several Mediterranean styles—Spanish
modern, classic Tuscan, Greek Revival, and early Taco Bell—had been slammed together by an
6
architect who had either a lousy education or a great sense of humor. What appeared to be acres
of steeply pitched, barrel-tile roofs hipped into one another with chaotic exuberance, punctuated
by too many chimneys badly disguised as bell towers with cupolas, and poor Skeet was perched
on the highest ridge line, next to the most imposingly ugly of these belfries.
Perhaps because he was unsure of his role in this situation and
needed something to do, the security guard said, “Can I help you, sir?”
“I’m the painting contractor,” Dusty replied.
The sun-weathered guard was either suspicious of Dusty or squint-eyed by nature, with so many
lines folded into his face that he looked like a piece of origami. “The painting contractor, huh?”
he said skeptically.
Dusty was wearing white cotton pants, a white pullover, a white denim jacket, and a white cap
with RHODES’ PAINTING printed in blue script above the visor, which should have lent some
credibility to his claim. He considered asking the leery guard if the neighborhood was besieged
by professional burglars disguised as housepainters, plumbers, and chimney sweeps, but instead
he simply said, “I’m Dustin Rhodes,” and pointed to the lettering on his cap. “That man up there
is one of my crew.”
“Crew?” The security man scowled. “Is that what you call it?”
Maybe he was being sarcastic or maybe he was just not good at conversation.
“Most painting contractors call it a crew, yeah,” Dusty said, staring up at Skeet, who waved. “We
used to call ours a strike force, but that scared off some homeowners, sounded too aggressive, so
now we just call it a crew, like everyone else.”
“Huh,” the guard said. His squint tightened. He might have been trying to figure out what Dusty
was talking about, or he might have been deciding whether or not to punch him in the mouth.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get Skeet down,” Dusty assured him.
“Who?”
“The jumper,” Dusty elucidated, heading along the driveway toward Motherwell.
“You think I should maybe call the fire department?” the guard asked, following him.
“Nah. He won’t torch himself before he jumps.”
“This is a nice neighborhood.”
“Nice? Hell, it’s perfect.”
“A suicide is going to upset our residents.”
“We’ll scoop up the guts, bag the remains, hose away the blood, and they’ll never know it
happened.”
Dusty was relieved and surprised that no neighbors had gathered to watch the drama. At this
early hour, maybe they were still eating
7
caviar muffins and drinking champagne and orange juice out of gold goblets. Fortunately,
Dusty’s clients—the Sorensons—on whose roof Skeet was schmoozing with Death, were
vacationing in London.
Dusty said, “Morning, Ned.”
“Bastard,” Motherwell replied. “Me?”
“Him,” Motherwell said, pointing to Skeet on the roof.
At six feet five and 260 pounds, Ned Motherwell was half a foot taller and nearly one hundred
pounds heavier than Dusty. His arms could not have been more muscular if they had been the
transplanted legs of Clydesdale horses. He was wearing a short-sleeve T-shirt but no jacket, in
spite of the cool wind; weather never seemed to bother Motherwell any more than it might
trouble a granite statue of Paul Bunyan.
Tapping the phone clipped to his belt, Motherwell said, “Damn, boss, I called you like yesterday.
Where you been?”
“You called me ten minutes ago, and where I’ve been is running traffic lights and mowing down
school kids in crosswalks.”
“There’s a twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit inside this community,” the security guard
advised solemnly.
Glowering up at Skeet Caulfield, Motherwell shook his fist. “Man, I’d like to hammer that
punk.”
“He’s a confused kid,” Dusty said.
“He’s a drug-sucking jerk,” Motherwell disagreed.
“He’s been clean lately.”
“He’s a sewer.”
“You’ve got such a big heart, Ned.”
“What’s important is I’ve got a brain, and I’m not going to screw it up with drugs, and I don’t
want to be around people who self-destruct, like him.”
Ned, the crew foreman, was a Straight Edger. This unlikely but still-growing movement among
people in their teens and twenties— more men than women—required adherents to forgo drugs,
excess alcohol, and casual sex. They were into head-banging rock—’n’-roll, slam-dancing, self-
restraint, and self-respect. One element or another of the establishment might have embraced
them as an inspiring cultural trend—if Straight Edgers had not loathed the system and despised
both major political parties. Occasionally, at a club or concert, when they discovered a doper
among them, they beat the crap
out of him and didn’t bother to call it tough love, which was also a practice likely to keep them
out of the political mainstream.
Dusty liked both Motherwell and Skeet, although for different reasons. Motherwell was smart,
funny, and reliable—if judgmental. Skeet was gentle and sweet—although probably doomed to a
8
life of joyless self-indulgence, days without purpose, and nights filled with loneliness.
Motherwell was by far the better employee of the two. If Dusty had operated strictly by the
textbook rules of intelligent business management, he would have cut Skeet from the crew a long
time ago.
Life would be easy if common sense ruled; but sometimes the easy way doesn’t feel like the right
way.
“We’re probably going to get rained out,” Dusty said. “So why’d you send him up on the roof in
the first place?”
“I didn’t. I told ‘im to sand the window casings and the trim on the ground floor. Next thing I
know, he’s up there, saying he’s going to take a header into the driveway.”
“I’ll get him.”
“I tried. Closer I came to him, the more hysterical he got.”
“He’s probably scared of you,” Dusty said.
“He damn well better be. If I kill him, it’ll be more painful than if he splits his skull on the
concrete.”
The guard flipped open his cell phone. “Maybe I’d better call the police.”
“No!” Realizing that his voice had been too sharp, Dusty took a deep breath and more calmly
said, “Neighborhood like this, people don’t want a fuss made when it can be avoided.”
If the cops came, they might get Skeet down safely, but then they would commit him to a
psychiatric ward, where he’d be held for at least three days. Probably longer. The last thing Skeet
needed was to fall into the hands of one of those head doctors who were unreservedly
enthusiastic about dipping into the psychoactive pharmacopoeia to ladle up a fruit punch of
behavior-modification drugs that, while imposing a short-term placidity, would ultimately leave
him with more short-circuiting synapses than he had now.
“Neighborhoods like this,” Dusty said, “don’t want spectacles.”
Surveying the immense houses along the street, the regal palms and stately ficuses, the well-
tended lawns and flower beds, the guard said, “I’ll give you ten minutes.”
Motherwell raised his right fist and shook it at Skeet.
Under the circling halo of crows, Skeet waved.
The security guard said, “Anyway, he doesn’t look suicidal.”
“The little geek says he’s happy because an angel of death is sitting beside him,” Motherwell
explained, “and the angel has shown him what it’s like on the other side, and what it’s like, he
says, is really awesomely cool.”
“I’ll go talk to him,” Dusty said.
Motherwell scowled. “Talk, hell. Give him a push.”
9
3
As the heavy sky, swollen with unspent rain, sagged toward the earth and as the wind rose,
Martie and the dog returned home at a trot. She repeatedly glanced down at her pacing shadow,
but then the storm clouds overwhelmed the sun, and her dark companion vanished as if it had
seeped into the earth, returning to some nether-world.
She surveyed nearby houses as she passed them, wondering if anyone had been at a window to
see her peculiar behavior, hoping that she hadn’t actually looked as odd as she’d felt.
In this picturesque neighborhood, the homes were generally old and small, though many were
lovingly detailed, possessing more charm and character than half the people of Martie’s
acquaintance. Spanish architecture dominated, but here were also Cotswold cottages, French
chaumières, German Häuschens, and Art Deco bungalows. The eclectic mix was pleasing,
woven together by a green embroidery of laurels, palms, fragrant eucalyptuses, ferns, and
cascading bougainvillea.
Martie, Dusty, and Valet lived in a perfectly scaled, two-story, miniature Victorian with
gingerbread millwork. Dusty had painted the structure in the colorful yet sophisticated tradition
of Victorian houses on certain streets in San Francisco: pale yellow background; blue, gray, and
green ornamentation; with a judicious use of pink in a single detail along the cornice and on the
window pediments.
Martie loved their home and thought it was a fine testament to Dusty’s talent and craftsmanship.
Her mother, however, upon first seeing the paint job, had declared, “It looks as if clowns live
here.”
As Martie opened the wooden gate at the north side of the house and followed Valet along the
narrow brick walkway to the backyard, she wondered if her unreasonable fear somehow had its
origins in the depressing telephone call from her mother. After all, the greatest source of stress in
her life was Sabrina’s refusal to accept Dusty. These were the two people whom Martie loved
most in all the world, and she longed for peace between them.
Dusty wasn’t part of the problem. Sabrina was the only combatant in this sad war. Frustratingly,
Dusty’s refusal to engage in battle seemed only to harden her hostility.
Stopping at the trash enclosure near the back of the house, Martie removed the lid from one of
the cans and deposited the blue plastic bag full of Valet’s finest.
Perhaps her sudden inexplicable anxiety had been spawned by her mother’s whining about
Dusty’s supposed paucity of ambition and about his lack of what Sabrina deemed an adequate
education. Martie was afraid that her mother’s venom would eventually poison her marriage.
Against her will, she might start to see Dusty through her mother’s mercilessly critical eyes. Or
maybe Dusty would begin to resent Martie for the low esteem in which Sabrina held him.
In fact, Dusty was the wisest man Martie had ever known. The engine between his ears was even
more finely tuned than her father’s had been, and Smilin’ Bob had been immeasurably smarter
than his nickname implied. As for ambition. . . Well, she would rather have a kind husband than
an ambitious one, and you’d find more kindness in Dusty than you’d find greed in Vegas.
Besides, Martie’s own career didn’t fulfill the expectations her mother had for her. After earning
10
a bachelor’s degree—majoring in business, minoring in marketing—followed by an M.B.A., she
had detoured from the road that might have taken her to high-corporate executive glory. Instead,
she became a freelance video-game designer. She’d sold a few minor hits entirely of her own
creation, and on a for-hire basis she had designed scenarios, characters, and fantasy worlds based
on concepts by others. She earned good money, if not yet great, and she suspected that being a
woman in a male-
dominated field would ultimately be an enormous advantage, as her point of view was fresh. She
liked her work, and recently she’d signed a contract to create an entirely new game based on
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which might produce enough royalties to impress
Scrooge McDuck. Nevertheless, her mother dismissively described her work as “carnival stuff,”
apparently because Sabrina associated video games with arcades, arcades with amusement parks,
and amusement parks with carnivals. Martie supposed she was lucky that her mother hadn’t gone
one step further and described her as a sideshow freak.
As Valet accompanied her up the back steps and across the porch, Martie said, “Maybe a
psychoanalyst would say, just for a minute back there, my shadow was a symbol of my mother
her negativity—”
Valet grinned up at her and wagged his plumed tail.
“—and maybe my little anxiety attack expressed an unconscious concern that Mom is. . . well,
that she’s going to be able to mess with my head eventually, pollute me with her toxic attitude.”
Martie fished a set of keys from a jacket pocket and unlocked the door.
“My God, I sound like a college sophomore halfway through Basic Psych.”
She often talked to the dog. The dog listened but never replied, and his silence was one of the
pillars of their wonderful relationship.
“Most likely,” she said, as she followed Valet into the kitchen, “there was no psychological
symbolism, and I’m just going totally nutball crazy.”
Valet chuffed as though agreeing with the diagnosis of madness, and then he enthusiastically
lapped water from his bowl.
Five mornings a week, following a long walk, either she or Dusty spent half an hour grooming
the dog on the back porch, combing and brushing. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, grooming
followed the afternoon stroll. Their house was pretty much free of dog hair, and she intended to
keep it that way.
“You are obliged,” she reminded Valet, “not to shed until further notice. And remember—just
because we’re not here to catch you in the act, doesn’t mean suddenly you have furniture
privileges and unlimited access to the refrigerator.”
He rolled his eyes at her as if to say he was offended by her lack of trust. Then he continued
drinking.
In the half bath adjacent to the kitchen, Martie switched on the light. She intended to check her
makeup and brush her windblown hair.
As she stepped to the sink, sudden fright cinched her chest again, and her heart felt as though it
were painfully compressed. She wasn’t seized by the certainty that some mortal danger loomed
摘要：

1FALSEMEMORYDEANKOONTZThisbookisdedicatedtoTimHelyHutchinson.Yourfaithinmywork,alongtimeago—andnowformanyyears—gavemeheartwhenImostneededit.AndtoJaneMorpeth.Oursisthelongesteditorialrelationshipofmycareer,whichisatestamenttoyourexceptionalpatience,kindness,andtoleranceforfools!2AUTOPHOBIAisarealpers...

展开>> 收起<<
Koontz, Dean - False Memory.pdf

共456页,预览10页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：456 页 大小：1.97MB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-05

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 456
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注