False Memory

He would step back into the lounge and instruct Jennifer to call the police and the paramedics, after all. While she was occupied on the phone, he would stoop beside Skeet, ostensibly to assist as best he could, but actually to cover the man’s mouth and pinch his nose shut for about a minute and a half, which should be long enough to finish him, considering his desperate condition.

Then, quickly back into the hallway, directly to a nearby maintenance closet that could be opened with his suite key. There, tuck the gun, the holster, and the blue bag deep behind rest-room supplies. Later, retrieve them after the police were gone.

Defy the tooth of time.

Hurry, hurry.

As he turned away from the corridor, intending to return to his office, he realized that no bloodstains marred the hallway carpet, which should have been liberally spattered if Skeet had traveled over it, gushing as he was now gushing in the reception lounge. Even as his lightning-quick gamesman’s mind was arriving at the significance of this odd detail, the doctor heard Moshlien’s door open behind him, and he cringed in expectation of the usual Say, Abriman, do you have a moment? and the torrent of idiocies that would follow it.

The words never came, but bullets did. The doctor didn’t hear a single shot, but he felt them, all right, at least three, slamming into him from the small of his back in a diagonal line to his right shoulder.

With less grace than he would have liked, he staggered into the reception lounge. Fell half on top of Skeet. Rolled off the little dope fiend in revulsion. Rolled onto his back, and looked up at the doorway.

The Keanuphobe stood on the threshold, bracing the door open with her body, holding a silenced pistol with both hands. “You’re one of the machines,” she said. “That’s why you weren’t really paying attention during our sessions. Machines don’t care about real people like me.”

Ahriman recognized in her eyes a fearsome quality that he had overlooked before: She was one of The Knowers, those girls who could see right through his disguises and deceptions, who mocked him with their eyes, with smug smiles and sly looks behind his back, who knew something hilarious about him that he himself did not know. Since he was fifteen, when he’d grown into his fine face, The Knowers had not been able to penetrate his facade, and so he had ceased to fear them. Now this.

He tried to raise the Beretta and return fire, but he discovered that he was paralyzed.

She pointed the pistol at his face.

She was reality and she was fantasy, truth and lie, an object of mirth, yet deadly serious, all things to all people and a mystery to herself, the quintessential person for her times. She was a nouveau riche ditz with a husband as dull as a spoon, but she was also Diana, the goddess of the moon and the hunt, on whose bronze spear Minette Luckland had impaled herself in that Palladian mansion in Scottsdale, after first killing her father with a handgun and her mother with a hammer.

How fun that had been, but how lacking in fun this was.

My rich Diana. Fly me to the moon with you. Dance among the stars.

Treacle. Romantic hogwash. Derivative. Unworthy.

My rich Diana. I hate you, hate you, hate you. Hate you, hate you, hate.

“Do it,” he said.

The goddess emptied the magazine into his face, and the doctor’s phantasm of falling petals vanished into moon and flowers. And fire.

As she and Dusty came out of the elevator alcove, Martie saw a woman standing half in the doorway to Ahriman’s reception lounge, near the end of the corridor. The pink Chanel suit marked her as the same woman who had followed Skeet into the elevator, downstairs in the lobby. She moved all the way into the office, out of sight.

Running along the hall, with Dusty close behind, Martie thought of enchanted New Mexico — and two dead men at the bottom of an ancient well. The purity of falling snow — and all the blood it covered. She thought of Claudette’s face — and Claudette’s heart. The beauty of haiku — and the hideous use to which it had been put. The glory of high green branches — and spiders squirming out of egg cases inside curled leaves. Things visible and invisible. Things revealed and hidden. This flash of cheerful pink, baby-pink, cherry-blossom pink, but a sense of darkness in the flash, poison in the pink.

All her dread expectations became dread realities in gruesome detail when she pushed through the door into Mark Ahriman’s reception lounge and was received by bodies sprawled in blood.

The doctor lay faceup, but without a face: thin noxious smoke rising from scorched hair, terrible craters in the flesh, cheekbones imploded, red pools where eyes had once been — and beyond one torn and gaping cheek, half a grin.

Facedown, Skeet was the less dramatic figure of the two, and yet more real. His own red lake surrounded him, and he was so frail that he seemed to float in the crimson as though he were but a tangle of rags.