False Memory

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: