False Memory

In Scottsdale, Arizona, stands a Palladian mansion in which a willowy young heiress named Minette Luckland pounds her mother’s skull to mush with a hammer and shortly thereafter shoots her father in the back of the head while he is eating a slice of crumb cake and watching a rerun of Seinfeld. Subsequently, she leaps from a second-floor gallery, free-falling eighteen feet, impaling herself on a spear held by a statue of Diana, goddess of the moon and the hunt, which stands on a fluted plinth in the center of the entry rotunda. The suicide note, indisputably written in Minette's own neat band, claims that she has been sexually abused since childhood by both parents — an outrageous slander that Dr Ahriman had suggested to her Around Diana’s bronze feet: spatters of blood like red plum-flower petals on white marble floor.

Now, standing half naked in the shadowy kitchen, green eyes reflecting the faint green light of the digital clock in the nearby oven, Susan Jagger was even lovelier than the late Minette. Although her face and form were the stuff of an erotomaniac’s sweat-drenched dreams, Ahriman was less excited by her looks than by the knowledge that in her lithe limbs and supple body was a lethal potential as great as that unleashed in Scottsdale so many years ago.

Her right carotid artery throbbed against the doctor’s thumb, her pulse slow and thick. Fifty-six beats per minute.

She was not afraid. She was calmly awaiting use, as though she were an unthinking tool — or, more accurately, a toy.

By using the trigger name Ben Marco and then by reciting the conditioning haiku, Ahriman had transferred her into an altered state of consciousness. A layman might have used the term hypnotic trance, which to a certain extent it was. A clinical psychologist would have diagnosed it as a fugue, which was closer to the truth.

Neither term was adequately defining.

Once Ahriman recited the haiku, Susan’s personality was more deeply and firmly repressed than if she were hypnotized. In this peculiar condition, she was no longer Susan Jagger in any meaningful sense, but a nonentity, a meat machine whose mind was a blank hard-drive waiting for whatever software Ahriman chose to install.

If she had been in a classic fugue state, which is a serious personality disassociation, she would have appeared to function almost normally, with a few eccentric behaviors but with far less detachment than she now exhibited.

“Susan,” he said, “do you know who I am?”

“Do I?” she asked, her voice fragile and distant.

In this state, she was incapable of answering any question, because she was waiting to be told what he wanted of her, what act she must commit, and even how she must feel about it.

“Am I your psychiatrist, Susan?”

In the gloom, he could almost see the puzzlement on her face. “Are you?”

Until she was released from this state, she would respond only to commands.

He said, “Tell me your name.”

Receiving this direct instruction, she was free to provide whatever knowledge she possessed. “Susan Jagger.”

“Tell me who I am.”

“Dr. Ahriman.”

“Am I your psychiatrist?”

“Are you?”

“Tell me my profession.”

“You’re a psychiatrist.”

This more-than-trance-not-quite-fugue state had not been easily engineered. Much hard work and professional dedication had been required to remake her into this pliant plaything.

Eighteen months ago, before he had been her psychiatrist, on three separate carefully orchestrated occasions, without Susan’s knowledge, Ahriman had administered to her a potent brew of drugs:

Rohypnol, phencyclidine, Valium, and one marvelous cerebrotropic substance not listed in any published pharmacopoeia. The recipe was his own, and he personally compounded each dose from the stock in his private and quite illegal pharmacy, because the ingredients must be precisely balanced if the desired effect were to be achieved.