permanent darkness, madness. Suddenly he recalled going to the house in
Palm Springs, remembered beating the girl, the naked girl, mercilessly
hammering her with his fists. Images of her bruised and bleeding face,
twisted in terror, flickered through his damaged memory like slides
through a broken stereopticon. But had he actually killed her? No, no,
surely not. He enjoyed playing rough with women, yes, he could admit
that, enjoyed hitting them, liked nothing more than watching them cower
before him, but he would never kill anyone, never had and never would,
no, surely not, no, he was a law-abiding citizen, a social and economic
winner, not a thug or psychopath. Yet he was abruptly assaulted by
another unclear but fearful memory of nailing Sarah to the wall in
Rachael’s house in Placentia, I. ailing her naked above the bed as a
warning to Rachael, and he shuddered, then realized it had not been
Sarah but someone else nailed up on that wall, someone whose name he did
not even know, a stranger who had vaguely resembled Rachael, but that
was ridiculous, he had not killed nvo women, had not even killed one,
but now he also recalled a garbage dumpster, a filthy alleyway, and yet
another woman, a third woman, a pretty Latino, her throat slashed by a
scalpel, and he had shoved her corpse into the dumpster…
No. My God, what have I made of myself? he wondered, nausea twisting
his belly. I’m both researcher and subject, creator and creation, and
that has to’ve been a mistake, a terrible mistake. Could I have become.
. . my own Frankenstein monster?
For one dreadful moment, his thought processes cleared, and truth shone
through to him as brightly as the morning sun piercing a freshly washed
window.
He shook his head violently, pretending that he wanted to be rid of the
last traces of the mist that had been clouding his mind, though in fact
he was trying desperately to rid himself of his unwelcome and unbearable
clarity. His badly injured brain and precarious physical condition made
the rejection of the truth an easy matter.
The violent shaking of his head was enough to make him dizzy, blur his
vision, and bring the shrouding mists back to his memory, hindering his
thought processes, leaving him confused and somewhat disoriented.
The dead women were false memories, yes, of course, yes, they could not
be real, because he was incapable of cold-blooded murder. They were as
unreal as his uncle Barry and the strange insects that he sometimes
thought he saw.
Remember the in ice, the mice, the frenzied, biting, angry nice What
mice? What do angry mice have to do with it?
Forget the damn mice.
The important thing was that he could not possibly have murdered even
one person, let alone three. Not him. Not Eric Leben. In the
murkiness of his half-lit and turbulent memory, these nightmare images
were surely nothing but illusions, just like the shadowfires that sprang
from nowhere. They were merely the result of short-circuiting
electrical impulses in his shattered brain tissue, and they would not
stop plaguing him until that tissue was entirely healed. Meanwhile, he
dared not dwell on them, for he would begin to doubt himself and his
perceptions, and in his fragile mental condition, he did not have the
energy for self-doubt.
Trembling, sweating, he pulled open the door, stepped into the garage,
and switched on the light. His black Mercedes 560 S.E.L was parked
where he had left it last night.
When he looked at the Mercedes, he was suddenly stricken by a memory of
another car, an older and less elegant one, in the trunk of which he had
stashed a dead woman No. False memories again. Illusions.
Delusions.
He carefully placed one splayed hand against the wall, leaned for a
moment, gathering strength and trying to clear his head. When at last
he looked up, he could not recall why he was in the garage.
Gradually, however, he was once again filled with the instinctive sense
that he was being stalked, that someone was coming to get him, and that
he must arm himself.
His muddied mind would not produce a clear picture of the people who