False Memory

leaped down the stairs two at a time, his heavy footfalls slapping off the concrete walls, echoing and re-echoing over one another, until by the time he came to the bottom of the second flight, he seemed to have left a wildly applauding audience behind him.
    The ground-floor hallway was deserted.
    He pushed through a door into the receiving room at the back of the building. Nobody here.
    One more door, this opening to the alleyway.
    As Ahriman stepped outside, the wind rattled the lid on one of the Dumpsters and seemed to blow a red Saturn past him.
    Behind the wheel was Dustin Rhodes. He glanced at the doctor. Fright and too much knowledge were written across the house-painter’s face.
    The dope-withered, snot-nosed, useless little shit of a brother was in the backseat. He waved.
    Taillights dwindling like those of a spaceship going to warp speed, the Saturn rocketed recklessly into the night.
    The doctor hoped the car would slam into a Dumpster behind one of the buildings along the alleyway, hoped it would spin out of control and tumble and explode into flames. He hoped that Dusty and Martie and Skeet would be burned alive, their carcasses reduced to scorched bones and charred hunks of smoking meat, and then he hoped that out of the sky would come a great flock of big mutant crows that would settle into the blasted ruins of the Saturn and tear at the cooked flesh of the deceased, tear and tear and rip and rend, until not an edible scrap remained.
    None of that happened.
    The car traveled two blocks before turning left at a corner, onto a main street.
    Long after the Saturn was out of sight, the doctor stood in the middle of the alleyway, staring into its wake.
    The wind buffeted him. He welcomed its cold blasts, as though it might blow the confusion out of him and clear his head.
    In the outgoing waiting room earlier in the day, Dusty had been reading The Manchurian Candidate, which the doctor had planted with Martie as a wild card that, if ever played, would add an acceptable measure of excitement to this game. Reading the thriller, Rhodes would experience little frissons of fear too piercing to be explained by the tale itself, especially when he found the name Viola Narvilly, and he would recognize odd connections to the events in his own life. The book would start him thinking, wondering.
    Nevertheless, the possibility that the Condon novel alone would spur Dusty to make great leaps of logic, leading to his understanding of the doctor’s true nature and real agenda, was so remote that there was a far greater likelihood of astronauts discovering a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise on Mars, with Elvis chowing down in a corner booth. And he could see no—underscore that: no—chance whatsoever that the housepainter could have deduced all this in one afternoon.
    Consequently, there must be other wild cards that the doctor himself had not stacked in the deck, that had been dealt by fate.
    One of them would be Skeet. Skeet, with a brain so addled by drugs that he hadn’t been entirely programmable.
    Concerned about the apprentice painter’s reliability, Ahriman had come here this evening expressly to establish a suicide scenario in Skeet’s sub-subconscious and then send the wasted wretch toddling off to self-destruct before dawn. Now he would need a new strategy.
    What other wild cards in addition to Skeet? Unquestionably, others had been played. However much Dusty and Martie knew-and their knowledge might not be quite as complete as it seemed-they had not put together a major portion of the puzzle with just the book and Skeet.
    This unexpected development didn’t appeal to Ahriman’s sporting spirit. He enjoyed some risk in his games, but only manageable risk.
    He was a gamester, not a gambler. He preferred the architecture of rules to the jungle of luck.

    61
    The trailer park huddled defensively in the high wind as though anticipating one of the tornadoes that always found such places and scattered them across blasted landscapes for the wicked delectation of television cameras. Fortunately, twisters were rare, weak, and short-lived in California. The residents of this park would not have to endure the practiced compassion of reporters torn between thrilling to a big story of destruction and admitting to what drams of human empathy had survived their years in service of the evening news.
    The streets were laid out in a grid, one exactly like the next. The hundreds of mobile homes on concrete-block foundations were