False Memory

ax with a block, Martie cranked the jaws shut until they tightened on the handle.
    She was able to pick up a pistol-grip hacksaw only with great effort. It was a dangerous instrument, but less fearsome than the ax, which must be destroyed. Later, she’d wreck the hacksaw, too.
    Using the saw, she attacked the wooden handle at the neck. The cast-steel head would still be deadly once it had been severed, but the ax, intact, was far more lethal than either of its parts.
    Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her husband forty whacks.
    The hacksaw blade torqued, bound in the ax handle, stuttered loose, torqued again, and made a sloppy kerf in the hard wood. She threw it on the floor.
    In the tool collection were two carpenter’s saws. One was a rip-saw, for cutting with the grain of the wood, the other a crosscut saw, but Martie didn’t know which was which. Hesitantly, she tried one, then the other, and both frustrated her.
    When the job was neatly done, she gave him another forty-one.
    Among the power tools was a hand-held reciprocating saw with a blade so fierce that she required all the courage she could muster to plug it in, pick it up, and switch it on. Initially the teeth stuttered with little effect across the oak, and the saw vibrated violently, but when Martie bore down, the blade buzzed through the wood, and the severed ax head, with handle stump, fell onto the workbench.
    She switched off the saw and set it aside. Opened the jaws of the vice. Freed the ax handle. Threw it on the floor.
    Next, she decapitated the sledgehammer.
    Then the shovel. Longer handle. Cumbersome. Getting it into the vise was more difficult than dealing with the ax or sledgehammer.
    The reciprocating saw tore through it, and the shovel blade clattered onto the workbench.
    She sawed through the hoe.
    The rake.
    What else?
    A crowbar. A pointed pry blade at one end, leveraging hook at the other. All steel. Couldn’t be sawn.
    Use it to smash the reciprocating saw. Steel ringing off steel, off concrete, the garage reverberating like a great bell.
    When she had disabled the saw, she still held the crowbar. It was as dangerous as the sledgehammer, which had driven her to use the saws in the first place.
    She had come full circle. She hadn’t accomplished anything. In fact, the crowbar was more effective than the sledgehammer, because it was easier to wield.
    There was no hope. No way to make the house safe, not even one room within the house, not as little as one corner within one room. It couldn’t be done as long as she remained in residence. She, not any inanimate object, was the source of these vicious thoughts, the sole threat.
    She should have clamped the reciprocating saw in the jaws of the vise, switched it on, and cut off her own hands.
    Now she held the crowbar in the same grip with which she had held the hammer. Through her mind spiraled bloody thoughts that terrified her.
    The garage-door motor kicked in. The door clattered upward, and she turned to face it.
    Tires, headlights, the windshield, Dusty in the driver’s seat of the van, Valet beside him. Normal life on wheels, motoring into Martie’s personal Twilight Zone. This was a collision of universes that she had been fearing since the portentous mental image of a key-skewered eye—Dusty’s eye—had caused her heart to plummet like an express elevator and her lunch to rise like a counterweight.
    “Stay away from me!” she cried. “For God’s sake, stay away! There’s something wrong with me.”
    Almost as effectively as a mirror, Dusty’s expression revealed to Martie how bizarre—how crazed—she looked.
    “Oh, God.”
    She dropped the crowbar, but the head of the ax and the head of the sledgehammer were within reach on the workbench. She could easily snatch them up, pitch them at the windshield.
    The key. The eye. Thrust and twist.
    Suddenly Martie realized that she had not thrown away the car key. How could she have failed to dispose of it immediately upon getting home, before dealing with the knives, the rolling pin, the garden tools, and everything else? If in fact the vision she had experienced was a premonition, if this hideous act of violence was inevitable, the car key was the first thing she should have mangled and then buried at the bottom of the trash can.
    Enter Dusty, and therefore on to the next level of the game, where the humble key of Level 1 now becomes a powerful and magical object, equivalent to the One Ring, the Master of all the Rings of Power, which must be