False Memory

told her how she was required to feel about this scenario. “Yes, Daddy.”
    Her carotid pulse, under his right thumb, remained slow.
    “Tell me the color of my hair, Susan.”
    Although the kitchen was too dark for her to determine his hair color, she said, “Blond.”
    Ahriman’s hair was salt-and-pepper, but Susan’s father was indeed a blond.
    “Tell me the color of my eyes.”
    “Green like mine.”
    Ahriman’s eyes were hazel.
    With his right hand still pressed to Susan’s throat, the doctor leaned down and kissed her almost chastely.
    Her mouth was slack. She was not an active participant in the kiss; in fact, she was so passive that she might as well have been catatonic if not comatose.
    Biting gently at her lips, then forcing his tongue between them, he kissed her as no father should ever kiss a daughter, and although her mouth remained slack and her carotid pulse did not accelerate, he sensed her breath catch in her throat.
    “How do you feel about this, Susan?”
    “How do you want me to feel?”
    Smoothing her hair with one hand, he said, “Deeply ashamed, humiliated. Full of terrible sorrow... and a little resentful at being used like this by your own father. Dirty, debased. And yet obedient, ready to do what you’re told... because you’re also aroused against your will. You have a sick, hungry need that you want to deny but cant.
    Again he kissed her, and this time she tried to close her mouth to him; she relented, however, and her mouth softened, opened. She put her hands against his chest, to fend him off, but her resistance was weak, childlike.
    Under his thumb, the pulse in her right carotid artery raced like that of a hare in the shadow of a hound.
    “Daddy, no.”
    The reflection of green light in Susan’s green eyes glistered with a new watery depth.
    Those shimmering fathoms produced a subtle fragrance, faintly bitter, briny, and this familiar scent caused the doctor to swell with fierce desire.
    He lowered his right hand from her throat to her waist, holding her close.
    “Please,” she whispered, managing to make that one word both a protest and a nervous invitation.
    Ahriman breathed deeply, then lowered his mouth to her face. The reliability of a predator’s sense of smell was confirmed: Her cheeks were wet and salty.
    “Lovely.”
    With a series of quick little kisses, he moistened his lips on her damp skin, and then explored his flavored lips with the tip of his tongue.
    Both hands around her waist now, he lifted her and carried her backward, until he was pressing her between his body and the refrigerator.
    “Please” again, and then once more “please,” the dear girl so conflicted that eagerness and dread spiced her voice in equal measure.
    Susan’s weeping was accompanied by neither whimper nor sob, and the doctor savored these silent streams, seeking to slake the thirst that he could never satisfy. He licked a salty pearl from the corner of her mouth, licked another from the flared rim of a nostril, and then suckled on the droplets beaded across her eyelashes, relishing the flavor as though this would be his sole sustenance for the day.
    Letting go of her waist, stepping back from her, he said, “Go to your bedroom, Susan.”
    Sinuous shadow, she moved like hot tears, clear and bitter.
    The doctor followed, admiring her graceful walk, to her bed in Hell.
    31
    Valet dozed, twitching and snuffling in the company of phantom rabbits, but Martie lay in stone-still silence, as though she were a death sculpture upon a catafalque.
    Her sleep seemed deeper than possible in the turbulent wake of the day’s events, and it was reminiscent of Skeet’s plumbless slumber in his room at New Life.
    Sitting up in bed, barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, Dusty once more sorted through the fourteen pages that had come from the notepad in Skeet’s kitchen, brooding on the name Dr Yen Lo in all thirty-nine renditions.
    That name, when spoken, had seemed to traumatize Skeet, causing him to lapse into a twilight consciousness in which he answered every question with a question of his own. Open eyes jiggling as in REM sleep, he responded directly—if often cryptically—only to questions that were framed as statements or commands. When Dusty’s frustration had led him to say Ah, give me a break and go to sleep, Skeet dropped into an abyss as abruptly as a narcoleptic responding instantaneously to the flipping of an electrochemical switch in the brain.
    Of the many curious aspects of Skeet’s behavior, one currently