False Memory

choking, gagging thickly, on the queasy verge of regurgitation, vigorously scrubbing at her mouth with both hands, as though repulsed by something on the menu in a dream feast.
    Up and moving almost as explosively as Martie, Dusty started around the bed, aware of Valet alert beyond her.
    She swung toward him: “Stay away from me!”
    Such emotion rushed through her voice that Dusty halted, and the dog began to shake, the hair standing straight up along the length of his withers.
    Still wiping at her mouth, Martie looked at her hands, as if she expected to see them gloved in fresh blood—and perhaps not her own. “Oh, God, oh, my God.”
    Dusty moved toward her, and again she ordered him to stay away, no less fiercely than before. “You can’t trust me, you can’t get near me, don’t think you can.”
    “It was only a nightmare.”
    “This is the nightmare.”
    “Martie—”
    Convulsively, she bent forward, gagging on the memory of the dream, then letting out a miserable groan of disgust and anguish.
    Despite her warning, Dusty went to her, and when he touched her, she recoiled violently, shoving him away. “Don’t trust me! Don’t, for Christ’s sake, don’t.”
    Rather than step around him, she scrambled monkeylike across the disheveled bed, bounded off the other side, and hurried into the adjoining bathroom.
    A short sharp bleat escaped the dog, a plucked-wire sound that twanged through Dusty and struck in him a fear that he had not known before.
    Seeing her like this a second time was more terrifying than the first episode. Once could be an aberration. Twice was a pattern. In patterns could be seen the future.
    He went after Martie and found her at the bathroom sink. The cold water gushed into the basin. The door of the medicine cabinet, which had been open, was swinging shut of its own accord.
    “It must’ve been worse than usual this time,” he said.
    “What?”
    “The nightmare.”
    “It wasn’t the same one, nothing as pleasant as the Leaf Man,” she said, but clearly she had no intention of elaborating.
    She popped the cap off a bottle of an effective nonprescription sleeping aid that they rarely used. A slurry of blue caplets spilled into her cupped left hand.
    At first, Dusty thought she was intending to overdose, which was ridiculous, because even a full bottle probably wouldn’t kill her— and, anyway, she must know that he would knock them out of her hand before she could swallow so many.
    But then she let most of the pills rattle back into the bottle. Three were left on her palm.
    “Two’s the maximum dosage,” he said.
    “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the maximum dosage. I want to be out cold. I’ve got to sleep, got to rest, but I’m not going to go through another dream like that, not another one like that.”
    Her black hair was damp with sweat and tangled like the crowning snakes of whatever Gorgon she had encountered in her dream. The pills were to vanquish monsters.
    Water slopped into the drinking glass, and she chased the three caplets with a long swallow.
    At her side, Dusty didn’t interfere. Three pills didn’t warrant paramedics and a stomach pump, and if she was a little groggy in the morning, she might be somewhat less anxious, as well.
    He saw no point in suggesting that deeper slumber might not be as dreamless as she expected. Even if she slept in the scaly arms of nightmares, she would be more rested in the morning than if she didn’t sleep at all.
    As she lowered the glass from her lips, Martie caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her reflection strummed a shiver from her, which the cold water had been unable to induce.
    As winter freezes the blueness out of a pond, so fear had frozen much of the color out of Martie. Face as pale as ice. Lips less pink than they were mallow-purple, with dry peels of zinc-gray skin that had been rubbed loose by her scrubbing hands.
    “Oh, God, look what I am,” she said, “look what I am.”
    Dusty knew that she was not referring to her damp and tangled hair or to her blanched features, but to something hateful that she imagined she saw in the depths of her blue eyes.
    Splashing out the last of its contents, the glass arced back in her hand, but Dusty seized it before she could throw it at the mirror, tore it from her clutching fingers as water spattered on the tile floor.
    At his touch, she erupted away from him with such alarm that she crashed into the bathroom wall hard enough to rattle the shower door in its frame.
    “Don’t get near me! For God’s sake,