False Memory

the shadows in farther corners of the room. He lifted his pendant ears as much as they would lift, as if listening to faint but suspicious sounds. His damp black nostrils flared and quivered as he tried to identify the plaited odors on the air, and he growled softly. Gentle Valet seemed to be trying to remake himself into a guard dog, though he remained puzzled as to what, exactly, he was guarding against.
    Watching Martie sleep, her skin still ashen and her lips as unnaturally dark as a fresh purple bruise, Dusty became strangely convinced that his wife’s descent into long-term mental instability wasn’t the greatest threat, as he had thought. Instinctively, he sensed that death stalked her, not madness, and that she was already half in the grave.
    He was, in fact, overcome by a preternatural sense that the instrument of her death was here in the bedroom this very minute, and with prickles of superstition stippling the nape of his neck, he rose slowly from the edge of the bed and looked up with dread, half expecting to see an apparition floating near the ceiling: something like a swirl of black robes, a hooded form, a grinning skeletal face.
    Although nothing but smoothly troweled plaster hung overhead, Valet let out another low, protracted growl. He had gotten to his feet beside the bed.
    Martie slept undisturbed, but Dusty lowered his attention from the ceiling to the retriever.
    Valet’s nostrils flared as he drew a deep questing breath, and as if thus inflated, his golden hackles rose, bristled. Black lips skinned back, baring formidable teeth. The retriever seemed to see the deadly presence that Dusty could only sense.
    The dog’s guardian stare was fixed sharply on Dusty himself.
    “Valet?”
    Even in spite of the dog’s thick winter coat, Dusty could see the muscles tighten in his shoulders and thighs. Valet assumed an aggressive stance totally out of character for him.
    “What’s wrong, fella? It’s only me. Just me.”
    The low growl faded. The dog was silent but tense, alert.
    Dusty took a step toward him.
    The growl again.
    “Just me,” Dusty repeated.
    The dog seemed unconvinced.

    34
    When at last the doctor was finished with her, Susan Jagger lay on her back, thighs pressed together demurely, as if in denial of how widely they had been spread. Her arms were crossed modestly over her breasts.
    She was still crying, but not silently as before. For his own pleasure, Ahriman had allowed her some vocalization of her anguish and shame.
    Buttoning his shirt, he closed his eyes to hear broken bird sounds. Her feather-soft sobs: lonely pigeons in rafters, misery of windblown gulls.
    When he first moved her to the bed, he had used the techniques of hypnotic-regression therapy to return her to the age of twelve, to a time when she was untouched, innocent, a rosebud without thorns. Her voice acquired a tender tone, higher pitched; her phrasing was that of a precocious child. Her brow had actually become smoother, her mouth softer, as if time had indeed run backward. Her eyes did not become a brighter green, but they grew clearer, as though sixteen years of hard experience had been filtered from them.
    Then, behind the mask of her father, he had deflowered her. She was at first allowed to resist feebly, then more actively, initially frightened and confused in her rediscovered sexual innocence. Bitter resistance was soon sweetened with tremulous hunger. At the doctor's suggestion, Susan was seized by quickening animal need; she rocked her hips and rose to him.
    Throughout what followed, Ahriman shaped her psychological state with murmured suggestions, and always, always, her thrilling girlish cries of pleasure were tempered by fear, shame, sorrow. To him, her tears were a more essential lubricant than the erotic oils that her body secreted to facilitate his entry. Even in ecstasy, tears.
    Now, as he finished dressing, Ahriman studied her flawless face.
    Moonlight on water, eyes brimming ponds of spring rain—dark fish in the mind.
    No. No good. He wasn’t able to compose a haiku to describe her bleak expression as she stared at the ceiling. His talent for writing poetry was but a fraction as great as his ability to appreciate it.
    The doctor had no illusions about his gifts. Although by all measures of intelligence, he was a high-range genius, he nevertheless was a player, not a creator. He had a talent for games, for using toys in new and imaginative ways, but he was no artist.
    Likewise, although he had been