Shadowfires

had vaguely resembled Rachael, but that was ridiculous, he had not killed two women, had not even killed one, but now he also recalled a garbage dumpster, a filthy alleyway, and yet another woman, a third woman, a pretty Latino, her throat slashed by a scalpel, and he had shoved her corpse into the dumpster…
    No. My God, what have I made of myself? he wondered, nausea
twisting his belly.
I'm both researcher and subject, creator and creation, and that has to've
been a mistake, a terrible mistake. Could I have become… my own
Frankenstein monster?
    For one dreadful moment, his thought processes cleared, and truth
shone through to him as brightly as the morning sun piercing a
freshly washed window.
    He shook his head violently, pretending that he wanted to be rid
of the last traces of the mist that had been clouding his mind,
though in fact he was trying desperately to rid himself of his
unwelcome and unbearable clarity. His badly injured brain and
precarious physical condition made the rejection of the truth an easy
matter. The violent shaking of his head was enough to make him dizzy,
blur his vision, and bring the shrouding mists back to his memory,
hindering his thought processes, leaving him confused and somewhat
disoriented.
    The dead women were false memories, yes, of course, yes, they
could not be real, because he was incapable of cold-blooded murder.
They were as unreal as his uncle Barry and the strange insects that
he sometimes thought he saw.
    Remember the mice, the mice, the frenzied, biting,
angry mice…
    What mice? What do angry mice have to do with it?
    Forget the damn mice.
    The important thing was that he could not possibly have murdered
even one person, let alone three. Not him. Not Eric Leben. In the
murkiness of his half-lit and turbulent memory, these nightmare
images were surely nothing but illusions, just like the shadowfires
that sprang from nowhere. They were merely the result of short-
circuiting electrical impulses in his shattered brain tissue, and
they would not stop plaguing him until that tissue was entirely
healed. Meanwhile, he dared not dwell on them, for he would begin to
doubt himself and his perceptions, and in his fragile mental
condition, he did not have the energy for self-doubt.
    Trembling, sweating, he pulled open the door, stepped into the
garage, and switched on the light. His black Mercedes 560 SEL was
parked where he had left it last night.
    When he looked at the Mercedes, he was suddenly stricken by a
memory of another car, an older and less elegant one, in the trunk of
which he had stashed a dead woman-
    No. False memories again. Illusions. Delusions.
    He carefully placed one splayed hand against the wall, leaned for
a moment, gathering strength and trying to clear his head. When at
last he looked up, he could not recall why he was in the garage.
    Gradually, however, he was once again filled with the instinctive
sense that he was being stalked, that someone was coming to get him,
and that he must arm himself. His muddied mind would not produce a
clear picture of the people who might be pursuing him, but he knew he was in danger. He pushed away from the wall, moved past the
car, and went to the workbench and tool rack at the front of the
garage.
    He wished that
he'd had the foresight to keep a gun at the cabin. Now he had to settle for a wood ax, which he took down from the clips by which it was mounted on the wall, breaking a spider's
web anchored to the handle. He had used the ax to split logs for the
fireplace and to chop kindling. It was quite sharp, an excellent
weapon.
    Though he was incapable of cold-blooded murder, he knew he could
kill in self-defense if necessary. No fault in protecting himself.
Self-defense was far different from murder. It was justifiable.
    He hefted the ax, testing its weight. Justifiable.
    He took a practice swing with the weapon. It cut through the air
with a whoosh. Justifiable.
Approximately nine miles from Running Springs
and sixteen miles from Lake Arrowhead, Benny pulled off the road and
parked on a scenic lay-by, which featured two picnic tables, a trash
barrel, and lots of shade from several huge bristlecone pines. He
switched off the engine and rolled down his window. The mountain air
was forty degrees cooler than the air in the desert from which they
had come; it was still warm but not stifling, and Rachael found the
mild breeze refreshing as it washed through the car, scented by