Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(134)
“I never felt I really knew him,” Nancy said, “until he came to live in the apartment over the garage. The way he was with Bibi…well, he found the father in himself, once war no longer needed him.” Her attention returned once more to the tape recorder in Pax’s hand. “You said he left that tape for Bibi. You’re sure it’s all right for us to listen?”
“It’s not only all right,” Pax said. “It’s essential.”
Pogo agreed. “But if a nurse or anyone walks in, we switch it off. It’s too big, too radical, too freakin’ wild to let it go beyond the four of us.”
“If it ever goes beyond us—that’s not ours to decide. That’s Bibi’s call,” Pax said.
He put the tape recorder on the bed as Nancy and Murphy moved closer. He pressed PLAY. From the small speaker came a tinny but nonetheless impressive version of Captain’s voice.
“My sweet girl, dear Bibi, this is my apology if it turns out one is needed. I have had a few years now to think about what I did, and I am less sure than I once was that it was the right thing. I am at times eaten by regret. I’m talking about the frightening event that I helped you to forget, but also about the memory trick itself, which you might have forgotten not because you were made to forget it, too, but because children naturally forget so much from their early years….”
In spite of its brightness, the crypto-fascist atmosphere of the cavernous reception hall so oppressed Bibi that it called to mind a passage of music from Disney’s Fantasia—“Night on Bald Mountain” by Moussorgsky. Recovering from four Taserings, she sat on the floor, her back against the black-granite desk, half seriously wondering if, when the lights went out, trolls would caper in the dark and ogres rise through the quartz floor from a world below, having ascended to devour the unwary.
She was über-wary. She was alert to the unfathomed dangers of being Bibi Blair. She had edited Chubb Coy out of existence. His clothes and other gear had lingered behind, but they had faded away when she looked steadily at them, as if her stare could function as an eraser. She thought she must be going mad. What seemed to have happened couldn’t have happened. She couldn’t eliminate someone by imagining him gone. Since shortly after leaving the hospital two days earlier, since she had allowed Calida Butterfly to seek hidden knowledge on her behalf, Bibi had been aware of supernatural forces at work in the world. But perhaps they had not been supernatural at all. Couldn’t they as easily have been the delusions of a deranged mind? If Chubb Coy was so little real as to be vanquished with a mere wish, wasn’t it possible that Calida, too, and Hoffline-Vorshack and the tattoo artist and the motel clerk and the nameless thugs and Robert Warren Faulkner—alias Terezin—were likewise no more than phantoms caused by a disorder of the stomach, by an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese…? Surely she could eliminate them by imagining them gone—if she had imagined them into existence in the first place. Derangement would not necessarily be apparent to the deranged.
Except…
Except that her struggle to stay free and alive during the past forty-eight hours, her arduous quest, and the search for Ashley Bell had been real enough, excruciatingly actual, verifiable by the myriad pains in her muscles and joints. By the hot throbbing ache in her torn and half-crushed ear. By the alternately recurring and receding pain in her jaw, a paroxysm that flared into higher waves when she clenched her teeth or touched her bruised face. If she couldn’t edit away her pain, then the people who had inflicted it—and the person whom they served, their mother-killing cult leader—had to have been real, as well. Didn’t they?
If Robert Warren Faulkner was a figment of her imagination, so was Terezin, and so was Terezin, Inc. If such a corporation did not exist, the building in which she sat did not exist, either, other than in her fevered imagination. Studying the acre of white quartz dazzling all around her, she tried to edit the structure out of existence, strove to revise recent events backward to the moment when she parked the Honda along Sonomire Way, before she ventured onto the property and encountered Marissa Hoffline-Vorshack. But the reception hall and the building that contained it did not dissolve.
Bibi wasn’t certain if the seeming permanence of the building confirmed its reality or if, in her stubborn insistence on the reality of Terezin, Inc., she resisted editing the place out of the narrative. Regarding the rules of its delusions, a deranged mind was not likely to be consistent.
Adding to her confusion, further testing her sanity, she heard Captain speaking to her. The voice flowed into the reception hall as if from a public-address system, but it must be entirely in her head, remembered or imagined.
“My sweet girl, dear Bibi, this is my apology if it turns out one is needed. I have had a few years…”
She couldn’t listen to this. Captain was dead. He had been dead for more than twelve years. In the months after his aneurysm, she had wanted him back. She had desperately wanted him to be alive again. She had been wrong to want such a thing. If she was unconsciously calling him back, his return would be no more right now than it would have been then.
“…talking about the frightening event that I helped you to forget, but also…”
She refused to listen. By listening, she would begin wanting him back. She could not want him back. Dared not. Long ago, hadn’t she learned why not? Hadn’t she?