Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(135)
She struggled to her feet, leaning for a moment against the black-granite desk. Then she set off across the white quartz toward a distant dark object that could be nothing other than her pistol.
The captain seemed to think she might have forgotten about the memory trick. He began to tell her how it was done.
She reached the pistol and picked it up and turned in a circle, surveying the enormous room, wondering what to do now. Who would come after her next?
The captain kept talking. She could see his face clearly in her mind’s eye. His smile. How much better things would be if Captain were alive. No.
Room 456. Five ideal wave conditions on the EEG. Bibi walking the board somewhere. The four witnesses around the bed. The girl not sleeping, not awake, yet also both of those things, lying in the bed, existing as well in a mysterious Elsewhere.
From the tape recorder, the captain spoke first about the memory trick, but not about why he’d used it. Nancy’s face hardened perhaps with some of the resentment that had embittered her in the days when, as a child herself, she had felt abandoned by him. “What is he saying…that he brainwashed her?”
“It may have been a mistake,” Pax said, “but he had a reason that seemed good to him. Listen.”
He knew that the next revelation would incense both Nancy and Murphy, but the greater shock would come when the captain revealed what it was that he helped the girl to forget.
“The memory trick worked so well not because I got it from a Gypsy or a hundred-year-old shaman, or from any place magical, like I made it sound. It worked because it was developed by a lot of smart people in the intelligence community, a defense against interrogation by the enemy. Once you were hypnotized and made to believe that the memory trick worked, it would work the rest of your life, whenever you needed to wipe something from your memory.”
Murphy’s tan had acquired a gray cast. “He hypnotized her?”
“Listen,” Pax said.
“This next part is a little tough for me, Bibi. It sounds worse than it is. But I knew it wouldn’t harm you in any way. See, sweetie, the hypnotism works so well to support the memory trick because the hypnotism itself is supported by a drug that puts the subject—in this case, you—in a state highly receptive to hypnotic suggestion. The night I taught you the memory trick, your mom and dad were out for the evening at a concert. We had dinner in their kitchen. Chili-cheese dogs and oven-baked fries. After dinner and before we had Eskimo Pies, I taught you the memory trick. The drug I mentioned was in your Coca-Cola.”
Such outrage fired Nancy’s face, Pax thought she might grab the recorder and throw it. He shielded it with one hand. “Just listen.”
“…your mom and dad were out for the evening at a concert…”
The voice wouldn’t stop. Bibi couldn’t keep it out because it came from within her. The longer that she listened, the warmer the voice sounded, the more clearly she remembered Captain, how he had protected her. She had felt safe with Captain living above the garage and looking down on the bungalow, where her bedroom window faced the courtyard, Captain up there keeping a watch over her.
Bibi found herself behind the black-granite desk without quite knowing how she’d gotten there. Two tall stools would allow security men or receptionists to work at the desk. She occupied neither stool. Somehow she had retreated into the kneehole. Like a child seeking a refuge. A hiding place.
The captain said, “I don’t know what I might have done. I mean, how having a big hole in your memory might affect you over time. Too late I realized maybe there might be some…disruption of a child’s psychological development. Using the memory trick when you’re a grown man, that’s different, your personality is formed. But what if…God help me, I hope nothing happens. Anyway, I don’t see how you could have lived and had a normal life with that memory…more than memory…with that knowledge of what had happened, of what you could do.”
Bibi realized that the moment was approaching when she would learn the central truth of the half-recovered memory, the identity of the intruder—the thing—in her bedroom when she was five years old. She tried to shrink farther back into the kneehole as dread overcame her, a double dread born of the fact that it was Captain making this revelation. If her imagination were inspired to a bright and terrible creativity, maybe both he and the bedroom thing would be conjured here tonight, to prowl the reception hall for the one hiding place that it provided. And what the hell did that mean? Conjured? She was no witch.
“Six months after I came to live in the apartment, eight months after your terrifying experience, you finally trusted me enough to tell me about it. You felt you couldn’t tell your mom and dad, that they wouldn’t…well, wouldn’t understand. Whether that was right or wrong…it seemed that forgetting was for the best. And there I was with a way to make forgetting possible. A coincidence? I’ve never believed in them. And knowing the kind of girl you are, how fast you’re growing up—I mean, in mind and heart, so wise for one so young—I suspect eventually you also won’t believe in coincidences. Anyway, you told me your colorful, very wild and dark story, and stupidly, in the way that unimaginative adults can be stupid when they’ve long lost their sense of wonder, I tried to dismiss it as just a bad dream. So you proved it to me. No experience in war ever so terrified me as what happened there in my apartment kitchen. The purpose of this tape, which I will tell you when I give it to you, is to serve as…I don’t know…as some kind of restoration of the way things might have been, as some kind of therapy for you if it turns out I was foolish, even reckless, to help you forget what you had done, what you could do, if I was a damn fool to teach you the memory trick.”