Transfixed, Glen gazed helplessly at what he was doing.
His hands moved again, and a third incision appeared, this one nearly spanning the space between her shoulders.
No! Glen thought. This can’t be happening! But even as his mind formulated the thought, dark, mocking laughter echoed in his head. Trying to stifle the taunting sound, Glen willed himself not to move his hands again, struggled to halt their inexorable motion. But now he felt something else — a terrible paralysis, robbing him of will, erasing his power over his own body. As he watched helplessly, his fingers went to work, deftly laying back the folds of skin as easily as they might have opened a pair of double doors.
Beneath the skin, clearly visible now, was the woman’s sternum.
Even as his hands reached for it, Glen’s mind grasped the purpose of the Makita. His fingers squeezed the switch and instantly his ears were filled with the keening whine of the whirling blade.
As the blade, no more than a silvery blur now, moved closer to the woman’s sternum, Glen struggled to wrest control of his body from the force that seemed to have seized it. Powerless, he saw the blade descend. Then the teeth dug into the mass of bone and cartilage that formed the ventral support of the woman’s rib cage.
Glen tried to scream out against the carnage he was witnessing, but his voice would obey him no more than his fingers and hands. No, he whimpered silently to himself. Oh, God, no. Don’t let this happen.
But even as he made his plea, the spinning blade dug deeper and his hand inexorably laid the woman’s torso open, splitting her sternum, ripping through the pleural membrane.
As his eyes focused on the mass of tissue that were the woman’s lungs, the darkness closed in on Glen once more.
This time he welcomed it.
CHAPTER 55
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jeffers, but Dr. Farber is with a patient.”
The nurse’s tone over the phone made Glen wonder if he was being deliberately punished for hanging up on the doctor earlier. “Can’t you at least tell him who it is?”
“Doctor does not like to be interrupted,” the nurse replied in a voice that made it crystal clear she was annoyed with him. “And you don’t have to shout, Mr. Jeffers. I’m not deaf, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” Glen said. Once again he tried to remember what had happened when he’d been talking to Gordy Farber this morning. They’d been in the middle of setting up an appointment when suddenly he’d had another of his blackouts. This one had come on him fast, and when he’d awakened this time, he found himself on the living room sofa. Though he hadn’t felt ill, he hadn’t felt rested, either. Certainly not as rested as he should have felt if he’d slept through all the hours that were missing from his day.
There were the usual memories of dreams, too, but unlike yesterday, these weren’t merely fragments. They were great cohesive chunks, and as vivid as normal memories.
“Is it an emergency?” the nurse asked, sounding only somewhat mollified.
Glen hesitated. He was scared, more scared than he wanted to admit, at least to the nurse. But was it really an emergency? He wasn’t sure.
The memory of the dream flashed back into his mind, as clear now as when he’d awakened a few minutes ago. In the dream, he’d “awakened,” too, opening his eyes to discover he was no longer in his own house or any other familiar surrounding, but standing in a stream, stark naked, with a fly rod in his hands and no memory at all of how he’d gotten there.
Like a dream within a dream.
The only memory he had — if it even was a genuine memory — was of cutting open a woman’s chest. And that image had been vivid, too, not at all like the fuzzy half-obscured flashes he’d had before.
In the dream, he’d reeled in the fish line and scrambled out of the stream, hurrying to a motor home parked in the middle of a flat grassy area a couple of hundred feet from the stream’s edge.
Though he had no memory of where the vehicle had come from, it nevertheless seemed familiar. His heart had begun pounding as he neared the van, but when he went inside, nothing was amiss. There certainly was no sign of anything like the hideous butchery he could also clearly remember. In one of the compartments in the vehicle’s undercarriage, he found a Makita saw, its blade removed. In one of the galley drawers he found a handle for an X-Acto blade, but again there was no blade attached to it. He could find no signs of blood anywhere in the motor home, but after putting on his clothes — the same clothes he was wearing now, as he talked to Gordy Farber’s nurse — he’d searched the woods surrounding the grassy clearing.
He’d found nothing.
He’d been on his way back to the motor home when he blacked out again.
“Mr. Jeffers?” the nurse asked. “Are you still there?”
“Yes,” Glen replied. “And it is an emergency. I really need to talk to Gordy.”
The nurse hesitated, as if trying to decide if he was lying, then apparently decided to let her employer make the decision for himself. “I’ll see if the doctor can be disturbed.”
Tinny Muzak dribbled from the speaker for a moment, then Gordy Farber’s voice came on the line. “Glen? Where are you? What’s going on? How come you hung up on me?”
“Can I come in and see you?” Glen asked. “I can be there as soon as you have some time open.”
“I’ll make the time,” Gordy Farber told him, reading the fear in Glen’s voice. “Can you get here in fifteen minutes?”
“I’ll be there,” Glen replied.
It was actually only ten minutes later that Glen walked into the doctor’s office. It would have been less, but as he set off to walk the eight blocks down to the hospital complex, he’d seen a motor home just like the one in the dream. He peered into its windows, and his heart had raced as he recognized what little of the interior he could see. He tried the doors, found them locked, and only then continued on to Group Health and Farber’s office.
The heart specialist insisted on a thorough examination despite Glen’s protests, then, satisfied that his patient wasn’t on the verge of a second attack, he gestured Glen to a chair and rested his own weight against his big walnut desk, arms crossed, eyeing the seated man carefully. Whatever had occasioned Glen’s worried phone call, it didn’t appear to be a medical emergency; in fact, from all signs, it appeared as if Glen’s physical recovery was proceeding satisfactorily. “So,” he asked, “what is this all about, Glen?”
“I don’t know,” Glen replied.
Gordy Farber stared at him. “You don’t know?” he echoed. “What the hell kind of answer is that? You were making an appointment. The doorbell rang, and then you came back, were barely civil to me, and hung up. So don’t tell me you don’t know. Who was at the door?”
Glen shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “I remember talking to you, and I remember the doorbell ringing. After that, the whole day is a mess. I woke up on the sofa twenty minutes ago, but I don’t think I was there all day. But it’s all crazy. I have this memory of waking up earlier, but that time I wasn’t even in the house. I was standing in a stream up in the mountains. I was fishing.” He reddened and his eyes shifted away from the doctor. “And I was stark naked.” Slowly and carefully, Glen repeated everything he remembered. When he was finally finished, he looked up at the doctor, fear blazing in his eyes. “The thing is, I’m starting to wonder what’s real and what’s a dream. My God, Gordy, what’s happening to me? And don’t try to tell me this is something that normally happens after a heart attack.”
The specialist moved around his desk and dropped into his chair. “You don’t have any memory of driving up to the mountains, or driving back?”