Glen shook his head. “I don’t even have a motor home. But the weird thing is, the one in my dream, or whatever it was, is parked half a block from my house. I just have the two memories — cutting up the woman, and then looking for her body in the motor home.”
“Obviously, you didn’t do either of those things,” Farber told him.
“What if I did?” Glen countered.
Farber frowned, then switched on the intercom. “Could you bring in this morning’s Herald, please?” he asked his nurse. “The front page.” A moment later the door opened and the woman appeared, a folded newspaper in her hand. When Farber nodded toward Glen, she handed it to him.
“Will that be all?”
“Yes, thanks,” Farber replied. As the nurse closed the door behind her, he turned back to Glen. “Take a look at the front page.” Glen unfolded the paper to see Anne’s story on the murder of Rory Kraven spread across the lower half of page one. “Did you read that this morning?” the doctor asked. Glen nodded. “Then I think we can identify the source of that dream,” Farber observed, a thin smile curving his lips. “Come on, Glen — that story doesn’t just talk about what happened to the guy they found across the street. It describes what he did to those two women, too. And one thing you can say for your wife — when she draws you a verbal picture, it’s vivid. So if you read that article this morning, and dreamed about cutting open a woman’s chest this afternoon, I don’t think it’s rocket science to find a connection between the two events.”
Glen shook his head doggedly. “But it doesn’t account for the blackouts. And what was I doing fishing in the nude?”
Gordy Farber grinned. “It was only a dream, Glen, remember? Hell, if it had been my dream, I might have been tempted to try it myself.” When his attempt to lighten Glen’s mood was only met by a dark look, Farber’s smile faded. “All right, I admit it’s a weird dream. But it’s also way out of my field. The kind of stuff you’re talking about, you need a shrink for. Want me to call someone?”
Glen hesitated. The image of the woman’s torso — and his own hands cutting into it, first with the X-Acto knife, then with the Makita — filled his mind. “Do you know someone good?” When the heart specialist nodded, he made up his mind. “Set me up.”
Jake Jacobson was ten years younger than Glen, five inches shorter, and forty pounds heavier. By the time Glen arrived in Jacobson’s office, the psychiatrist had already pulled his medical history from the central computer, and as his new patient came in the door, the doctor looked at him critically. “Well, at least you don’t look crazy,” he offered in an attempt to put Glen at his ease.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Glen asked.
“If you don’t want me to make you feel better, why did you come?” Jacobson countered.
For the next half hour he listened while Glen related as much as he could remember about his state of mind since he’d had the heart attack, and especially the strange, surreal experiences of the past few days. The psychiatrist took some notes, but didn’t interrupt Glen’s story until he had finished.
“The human mind is a very complex organ,” Jacobson observed when Glen at last fell silent. “We already know that a very simple suggestion can implant false memories that are every bit as vivid as genuine ones. We’re seeing it all the time in alleged child sex-abuse cases. I don’t question your belief that what you remember about this afternoon is real. All I question is the validity of that belief.” He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his ample belly. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume the experience in the river was real. You yourself were unable to find any evidence of what you think you did.” He smiled. “A saw and a knife, neither of them with a blade?”
“I could have thrown them away anywhere,” Glen said, his voice obstinate. “I didn’t even look for them.”
“But you did look for a body, and didn’t find one. Nor did you find any blood, or any sign of a struggle, or anything else that might rationally lead you to believe you’d actually killed someone. It was all a dream, Glen. As for the motor home, obviously you saw it at some point this morning. You probably even looked in the windows earlier, so when you had the dream, the images were already in your mind.” He began ticking points off on his fingers. “Your next-door neighbor was murdered in a manner not unlike what you dreamed. There is a motor home like the one you dreamed of, sitting almost in front of your house. Your wife has been writing about Richard Kraven for years, and one of the things I remember about him is that he liked to go on fishing trips in a motor home. I can’t believe that little fact isn’t buried somewhere in your subconscious, too. What you’ve done is put all that material together into a single vivid, pseudomemory of an event for which you admit you could find no physical evidence whatsoever.”
“What about the blackouts?” Glen pressed.
Jacobson spread his hands in a dismissive gesture. “I can think of at least one possibility right off the top of my head: you may have suffered a minor stroke.”
“A stroke?” Glen echoed hollowly. “But if I’d had a stroke—”
“People have strokes every day,” the psychiatrist cut in. “Most of them go unnoticed. A stroke doesn’t have to be a huge event, you know. Even the tiniest, most insignificant hemorrhage in the brain falls into the category. And it’s quite possible you’ve had one.” He picked up the phone and spoke into it. “Ellie, could you set up for an EEG, please. We’ll be in in a couple of minutes.” Hanging up the phone, he turned his attention back to Glen. “An electroencephalogram will tell us if you have any major problems, and we’ll schedule an MRI, just to be sure.” He tapped at the keyboard of his computer, pulling up his scheduling program. “Is Monday all right?”
Glen nodded, feeling the terror begin to retreat. Maybe, after all, there was a rational explanation for his bizarre and frustrating experiences. The psychiatrist led him through a door into an examining room, explaining the procedure while Glen rolled up his sleeve so the nurse could take his blood pressure and pulse.
“It’s pretty simple, really,” Jacobson told him. “I’m going to attach some electrodes to your head, and then we’ll measure the electrical activity in your brain.” He smiled reassuringly as he saw an expression of panic cross Glen’s face. “Believe me, you won’t feel a thing.”
The nurse unwrapped the cuff of the sphygmomanometer from Glen’s left arm, then began attaching the electrodes to his scalp. Glen could feel the contacts being attached to his skin.
“All set?” the psychiatrist asked a few moments later.
“Ready,” the nurse replied.
The doctor turned a switch on the console of the EEG, and though Glen felt no physical pain whatsoever, a wave of panic swept over him.
And then a howl filled his head. A howl of both terror and agony, it was a sound of such unutterable horror that for a moment Glen was afraid his mind would shatter.
But where was it coming from? His eyes darted from the doctor to the nurse, then back again. Obviously neither of them was hearing the mind-rending scream, so it had to be coming from inside his own brain.
As the doctor adjusted the dials, the tenor of the shriek changed, and when Jacobson finally turned the machine off, it abruptly died away — and left no memory of having happened at all.
“That’s it,” the psychiatrist said. “And you didn’t feel a thing, did you?”
Glen shook his head, his eyes fixed on the sheet of paper that had fed out of the machine. “Is that it?”
“That’s it,” Jacobson replied, tearing off the sheet. “Let’s have a look.” He studied the paper for a moment, then showed it to Glen.