The Key to Midnight Read online

  “Now what?” Alex asked.

  Omi Inamura was silent for so long that Alex thought he hadn’t heard the question. Then: “The posthypnotic suggestion that triggered her breathing difficulties was their first line of defense. This is their second. I suspect this one is going to be harder to crack.”

  35

  “Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.”

  “Do you hear me, Joanna?” the psychiatrist asked.

  “Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.”

  Alex closed his eyes, silently repeating her chant along with her. He was teased by a vague sense of familiarity, as though he had heard it somewhere before.

  Inamura said, “At the moment, Joanna, I’m not trying to pry any of your secrets out of you. I just want to know if you are listening, if you can hear my voice.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That sentence you keep repeating is a memory block. It must have been implanted posthypnotically. You will not use that sentence—’Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun’—when you talk with me. You neither need nor want to avoid my questions. You came here to learn the truth. So just relax. Be calm. You are in a deep and natural sleep, safe in a deep sleep, and you will answer all my questions. I want you to see that memory block. It’s lying in your mind, rather like a fallen tree lying across a highway, preventing you from going deeper into your memories. Visualize it, Joanna. A fallen tree. Or a boulder. Lying across the highway of memory. You can see it now ... and you can even put your hands on it. You’re getting a grip on it ... such a powerful grip ... and you feel a sudden rush of superhuman strength ... so very strong, you are, so powerful ... straining ... lifting ... lifting the boulder ... casting it aside ... out of the way. It’s gone. The highway is open. No obstacle any more. Now you will remember. You will cooperate. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Good. Very good. Now, Joanna, you are still in that room. You smell the alcohol ... ammonia. Such a stench that you can even taste it. You’re strapped to the bed ... and the straps are biting into you. The blind is open at the window. Look at the window, Joanna. What do you see beyond the window?”

  “Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.”

  “As I expected,” Inamura said. “A difficult barrier.”

  Alex opened his eyes. “I’ve heard that chant before.”

  Inamura blinked and leaned forward in his chair. “You have? Where? When?”

  “I can’t recall. But it’s strangely familiar.”

  “If you can remember, it would be enormously helpful,” Inamura said. “I’ve got several tools with which I might be able to reach her, but I wouldn’t be surprised if none of them worked. She’s been programmed by clever and capable people, and more likely than not, they’ve anticipated most methods of treatment. I suspect there are only two ways I might be able to break through the memory block. And under the circumstances, with time so short, the first method—years of intensive therapy—isn’t really acceptable.”

  “Not really,” Alex agreed. “What’s the second way?”

  “An answering sentence.”

  “Answering sentence?”

  Inamura nodded. “She might be requesting a password, you see. It’s unlikely. But possible. Once she gives me the first line—’Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun’—she might be waiting for me to respond with the appropriate second line. A sort of code. If that’s the case, she won’t answer my questions until I’ve given her the correct answering sentence.”

  Alex was impressed by the doctor’s insight and imagination. “A two-piece puzzle. She’s got the first piece, and we’ve got to find the second before we can proceed.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “If we knew the source of the line she uses, we might be able to come up with the answering sentence. For instance, perhaps she’s giving us the first line of a couplet of poetry.”

  “I believe it’s from a book,” Alex said. He rose to his feet, stepped out of the circle of chairs, and began to pace around the shadow-shrouded room, because pacing sometimes helped him think. “Something I read once a long time ago.”

  “While you think,” said Omi Inamura, “I’ll see what I can do with her.”

  For thirty minutes the doctor strove to break down the memory block. He cajoled and argued and reasoned with Joanna; he used humor and discipline and logic; he demanded, asked, pleaded; he pried and probed and thrust and picked at her resistance.

  Nothing worked. She continued to answer with those same six words, grating them out in a tone of barely contained rage: “Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.”

  For a while Alex stood at the cage, eye to eye with the myna. It was a small bird, but its stare was fierce.

  Most of the time, the myna worked its orange beak without producing any sound, but once it said, “Nevermore,” as though it were perched on a plaster bust above a study door, lamenting Poe’s lost Lenore.

  Alex wondered why the myna spoke in English rather than in Japanese. Omi Inamura spoke English well, but with most of his patients, he would converse in his native language.

  “Freud,” said the myna. “Freud. Fly away.”

  The creature’s speech was simple mimicry, of course; it didn’t understand anything it said. Still, Alex was intrigued by the quick intelligence in its eyes, and he wondered what thoughts went through the mind of a bird. Somewhere he’d read that birds were descended from flying reptiles. Although the myna was cute and appealing, its basically reptilian view of the world was most likely cold, strange, and utterly alien. If he’d been able to read its mind, no doubt he’d have recoiled in horror and disgust from—

  Read its mind.

  Mind reading.

  Telepathy.

  Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.

  “I’ve got it,” he said, turning away from the bird and hurrying back to the circle of armchairs. “The line. It’s from a science fiction novel.” He sat down on the edge of his chair. “I read it years and years ago.”

  “What’s the title?” Inamura asked.

  “The Demolished Man. ”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Absolutely. It’s a classic of the genre. When I was young, I read a lot of science fiction. It was the perfect escape from ... well, from everything.”

  “Do you remember the author?”

  “Alfred Bester.”

  “And the line Joanna keeps repeating? What’s the significance of it?”

  Alex closed his eyes and cast his mind back into his childhood, when the covers of books had been doors through which he escaped to far places where there had been no monsters as terrible as drunken and abusive parents. He could see the futuristic artwork on the paperback almost as clearly as if he’d held it in his hands only a week ago.

  “The novel’s set a few hundred years in the future, during a time when the police use telepathy to enforce the law. They’re mind readers. It’s impossible for anyone to commit murder and get away with it in the society Bester envisions, but there’s one character who’s determined to kill someone and escape punishment. He finds a way to conceal his incriminating innermost thoughts. To prevent the telepathic detectives from reading his guilt in his own mind, he mentally recites a cleverly constructed, infectious jingle while retaining the ability to concentrate on other things at the same time. The monotonous repetition of the jingle acts like a shield to deflect the snooping telepaths.”

  Inamura said, “And one of the lines he recites is ‘Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.’ ”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then if there is an answering sentence that will dispose of Joanna’s memory block, it’s almost certainly another line of that jingle. Do you remember the rest of it?”

  “No,” Alex said. “We’ll have to get the book. I’ll call my office in Chicago and have someone track down a copy. We—”
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  “That might not be necessary,” Dr. Inamura said. “If the novel is a classic in its field, there’s a good chance it’s been translated into Japanese. I’ll be able to obtain it from a bookstore here or from a man I know who deals in rare and out-of-print titles.”

  That put an end to their first session. There was no point in continuing until Inamura had a copy of The Demolished Man. Once more the doctor turned his attention to Joanna. He told her that upon waking she’d remember all that had transpired between them—and would be more easily hypnotized the next time that he treated her.

  “In fact,” Inamura told her, “in the future you will slip into a deep trance upon hearing me speak just two words: ’dancing butterflies.’ ”

  “Dancing butterflies,” Joanna repeated, at his request.

  The psychiatrist brought her slowly back from the past to the present, used the remote control to tilt her chair into the full upright position, and then woke her.

  Outside, when Alex and Joanna left Inamura’s building, the day had grown colder. The huffing wind seemed like a living presence, pulling and shoving with malicious intent.

  As they walked toward Joanna’s Lexus, a large black-and-yellow cat scurried along the gutter. It jumped the curb to the sidewalk, directly into their path, glanced warily at them, and then dashed down a set of shadow-filled basement steps. Alex was glad for the touch of yellow in its coat.

  “Dancing butterflies,” Joanna said.

  “You find that curious?”

  “I find it very Japanese. Dancing butterflies. Such a lovely, delicate image to be associated with a grim business like this.”

  The afternoon was giving way to evening. The low clouds were as dark as slate, and the sky looked too hard to be the home of any but malevolent gods.

  36

  Twenty-four hours later. Saturday afternoon.

  The myna climbed the curved walls of its cage, and from time to time its talons plucked a reverberant note from the brass, which to Alex sounded like a piano wire snapping under too much tension.

  “Dancing butterflies,” said Omi Inamura.

  Joanna’s eyes fluttered and closed. Her breathing changed. She went limp in the big reclining chair.

  With great skill, the psychiatrist took her back through the years until she was once again deep in the past, in the room that stank of antiseptics and disinfectants.

  “There is a window in that room, isn’t there, Joanna?” Inamura asked.

  “Yes. One.”

  “Is the blind open?”

  “Yes.”

  The doctor hesitated, then asked, “What do you see beyond that window?”

  “Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.”

  Inamura opened a copy of the Japanese edition of The Demolished Man, one page of which he had marked with a blue silk ribbon. Joanna had recited the last line of the jingle that was an integral part of Bester’s story. Inamura read aloud the next to last line, hoping that it would prove to be the answering sentence—if there was such a thing. “’Tenser, said the Tensor.’ ”

  Although the doctor had not asked a question, Joanna responded. “Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.”

  “ ‘Tenser, said the Tensor.’ ”

  Joanna did not respond this time.

  Inamura leaned forward in his armchair. “You are in the room that smells of alcohol ... ammonia. You’re strapped to the bed.”

  “Yes.”

  “There is a window. An open window. What do you see beyond the window, Joanna?”

  “The roof of a house,” she said without hesitation. “It’s a mansard roof. Black slate. No windows in it. I can see two brick chimneys.”

  “By God, it worked!” Alex said.

  “I got the Bester novel last evening,” Inamura said, “and read it in a single sitting. It’s engrossing science fiction. Do you remember what happens to the killer at the end of the novel?”

  “He’s caught by the telepathic police,” Alex said.

  “Yes. Caught in spite of all his cleverness. And after they apprehend him, rather than imprison or execute him, they ’demolish’ the man. They tear down his psyche, wipe out his memory. They remove every twist and quirk that made it possible for him to commit murder. Then they reconstruct him as a model citizen. They make an entirely new person out of him.”

  “So in some ways it’s similar to Joanna’s experience. Except that she’s an innocent victim.”

  “Some things that were science fiction thirty years ago are fact today. For better or worse.”

  “I’ve never doubted that modern brainwashing techniques could produce a total identity change,” Alex said. “I just want to know why the hell it was done to Joanna.”

  “Perhaps we’ll find the answer today,” the psychiatrist said. He faced his patient again. “What else do you see beyond the window, Joanna?”

  “Just the sky.”

  “Do you know what city you’re in?”

  “No.”

  “What country?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s talk about the people who visit you in that room. Are there many of them?”

  “A nurse. Heavyset. Gray hair. I don’t like her. She has a ... strange smile.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Take your time.”

  Her face clouded with puzzlement as she struggled to recall the nurse’s name. At last: “No. It’s gone.”

  “Who else visits you?”

  “A woman with brown hair, brown eyes. Sharp features. She’s very brisk, businesslike. She’s a doctor.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I ... I guess maybe she told me. And she does things ... doctor things.”

  “Such as?”

  “She takes my blood pressure and gives me injections and runs all kinds of tests on me.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you just forgotten—or did she never tell you her name?”

  “I don’t think she ever told me.”

  “Is there anyone else who comes to see you in that room?”

  Joanna shuddered. Although she didn’t reply, she crossed her arms protectively across her breasts, and a shadow of fear fell across her face.

  “There is someone,” said Inamura. “Who, Joanna? Who else comes to see you?”

  She chewed on her lower lip. Her hands were fisted. Her voice faded to a tremulous whisper: “Oh, God, no. No. No.”

  “Relax. Be calm,” Inamura instructed.

  Alex fidgeted in his chair. He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her, let her know that she was safe.

  Inamura persisted: “Who else comes to see you, Joanna?”

  “The Hand,” she said thinly.

  “The Hand? Do you mean the man with the prosthetic device, the mechanical hand?”

  “Him.”

  “Is he a doctor too?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The woman doctor and the nurse call him ‘Herr Doktor.’ ”

  “Did you say Herr, the German form of address?”

  “Yes.

  “Are the women German?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is the man German?”

  “The ... The Hand? I don’t know.”

  “Do they speak German?”

  “Not to me. Only English to me.”

  “What language do they speak among themselves?”

  “Sometimes English.”

  “And at other times?”

  “Something else.”

  “Might it be German?”

  “I guess. Maybe.”

  “When they’re speaking in English, do they have German accents?”

  “I ... I’m not sure. Accents. All of them have accents. But not necessarily German.”

  “Do you think this room could be somewhere in Germany?”

  “No. Maybe. Well
... I don’t know where it is.”

  “The doctor, this man who—”

  “Do we have to talk about him?” she asked plaintively.

  “Yes, Joanna. We must talk about him. Just relax. He can’t hurt you now. Tell me—what does he look like?”

  “Brown hair. He’s going bald.”

  “What color eyes?”

  “Light brown. Pale. Almost yellow.”

  “Tall or short? Thin or fat?”

  “Tall and thin.”

  “What does he do to you in that room?”

  She rolled her head slowly from side to side on the chair, declining to answer.

  “What does he do to you?”

  The myna was suddenly frantic, rapidly circling the walls of its cage, plucking at the brass bars with its talons and beak.

  “What does he do to you, Joanna?”

  The plink-plonk-plink of brass was a cold, flat music, as though a draft out of Hell were stirring the music of damnation from a set of wind chimes.

  Inamura was insistent. “What does he do to you, Joanna?”

  At last she said shakily: “Treatments.”

  “What sort of treatments?”

  Her lashes fluttered, and from her closed eyes came slow tears.

  Alex reached out for her from his chair.

  “No,” the doctor said almost sotto voce but forcefully.

  “But she needs—”

  “She needs to remember.”

  Alex said, “But I can’t—”

  “Trust me, Mr. Hunter.”

  Anguished, Alex drew back from Joanna.

  “What sort of treatments?” Inamura asked again.

  “I’m dying.” She shuddered. She pressed her arms even tighter across her chest, shrank back defensively into the chair. “Each time I d-d-die just a little more. Why not kill me all at once? Why not get it over with?” She was crying openly now. “Please, just get it over with.”

  “You aren’t dying,” Inamura assured her. “You’re safe. I am protecting you, Joanna. Just tell me about these treatments. What are they like?”

  She could not speak.

  “All right,” the psychiatrist said gently. “Relax. Be calm. You are calm and relaxed ... relaxed ... safe and at peace and relaxed ... sleeping deeply ... such sweet tranquillity.”