hadn’t even read this thriller. There was nary a dragon in it, neither elf nor wizard.
After several circuits of the room, beginning to understand the frustration of a zoo-kept panther, Dusty returned to his chair, even though he still felt as if all the fluid in his spine had collected, like chilled mercury, in the small of his back.
He continued reading.
49
Sloppy work, this decapitation, obviously performed with the wrong cutting tool.
“The victim’s eyes are a point of interest here, Martie. How wide they appear. The upper lids crimped back so far by shock that they almost look as though they were cut off. Such mystery in his gaze, such an otherworldly quality, as though in the moment of death, he had been granted a glimpse of what awaited him beyond.”
She looked into the pitiable eyes in the photograph. Blinked. Blinked.
Paging to the next pink Post-it, the doctor said, “This one is of special importance, Martie. Study it well.”
She lowered her head slightly toward the page.
“You and Dusty will eventually be required to mutilate a woman in a similar manner to this, and you will arrange the various body parts in a tableau as clever as this one. The victim here is a girl, just fourteen years old, but the two of you will be dealing with a somewhat older person.”
The doctor’s interest was so gripped by the photograph that he didn’t see the first two tears until they had tracked most of the way down Martie’s face. Looking up, catching sight of those twin pearls, he was astonished.
“Martie, you are supposed to be in that deepest of deep places in your mind, far down in the chapel. Tell me whether or not that is where you are.”
“Yes. Here. The chapel.”
With her personality this deeply repressed, she should not have been able to respond emotionally either to anything that she witnessed or to anything that was done to her. As with Susan, the doctor should have had to bring her out from the chapel and up a flight or two of stairs, figuratively speaking, to a higher level of consciousness, before she would be capable of any reaction as savory as this.
“Tell me what’s wrong, Martie.”
Her voice was barely louder than a breath: “Such pain.”
“You’re in pain?”
“Her.”
“Tell me who.”
As more tears welled and shimmered in her eyes, she pointed to the rearranged young girl in the photograph.
Puzzled, Ahriman said, “It’s just a photograph.”
“Of a real person,” she murmured.
“She’s been dead a long time.”
“She was alive once.”
Martie’s lacrimal glands were evidently fine specimens. Her lacrimal sacs emptied into the lacrimal lakes, which reached flood stage, and two more droplets sluiced a little misery out of her eyes.
Ahriman was reminded of Susan’s final tear, squeezed out in the last minute of her life. Dying, of course, must be a stressful experience, even when one perishes quietly in a state of extreme personality submersion. Martie was not dying. Yet, these tears.
“You didn’t know this girl,” the doctor persisted.
Barely a whisper: “No.”
“She might have deserved this.”
“No.”
“She might have been a teenage prostitute.”
Softly, bleakly: “Doesn’t matter.”
“Perhaps she was a murderer herself.”
“She’s me.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“What does that mean?” she parroted.
“You say that she is you. Explain.”
“It can’t be explained.”
“Then it’s meaningless.”
“It can only be known.”
“It can only be known,” he repeated scornfully.
“Yes.”
“Is this a riddle, maybe a Zen koan or something?”
“Is it?” she asked.
“Girls,” he said impatiently.
Martie said nothing.
The doctor closed the book, studied her profile for a moment, and then said, “Look at me.”
She turned her head to face him.
“Be still,” he said. “I want to taste.”
Ahriman pressed his lips to each of her welling eyes. A little tongue work, too.
“Salty,” he said, “but something else. A subtle something quite intriguing.”
He required another sip. A spasm of REM caused her eye to quiver erotically against his tongue.
Sitting back from her again, Ahriman said, “Astringent but not bitter.”
Girl’s face shiny damp. All the sorrow of the world. Yet such bright beauty.
Daring to believe that those three lines were the beginning of yet another haiku worth committing to paper, the doctor tucked the verses away in his mind to be polished later.
As if the heat of Ahriman’s lips had withered Martie’s lacrimal apparatus, her eyes grew dry once more.
“You’re going to be a lot more fun than I thought,” Ahriman said. “You’ll require considerable finesse, but the extra effort ought to be worthwhile. Like all the best toys, the art of your form — your mind and heart — at least equals the thrill of your function. Now I want you to be calm, perfectly calm, detached, observant, obedient.”
“I understand.”
He opened the textbook again.
With the doctor’s patient guidance, dry-eyed this time, Martie studied the crime-scene photograph of the dismembered girl, whose parts had been creatively rearranged. He instructed her to imagine what it would be like to commit this atrocity herself, to glory in the reeking wet reality of what she saw here on the glossy page. To be certain Martie involved all five of her senses in this exercise, Ahriman employed his medical knowledge, his personal experience, and his well-conditioned imagination to assist her with many details of color, texture, and stench.
Then other pages. Other photographs. Fresh corpses but also bodies in various stages of decomposition.
Blink.
Blink.
Finally he returned the two heavy volumes to the bookshelves.
He had spent fifteen minutes too long with Martie, but he had taken considerable satisfaction in refining her appreciation for death. Sometimes the doctor thought he might have been a first-rate teacher, costumed in tweed suits, suspenders, bow ties; and he
He instructed Martie to lie on her back, on the couch, and close her eyes. “I’m going to bring Dusty in here now, but you will not hear a word of what either of us says. You will not open your eyes until I tell you to do so. You will go away now into a soundless, lightless place, into a deep sleep, from which you will awake back in the mind
