Dark Terrors 3 (28 page)

‘—hypnotic regression to recover my memories, we’ve determined that I’ve observed you displaying at least thirteen different personalities, just to help you cope with the terrible things I’ve done to you—’

‘What?’
Renata looked from her father’s earnest image on the TV, babbling away about
abuse
and
multiples
and
recovered memories
to Jules’ tormented, painful face above her. ‘Julio, what in God’s name is he talking about?’

He turned to look at Dan. ‘This must be the one Dad referred to as “Cleo.” She always denied all knowledge of anything that was going on.’

‘Who’s
Cleo?’ Renata demanded. ‘What are
you
talking about now?’

‘Cleo,’ Jules said to her. ‘Short for Cleopatra. Queen of Denial?’ Pause. ‘You get it?’

‘No, wait a minute. And get
off me,
goddammit—’ Renata arched her back again, trying to throw him off.

‘Careful!’ Dan called. ‘Maybe that isn’t Cleo, it could be Lilith just
pretending
to be Cleo so she can molest you—’

Jules made a disgusted noise, started to get off her and then didn’t, instead planting his knee in the centre of her stomach without letting go of her wrists. ‘What do we do?’ he asked, frightened.

Dan was at his side in a moment. ‘Well, the first thing we do is, we keep our heads. Remember, I told you that doing an intervention can be an incredibly emotional experience. You can’t start panicking as soon as things get hairy. It’s going to get worse before it gets better, it’s going to get a
lot
worse, and Renata needs all of us to be strong and calm for her—’

‘Hey, asshole,’ Renata said angrily, ‘I’m right here, not in
the next room. Now get my crazy brother off me and stop talking about me in the third—’

‘Should I call an ambulance?’ asked one of the twins in a tight, anxious voice.

‘Not yet,’ Dan said. ‘Some of these personalities can be incredibly strong, we don’t want any innocent paramedics to get hurt. As soon as she’s calmer, we’ll call a private service and have them take her out to Wood Grove.’ He knelt down beside the couch and brushed Renata’s hair out of her face. ‘I want to speak with Renata, please. Or The Boss. That’s what your father always called her,’ he added to Jules. ‘The Boss was the one who always took charge when things got a little loose around the edges and threatened to fall apart’ He turned back to her and spoke clearly into her face, over-enunciating as if she were stupid.

‘I said, send out Renata
right now.
We want to talk to
Renata.’

‘Dan,’ she said, trying to sound calm but hearing the shakiness in her voice. ‘Dan, stop a minute. What are you doing? At least, tell me what you think you’re doing? We’ve known each other all our lives. We played together, went to the same school. Hell, you even took me to the Christmas dance one year when my boyfriend came down with shingles.’ She swallowed hard. ‘Remember that?’

Dan’s face took on an expression so sad that she wanted to cry for him. ‘You see, Jules? You see how insidious this thing is? She remembers going to a dance she never went to, because it’s far better than remembering what
really
happened that night, that her father forced me to bring her to that motel where he was meeting with that group he called The Sex Club—’

‘Dan, there are
pictures, photos
of us together at the dance—’

‘Faked,’ Dan said, with authority. ‘All faked. So you’d go on believing that you’d had a happy childhood and a good life, and not the horror that you really had to live with.’ He
bowed his head for a moment. ‘And so I could repress the memory of my part in what you suffered.’

The rest of them had gathered around the couch now, even her mother, sniffling and dabbing at her eyes and clutching Mrs Anderson for support. They all looked down at her as if she were some kind of strange, unidentifiable creature that had somehow landed, injured and frightened, in the middle of an ordinary, suburban living room.

‘This is
wrong,’
Renata told them desperately. ‘This is
wrong,
this is
not
what happened. Can’t you hear me, don’t you understand me?
None of this is true.
It didn’t happen.
It didn‘t happen!’

One of her cousins reached down and touched her shoulder gently. ‘I know it’s hard to believe. The human mind is so amazing, there are all sorts of things that it can do, including repressing memories that are too horrible for us to live with. But don’t worry. Wood Grove is a good place. They’ve got a great staff there, including Dan—’ she paused to smile over at him. ‘And it’s completely covered by insurance. They helped me. They and Dan helped me.’

‘And me,’ said the other twin, and put her hand on Jules’ shoulder. ‘And they’ve performed miracles with your brother. His personalities will never be integrated the way ours were, but he’s learned how to manage them better than a traffic cop in New York rush hour.’

Everyone gave a polite titter at her joke and Jules’ expression was an impossible combination of pride and nausea.

Dan leaned forward and put his hands on both sides of her face, turning her head gently so he could stare into her eyes. ‘The important thing to do right now,’ he said, ‘is relax. You’re among friends, you’re safe, you can stop denying and pretending. You’re a bad subject for hypnosis? Don’t worry, I can fix that. I can make you a good subject. I can. I’m very good at what I do.’

She tried to draw back but there was nowhere to go.

‘Next month at this time,’ Dan said gently, ‘next month,
you’ll remember it all. You’ll have all those memories and you’ll be able to take them on and cope with them. I promise.’ He looked up at one of the twins. ‘You can phone for the ambulance now.’

* * * *

Pat Cadigan’s
short stories have recently appeared on the
Omni
website, and she contributed a quarter of
Omni’s
first round-robin story, ‘Making Good Time’. Anthology appearances include
Killing Me Softly
edited by Gardner Dozois and two edited by Ellen Datlow,
Little Deaths
and
Lethal Kisses,
while upcoming stories are due in
Dying For It
and David Garnett’s re-revived
New Worlds.
‘ “This Is Your Life (Repressed Memory Remix)” was a direct result of my having read the book
Victims of Memory: Incest, Accusations and Shattered Lives
by Mark Prendergast,’ says Cadigan. ‘Prendergast’s book is exhaustively documented and researched, a scholarly investigation not of incest accusations
per se,
but of incest accusations that come strictly from what is commonly called “recovered memory therapy”. While Prendergast does not assume that everyone accused is innocent, he shows the horror of having your life suddenly torn apart by accusations that come seemingly from nowhere, that not only persist, but spread like a virus even when there is hard evidence to the contrary. In one particularly tragic case, a woman managed to convince her entire family that they had been Satanists who had abused her sexually throughout her childhood. Her father went so far as to turn himself in to the police as a child molester and served time in prison before the daughter had second thoughts about what she thought she remembered. The father never actually did manage to remember anything, but decided that he was in denial, or just suppressing - after all, why would his daughter accuse him unless it had actually happened? As a parent, I find this bloody chilling. I’d rather face a vampire or a zombie, thank you. And then it occurred to me that all of the people who recover memories always remember as victims - no one ever recovers a memory of being a victimizer, a perpetrator. And
then
I decided that maybe there was a horror story that might match the prospect of having your offspring accuse you of the unspeakable - the idea of your
parent
suddenly “remembering” years of abusing you, and the rest of your family deciding to help you remember it, too.’

<>

* * * *

BRIAN HODGE

There must’ve been signs first. There always are -- subtleties we’re afraid to imagine go any deeper than one day’s mood. So I don’t suppose it was until our latest funeral that I broke down and admitted that something inside Jared was truly changing, and not for the better.

This one had been particularly rough on Jared. Neither of us had been strangers to funerals over the past few years, but this time it was for an earlier lover of Jared’s, amicably parted from after a growing realization that all he and Terry had in them was the honeymoon.

People -- lovers, especially -- have a million ways of changing on you, most of them bad. Not inherently, maybe, but bad for you. Because you couldn’t or wouldn’t follow along.

You’ll hear people say that only the dead don’t change, but obviously they’ve never thought this through, because to the dead change comes naturally, as they seek their return to earth and air and water, while we survivors who loved them manage to forget all the flaws that kept things interesting. Remake them into idealized versions that we’d never be able to tolerate if they came walking back through the door this way, so perfect we’d eventually want to kill them all over again. You...you’ve changed, we’d accuse them, feeling somehow betrayed.

Terry had died at home -- the virus, what else? -- his current lover helping the nurses and hospice volunteers care for him. It’s where we gathered after the funeral, his brownstone apartment with vintage wood as solid as a bank vault and laid out shotgun-style, one long chain of rooms full of friends, acquaintances, strangers. Everybody was welcome, except for those righteous fuckers who’d showed up at the cemetery to gloat in the distance, toting picket signs.

SODOMITES REPENT, that was one of the gentler ones. Some of them got almost as ugly as the faces underneath, eyes frightened and angry, prissy mouths crinkled tight like drawstring purses.

“And those are the ones with the nerve to claim they’re made in God’s image?” Jared had whispered hoarsely in the cemetery.

“I’d always pictured God as better looking,” I said. “That doesn’t make much of a case for omnipotence, does it?”

He appeared not to have heard me, staring at this wretched Greek chorus. “But what if they are? What if they really are?”

At Terry’s apartment we threw our coats atop the pile already on the bed, Jared lingering over all the sleeves that seemed caught up in some pointless struggle for supremacy. I wondered if he was remembering being in this same bed three years earlier, maybe recalling a conversation or some good night’s love.