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  How did he know his brother was dead? If he couldn’t remember, how could he be sure? And yet, he was sure . . . wasn’t he?

  “No, Aloysius,” Diogenes said with a smile. “That’s all part of your fantasy. Your illness. Think back on your life, or what you believe has been your life. What is your profession?”

  Pendergast hesitated. “I’m . . . an FBI agent.”

  Another gentle smile. “Okay. Now think about that. We know all about this ‘life’ of yours. You’ve spent the last months talking about it with Dr. Augustine. We’ve heard all about the insane exploits, the wild encounters. We’ve heard about all the people you’ve supposedly killed, about your narrow escapes. We’ve heard about genetic monsters eating people’s brains and infantile serial killers living in caves. We’ve heard about underground mutant armies and Nazi breeding programs. We’ve heard about a certain young lady who is a hundred and forty years old . . . That, Aloysius, is the fantasy world you’re finally awakening from. We’re real; that crazy world is not.”

  As Diogenes rattled these items off, each one suddenly resonated in Pendergast’s memory, bursting like a firework. “No,” he said. “It’s exactly the opposite. You’re twisting everything. You’re not real; that other world is real.”

  Helen leaned over, her violet eyes looking into his. “Do you really think the FBI, the buttoned-down FBI, would allow one of its agents to run amok, killing people willy-nilly?” She spoke calmly, her voice cool and rational. “How could all that be real? Think back on these so-called adventures of yours. Could one man, one person, really experience all that and live through it?”

  Diogenes spoke again, his buttery Southern accent like a balm. “You simply couldn’t have survived all the adventures you’ve told Dr. Augustine about. Don’t you see? Your memories are lying to you. Not us.”

  “Then why am I restrained? Why the hood?”

  “When the breakthrough came,” said Diogenes, “when Dr. Augustine finally breached the hard shell of your fantasies, you became . . . disturbed. We had no choice but to have you restrained, for your own safety. They hooded you because the light was bothering you. You’ve always had an aversion to light, ever since you were a child.”

  “And why the shaved head?”

  “That’s necessary for the treatment, the placement of electrodes. Electrical stimulation of the brain.”

  “Electrodes? What in God’s name is being done to me?”

  “Try to relax, Aloysius,” Helen said soothingly. “We know how difficult this must be. You’re awakening from a long, long nightmare. We’re here to help you back to reality. Try to sit up. Have a drink of water.”

  Pendergast sat up and Helen adjusted the pillows behind him. He now took a closer look at the room. It was elegant, paneled in oak, with leaded glass windows opening to a sweep of green lawn and flowering dogwood trees. He noted that the windows were discreetly barred. A Persian rug covered much of the gleaming parquet floor. The only indication that this was a hospital room was an odd-looking medical instrument, set into the wall by the head of his bed, with dials, tiny lights, and a series of electrodes dangling on long, colored leads.

  His gaze was arrested by a strange sight: in a satin wing chair in the far corner sat a ventriloquist’s dummy. The dummy had brown hair and scarlet lips. It was wearing a doctor’s white coat with a stethoscope draped around its neck. Its mouth hung open, revealing a dark hole. Its glassy blue eyes underneath arched eyebrows stared directly at him, unblinking. It sat up very straight, its legs sticking straight out, its polished brown shoes decorated with painted orange laces.

  At that moment, the door opened and a man strode in, a big, cheerful fellow with a fringe of hair around a bald pate. He was dressed in a blue serge suit with a red bow tie, a red carnation in his boutonniere. He carried a clipboard.

  Diogenes rose and extended his hand. “Hello, Doctor. We’re so glad you’re here. He’s awake and, I daresay, a lot more lucid than before.”

  “Excellent!” said the doctor, turning to Pendergast. “I think we’ve achieved a real breakthrough here.”

  “Breakthrough? Not at all. This is some sort of induced hallucination, some scheme to affect my sanity.”

  “That,” said the doctor, “is the last gasp of your delusion talking. But that’s quite all right. May I?” He indicated a seat next to the ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “I am perfectly indifferent to your comfort,” said Pendergast. “Do as you wish.”

  The doctor sat down, unperturbed. “I’m so glad to see you able to recognize Helen and Diogenes. That in itself is a huge step. Before, you couldn’t even see them, so powerful were your fantasies of their being dead. Now, if I may, I’d like to explain all this to you while you’re lucid.”

  Pendergast waved a hand.

  “Yours is a deep and complex case—perhaps the most complex in my experience. What I am now summarizing is the result of months of painstaking reconstruction. During your time in the Special Forces, twenty years ago, you suffered an unbearably traumatic experience. We’ve covered that thoroughly and don’t need to touch on it again. Suffice it to say, the experience was so dreadful it presented a threat to your sanity, indeed to your very existence. You left the Special Forces. But the trauma produced in you an extreme form of PTSD, which lay deeply buried and untreated. Like a cancer, it worked away on you over the years. Being a man of means, you could afford not to work—and enforced idleness may have been the worst thing for you. You became delusional. Your primary way of dealing with this untreated PTSD was to become, in your own mind, an all-powerful FBI agent, who rights wrongs, kills without mercy, and rids the world of evil. This fantasy took over your very existence.”

  Pendergast stared at the doctor. As much as he wanted to disbelieve, there was a disturbing logic to it. As proof, here were Diogenes and Helen, two people he’d believed dead, in the room, living, breathing, and to all his senses absolutely real. He couldn’t deny the reality of his own eyes. And yet . . . his memories of his FBI days, which the earlier litany of Diogenes had opened to him as if by a floodgate, were just as strong.

  “You’ve been in a dark place,” the doctor said, tapping his pen on the clipboard. “But you’re making real progress at last, thanks to my course of treatment. In fact, things were looking so promising that, last week, I brought in the two people who care about you the most—your brother and your ex-wife—to be by your side. It’s always darkest just before you emerge from the tunnel.”

  “What is this place?”

  “This is the Stony Mountain Sanatorium, outside of Saranac Lake in Upstate New York.”

  “And how did I get here?”

  “Your housekeeper found you barricaded in your Dakota apartment, raving about Nazis. The police were called, your brother was notified, and he and your ex-wife arranged to bring you here. That was almost six months ago. It was slow, difficult going at first, but the progress you’ve made recently is most encouraging. Now—after what I’ve just explained, how do you feel?”

  Pendergast turned to Diogenes and was once again struck by the look of brotherly concern on his face. “But you made it your life’s work to destroy me.”

  An expression of distress crossed Diogenes’s face. “That, Aloysius, is the most painful part of your delusions. I’ve never been anything to you but a loving brother. Sure, we had our differences as kids. What brothers don’t? But to see those childish tiffs grow into this adult paranoia was really painful. But I love you, brother, and I long ago realized it was an illness—not a choice.”

  Pendergast turned to Helen. “And you?”

  She lowered her eyes. “First, it was your fantasy about me being killed by a lion in Africa. And then your delusion morphed into something even more bizarre—that I hadn’t been killed by a lion at all, but by Nazis in Mexico. There came a time when I just couldn’t take it. That’s why I divorced you. I’m so sorry. Maybe I should have been stronger. But the fact is I never stopped loving you.”

&nbs
p; There was a silence. Pendergast looked around the room. It was all so real, so vivid, and so calming. Despite himself, he felt a sense of release, as if a long nightmare was finally ending. What if they were telling the truth? If so, the horror of Helen’s death hadn’t happened. It was all in his mind. And how wonderful to be released from those dreadful memories, that crushing sense of guilt, pain, and remorse, free of all the horrible things he had witnessed as an FBI agent. And he could let go of the pain of Diogenes’s insanity and implacable hatred. “How do you feel?” Dr. Augustine had asked. He felt at peace. He could forget everything now. It was as if all the shackles of his old, false memories, his old, imagined actions, were dropping away, and he was being given a second chance in life.

  “I think I would like to sleep now,” he said.

  · · ·

  He awoke in the dark. It was night. He sat up and saw Helen, sitting in a chair near the bed, dozing. She awoke, her eyes opening, and smiled. She glanced at her watch. The moonlight was lighting up the lace curtains in the window, casting an ethereal glow over the polished oak walls. The chair with the dummy was now empty.

  “What time is it?”

  “One o’clock.”

  He felt strangely refreshed, alert.

  “Would you like me to turn on a light?” she asked.

  “No, please. I like the moonlight. Do you remember the full moon?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Of course. The moon.”

  Pendergast was shaken. He felt a sudden sense of gratitude that she was alive, that she had not died—that he was not responsible.

  “What I mean, if I haven’t been in the FBI, what have I been doing?”

  “Well, we met after you had left the Special Forces. You never talked about it and I never wanted to pry. You were living a life of leisure and intellectual pursuit at the old family estate down in Louisiana, and we spent quite a few idyllic years there, as well as traveling the world. Tibet, Nepal, Brazil, Africa.”

  “Africa?”

  “Big game hunting. I was never killed by a lion, however.” She smiled thinly. “Let me just say this, Aloysius. Let me get this off my chest. I’m not proud of myself for leaving you—but I began to fear for my safety. Living with you became increasingly dangerous. Through it all, Diogenes was a saint. He learned of this experimental treatment here at Stony Mountain. It was our last option.”

  Pendergast nodded slowly. “What will become of me now?”

  “I’m told the recovery will take time. You’ll have to stay here until the doctor feels it’s complete. It might be another six months.”

  “You mean, I can’t leave?”

  Helen hesitated. “You’ll have to face the fact that you’ve been legally committed. But it’s for your own good. After all, it took you years and years to develop these delusions. You can’t expect to get well overnight. In time, you’ll be able to return to Penumbra and pick up your old life of leisure.” She took both his hands in hers. “After that, who knows what might happen? Maybe there’s even hope for us.”

  She squeezed his hands. He returned the pressure.

  She smiled, stood up. “I’ll come see you tomorrow, around noon.”

  Pendergast watched her go. A long moment passed as he fell deep into thought. For a very long time the room was utterly silent. A strip of moonlight marched slowly across the floor.

  Finally, perhaps two hours later, he rose from the bed. On the far side of the room was a heavy metal locker, no doubt added at the time the space was converted into a hospital room. It was secured with a padlock. He looked about. On a table in one corner sat some papers. He flipped through them, but they were only newsletters and hospital menus. Slipping two paper clips off the documents, he went to the locker and—with a movement that was almost automatic—unbent both clips, inserted first one and then the other into the padlock, and with a single deft movement sprung it open.

  He paused. How did he know how to do that? From his Special Forces days? His memory of that time was still so damnably miasmic.

  He peered into the cabinet. It held a black suit, a white shirt, a tie, shoes, and socks. He touched the material of the suit, soft and elegant, as familiar as his own skin. He felt a prickling sensation at the base of his neck. He searched the suit and pants, going first to the pocket that—he supposedly remembered—held his FBI wallet. Nothing. The other pockets, all the little custom-made slots and pouches, were there. And all were empty. No ID, nothing.

  He slipped off his hospital gown and put on the shirt, stroking the fine pinpoint cotton. Then came the pants, the Zegna tie, the jacket, the socks. As he picked up the John Lobb shoes, he thought of something, flipped over the left shoe, and detached the heel. There, nestled in a carved hollow, was a razor blade, a set of lock picks, two sealed ampoules of chemicals, and a tightly folded hundred-dollar bill.

  He stared. Could this, too, be a product of his delusional FBI period?

  Refastening the heel, he put on the shoes. He walked to the window, unlatched it, and swung it open. A breeze scented with hemlocks flowed through the vertical iron bars. He tried again to summon his last memory. They said he had been in there six months. Had it been winter, then? He tried desperately to remember, to see the landscape in front of him covered with snow, but could not.

  Flexing his arms, he reached out and grasped two adjoining metal bars. They were wrought iron, of poor quality, and corroded. With all his force, he pushed outward with each hand. Slowly but surely, the wrought iron deformed under his immense strength until an opening large enough for him to slip through had been made. He let go, breathing hard. But now was not the time to leave. No—he needed answers first.

  He fastened the window shut and drew the curtains. Moving cautiously, he went to the door of his room, tested the knob. Locked, of course. In ten seconds he had picked it with the aid of the paper clips, again marveling at his instinctual skill.

  He cracked the door and peered out. The lights were on in the hall, and at the far end he could see a nurse’s station attended by a nurse and two orderlies. All were alert and busy. He waited, timing his exit until their attention was elsewhere, then ducked out of the door and pressed himself into the darkness of the next doorway. Another patient? With a deft twist of the paper clips, the lock opened, and he found himself in a room like his own, only much smaller. A man lay in the single bed. He, too, had a shaved head, but he looked thin and wasted, and his bare arm sported the old tracks of a heroin addict. His bed had been outfitted with the same medical device Pendergast had noticed in his own room.

  With extreme caution, Pendergast exited the dark space and moved down the long hall. Each room he peered into was similar: a sleeping patient with a shaved head, frequently gaunt and wasted-looking.

  This was getting him nowhere.

  He paused to consider the possibilities. Either his version of reality was correct, or theirs was correct. Either way, unfortunately, seemed to indicate that he was crazy. He needed more information to choose which of the two insanities was real.

  Stepping out of the last patient’s room, he stuck his hands in his pockets and—not sure, exactly, what he was doing, and yet strangely certain of his actions—strolled back down the hall toward the nurse’s station. The two orderlies—big strapping blond men, six-feet-four inches, a matched set—watched him approach, first with incomprehension on their faces and then with alarm. He saw that both men were armed.

  “Hey . . . hey!” one of them cried, flummoxed at his appearance. “Who the hell are you?”

  He strolled up to them. “Pendergast, at your service. The patient from room 113.”

  In a practiced move, they parted and took up positions on either side of him. “Okay,” the first said, speaking calmly, “we’re going to take you back to your room, nice and easy. Understood?”

  Pendergast did not move. “I’m afraid that’s not acceptable.”

  They both moved a little closer. “Nobody wants any trouble.”

  “Incorrect. I d
o want trouble. In fact, I positively welcome it.”

  The first orderly reached out and gently grasped his arm. “Enough with the tough talk, friend, and let’s go back to bed.”

  “I do hate being touched.”

  The second orderly had now moved in, crowding him.

  The orderly’s grip tightened. “Let’s go, Mr. Pendergast.”

  There was a flicker of movement; the sound of a fist hitting a gut; the sudden wheeze of expelled air—and then the orderly buckled over and collapsed to the floor, grasping his diaphragm. The second orderly swung to grab Pendergast and a moment later was doubled up on the floor as well.

  The nurse at the station turned toward an alarm, pulled it, and a siren began to wail. Red lights went on and Pendergast could hear automatic bolts shooting in various door locks. Almost instantly, half a dozen monster orderlies appeared out of nowhere and converged on the nurse’s station, where Pendergast stood calmly with crossed arms. They surrounded him, weapons drawn. The two orderlies on the floor continued to lie in a fetal position, gasping and sucking in air, unable to speak.

  “Gentlemen, I am ready to go back to my room,” said Pendergast. “But please don’t touch me. I have a ‘thing’ about it, you might say.”

  “Just get the hell going,” said one of the orderlies, apparently the leader. “Move.”

  Pendergast strolled down the hallway, orderlies before and after. They entered the room and one turned on the light, the last one shutting and locking the door. The lead orderly gestured toward the open metal cabinet, at the foot of which lay Pendergast’s hospital gown.

  “Strip off your clothes and get back in your gown,” he said.

  Meanwhile, another orderly was speaking on a walkie-talkie, and Pendergast could hear him assuring someone that all was under control. The siren stopped and silence descended once again.

  “I said, strip.”

  Pendergast turned his back on the orderly, facing the locker, but made no move to take off his clothes. A moment passed and then the lead orderly stepped forward and grabbed him by the shoulder, pulling him around.