Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

This Is Your Life (Repressed Memory Remix) PAT CADIGAN

By the time she was on the flight back to Massachusetts, Renata had grown weary of condolences. You’re forty years old, your father dies. If you haven’t been close to him for most of your life, you’re not going to suddenly discover a deep well of emotion connected to him.

Of course, she had to remind herself, it wasn’t that way with a lot of people. A good many of her co-workers, for example, would not have had to fly to get home for a family funeral, and they’d have been pretty torn up about it. But that was how you felt when you lost someone who had been one of the mainstays of your life.

Her friend Vinnie had been nonplussed to know that she didn’t consider her father one of the mainstays of her own life. Brought up in a large extended Italian family, Vincenza Maria Fanucci was a curious mix of highly independent, uncompromising professional and Old World filial piety. Vinnie regarded her own father as a big kid ensconced in the body of a flawed minor deity who permeated, even now, the lives of his five children with his paternal. oh, hell, Renata didn’t even know what to call it. Paternal existence. Paternal paternity. Daddyish-ness. Staring down unseeing at the inflight magazine in her lap, Renata thought that she probably knew more of the substance of Vinnie’s father than she ever had of her own.

It wasn’t that her father hadn’t loved her, or that he had rejected her. She could remember times when she was little when her father had taken her to the movies or to the circus, or even just out to the playground on Saturday. Just her alone — in those days, her brother Jules had been only a baby. Her father had dutifully pushed her on the swings, spun the merry-go-round for her till she had got dizzy almost to the point of nausea, caught her at the bottom of the slide.

No, not just dutifully. That was unfair. He had been pleasant. She had even believed that he’d been having fun, but no child could believe that anyone wouldn’t have fun in a playground. Any more than, she supposed, any child — any very young child — could believe that she wasn’t the only thing of any real importance in her parents’ world.

Eventually, you’d know better. By then, however, you had usually achieved adolescence and if you gave that sort of thing any thought at all, it was probably more with satisfaction than anything else, maybe a fleeting sense of relief as you left the house to go meet friends. As Renata had always understood it, this was called flying the nest. Except some people worked out some kind of compromise, where they left but acceded to a kind of placeholder that marked a bit of territory that they would always belong to, rather than vice versa.

My, but our thoughts are heavy today, for someone claiming not to be terribly affected by her father’s death.

She turned a page and frowned down at a photo of an impossibly plush hotel in some ridiculously inaccessible vacation region. Perhaps that was because, instead of mourning her father, she was mourning the profound and lasting connection they had failed to achieve. As she got older, he’d just had less and less time for her, or her brother Jules. She thought now that probably he’d barely had time for their mother. But that had just been the way things were back then. His draftsman’s job consumed more of his time and attention. The company he’d worked for had been switching over to Computer Aided Design, trying to keep up with the rest of the corporate Joneses, and her father had had to re-train himself almost from scratch in a job that he had been proficient in — had thought he’d been proficient in — for almost twenty years. New developments had eaten up his time and hadn’t left much in the way even of bare bones behind.

And hadn’t it been that way for a lot of other families as well? Sure. We can’t all be jolly Italian dynasties, now, can we? No, we sure can’t.

What sadness there was for her in the occasion had much more to do with the absence of the man’s effect on her rather than the absence of the man himself. Maybe that was sadder than his death, she thought, and actually felt her throat begin to tighten.

Now, now. Let’s not go to pieces just because it’s an occasion that usually calls for it, she thought, sneaking a look at her seat-mate on the right as she pretended that she wasn’t dabbing tears from her eyes. No worries there; the woman had dozed off with her mouth open and her reading glasses a centimeter from the end of her prominent nose. She was a plump, middle-aged blonde made even plumper by masses of hair extensions artfully braided into her natural hair. Naturally-grown hair, Renata amended to herself; the colour was as acquired as the extra tresses. It wasn’t a bad job. Renata wouldn’t have known except that one tiny connection knot was peeking out at her near the woman’s left temple. She smiled at it, absently patting the greying brown hair fluffing over the back of her own collar.

Tell you what, Blondella, Renata thought at her; you don’t notice my tears and I won’t notice your hair-falsies. Is it a deal?

The woman went on sleeping silently, her breath inaudible in spite of her open mouth. Too bad. A snore as an inadvertent reply would have made her laugh at least inwardly and dried up her tears. She should have known, Renata chided herself, looking down at the ridiculous vacation hotel ad again. Comic timing, like so many other things, was just never there in real life. At least, not in her real life.

Her surprise at finding her brother waiting to meet her at the airport was almost enough to be honest shock. He was standing at the top of the escalators that slid down to the baggage carousel area, his face sad, worried and portentous, which was even more disconcerting. She had always described Jules to everyone as the sort of person the term even-tempered had been invented for. Unflappable Jules Adrian Prescott, who had raised his voice maybe three times a year, usually to say ‘Ow!’ after stubbing his toe or something. There had been times she had felt like telling him they could trade birth order and he could be the older Prescott kid, as he had always been more mature than she. Sometimes, though, she wondered if he didn’t frustrate the hell out of his wife, Lena.

The thought of Lena made her automatically look at Jules’ left hand; his wedding ring was gone. Now she was shocked, almost enough to draw back as he leaned forward to kiss her cheek and say something, but he looked so fraught that she shut up instead and submitted. For all she knew, he had accidentally left his ring in the bathroom after showering. Why add a stupid, intrusive, and possibly erroneous question to a time like this?

A time like what, though? Jules hadn’t been terribly close to their father, either.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked her as he took her carry-on bag and steered her on to the escalator.

‘Okay, I guess, Julio,’ she said, using the old childhood nickname, in which the j was pronounced improperly as j and not h. ‘But you don’t look too good—’

‘Yeah, well, a time like this,’ he said almost offhandedly, and she felt a frisson as he unknowingly echoed her thoughts. ‘It’s all so—’ he shook his head and a sudden stray breeze rifled his thick brown hair like invisible fingers searching for something concealed there.

She looked up at him, puzzled. It’s all so what, Julio? she wanted to say, but the pain in his expression stopped her. Maybe if the non-relationship with their father saddened her, she thought suddenly, it was even more so for Jules. Maybe he’d been reflecting on everything he hadn’t had as his father’s son, on memories that should have been there to comfort and reassure but were not, never could have been, never would be. Did Lena understand? she wondered, anxious for him now.

They collected her one small bag from the carousel and then followed a silly, over-complicated route made even more convoluted by detours around awkwardly-placed areas of renovation hidden behind impassive wooden walls. Signs warned of dangers hidden behind their featureless facades. Apparently there were things back there that could maim you, cripple you, kill you without warning. But nothing reached out to harm them or so much as scare them as they made their way to Jules’ car in the parking garage. The walk took a good twenty minutes and during that time, Jules never did manage to complete the sentence that had ended with everything being so and she thought again that he was probably suffering from the realization that it was all just So what?

Her first thought was that her mother needed heart pills. Everything about her was grey, in a way that went beyond old age. Her skin looked as if it had been dusted with ashes only a few shades lighter than her hair, her lips might have moved a doctor to pronounce her cyanotic, and even the pupils of her eyes seemed to have lost all pigmentation. She sat, or rather sagged on a chair at the dining-room table, while Renata’s Aunt Daisy stood over her like a sentinel or a household servant waiting for instruction, occasionally squeezing one of her mother’s plump, rounded shoulders.

Daisy’s name was one of those ridiculous mistakes people sometimes made in christening their children. For Renata, the name Daisy had always suggested capriciousness and whimsy to the point of complete foolishness. But Daisy was serious, often humourless, and almost never emotional in any way. The only remotely daisy-ish thing about her was her yellow hair which was actually natural and looked dyed. It gave Renata another pause. Did anyone in her family ever get anything right? she wondered.

Jules had allowed her to carry in her own suitcase. Now he had vanished into another part of the house or into thin air, Renata wasn’t sure which. Daisy’s twin daughters were both there, one with her husband, the other with her female partner. The four of them were huddled near the antique sideboard where the good china and crystal sat safely in the dark of the cabinets most of the year, emerging only for Christmas-season dinners. On the mirror-shiny surface, kept that way by her mother’s monthly polishings, a collection of photos of various family members gazed out over the room as if the frames were actually funny little windows in so many sizes and shapes that each subject had just happened to wander up to, and were now staring through with vague unease at all that went on.

Renata’s own vague unease snapped into precise clarity. There were no pictures on the sideboard now. Someone had removed them, every single one, and she had never known that to happen, outside of her mother’s regularly scheduled cleaning sessions. She put her bag down where she stood and looked around, unease beginning to mutate into suspicion.

On the other side of the room, Mrs Anderson from next door was standing by a tall bookcase with the O’Briens from across the street. The three of them looked exhausted, as if something — her father’s death, or something unrelated except for timing? — had been draining them of every bit of energy and endurance. It was how another of her co-workers, a pretty young woman in accounting services, had looked after seeing her sister through a long and terrible death from AIDS.

But if Mrs Anderson and the O’Briens had been through something similar, it couldn’t have been with her father, Renata thought. Her father’s final heart trouble had dragged on a bit, but it had not been that kind of ordeal. Even if it had been, she couldn’t imagine that these people would have been involved to such an extent.

The O’Briens’ son Dan was sitting on a stool by the television, his elbows on his knees and his big hands folded under his chin. Dan was her age and looked about the same as he had the last time she had seen him several years before, except there was a little less of his greying, light brown hair and a little more round softness in his face. He was watching her with an intensity that almost frightened her, that would frighten her if he kept it up.

If he does keep it up, she decided, I’ll go over there and give him one upside the head, as the kids say. Knock that stupid look right off his face.

Her Aunt Daisy was watching her with almost the same expression, she realized suddenly. They all were. They were watching her, as if they expected her to do something strange and dangerous. A chill spread out over her scalp and down her neck, and she knew that if her hair could actually have stood on end, it would have.

She thought absurdly of the woman on the plane. Too bad I don’t have that hair to stand on end — that would really give them something to stare at. And now she was staring right back at all of them, each and every one in turn, and the fact that they weren’t the least bit put off by this, that not one of them felt compelled to look away or even blink, was the worst of all.

‘What?’ she said finally, trying to force down the panic that was lifting so rapidly inside her that she had to gasp for breath. ‘What? What is it? What the hell are you all looking at me like this for?’

There was a moment of utter silence, not long, but if it had stretched out any longer, she would have screamed into it. Abruptly, Dan O’Brien got up from the stool over by the television and gestured at it. ‘Renata, there’s something you have to see before the funeral.’

She gave her head a quick, minute shake. ‘What — an old re-run of Masterpiece Theater?’’

‘Please,’ he said, and his voice was as frightening as everything else, because it was so damned calm. ‘This hasn’t been easy on your mother or Jules, it isn’t easy for any of us, and it won’t be easy for you. But you have to see this. You do. And after you see it, you’ll understand. Everything will be clear.’

Renata looked to her mother for some sign but her mother had buried her face in Daisy’s waist, while Daisy held her, stroking her hair and glaring at Renata as if she were to blame. ‘Where’s Jules?’ she asked Dan, glancing at her twin cousins and their respective partners.

‘Jules has seen it,’ Dan said, suddenly sounding prim.

She wanted to make a smart remark about how they all had cable where she lived, so she had probably seen it herself, but something in her gave out and she sat down on the stool instead. Just get it over with, she told herself firmly. If it’s something utterly horrid, just leave. Don’t even stay for the funeral.

Dan put on the TV and then reached down to the VCR on the shelf underneath. Renata had a glimpse of a greasy man standing in front of a chat-show panel of even greasier people and then her father was looking earnestly out at her from the television screen. She jumped, putting one hand to her chest. God, but it looked and sounded so much like him, it was positively scary.

Then she suppressed a groan. It was one of these ghoulish videotaped will things that people knew would be played back after their deaths. So ghoulish. She felt her stomach turn over. Didn’t anyone ever consider what it would be like for the survivors to watch something like this? No wonder Jules was hiding out.

‘My darling Renata,’ her father said, folding his hands and leaning forward, as if he really were seeing her in the lens of the camera focused on him. He had been videotaped sitting at the head of the dining-room table. How much she and her father had resembled each other, she thought, much more than her father and Jules, or even herself and Jules. There was no missing the similarity of the shape of their faces and eyes, and even their voices shared a certain timbre. ‘My darling daughter Renata, this is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Harder, in some ways, than dying, really. I know I am dying. I can feel my heart becoming weaker every day. If my hearing were good enough, I would probably hear the blood in my veins and arteries slowing down, swashing and gurgling, getting ready to stop.’

Renata took a deep, careful breath to control her nausea. Maybe her father did know what sort of effect this would have and he was doing it on purpose, some kind of weird revenge of an angry, dying man on his still-living relatives.

‘So I must — must — make a clean breast of things. I cannot die carrying the guilt and the shame of what’s happened between us any longer.’

Her nausea melted into bewilderment. ‘The guilt and shame of what had happened between them?’ Being a distant, mostly absent father figure was a source of guilt and shame? The poor man, she thought in a sudden rush of pity. Then her bewilderment returned, along with a dash of irritation. If it had bothered him that much, he could have apologized, in person, while he’d still been alive.

‘No parent should ever put a child through the terrible things I put you through,’ he continued. ‘When I think of the hell you endured, I want to—’

‘Stop it,’ Renata snapped suddenly and jumped up from the stool. ‘Stop it right now.’

Dan O’Brien looked startled but obediently pointed a slender remote control at the VCR. Her father’s face froze in mid-word. Everyone in the room was looking at her as if she were displaying the worst manners possible, except for her mother who was slumped against Daisy and sobbing softly into a wad of tissues.

‘I refuse to listen to another moment of this travesty,’ Renata said angrily. ‘Obviously Dad went a little wonky before he died. I’m awfully sorry about that, it’s a terrible thing to happen. But now he’s gone. His troubles are over, and there’s no good reason to torture ourselves with this kind of thing.’

There was no answer except the sound of her mother’s sobbing.

‘Where’s Jules?’ Renata said, disgusted. ‘I want my suitcase. I’m going. If Jules won’t drive me back to the airport, I’ll take a cab or I’ll even walk if I have to, but I’m not going to stay here—’

‘Please,’ Dan said and she turned to him in surprise. ‘You don’t know how important this is.’

‘You’re probably right about that. You’re not family to me, however—’

‘Well, no, I’m not. Though in some ways, I may be even closer.’ Dan’s face was frighteningly sincere as well as serious. ‘I’m your father’s therapist. I treated him for two years before he died.’

Renata turned to her mother for confirmation, but her mother wouldn’t look at her. Her gaze went to the O’Briens to see what their reaction was. They had none, or none that she could see, except for the same strange quiet that everyone except her mother was hell-bent on maintaining. She turned back to Dan. ‘I didn’t know you were a doctor. I thought you went to business school.’

‘I did, but I switched direction a little while ago. Now I’m a therapist. Not a doctor in the sense that I could prescribe medications, but most of that stuff is poison anyway.’ Renata was sure that Dan’s smile was meant to look benevolent, but to her it seemed more vacant than anything. ‘I do a lot of work with hypnosis.’

‘Fine,’ Renata said. ‘But don’t expect me to make an appointment just because my father did. I’m a lousy subject for hypnosis, I just don’t have the attention span.’ She raised her voice. ‘Jules! Jules, dammit, where are you, I want to—’

Dan caught her arm as she was about to walk out of the room. ‘Renata, you’re making a hard situation all but impossible. Sit down and watch the tape, and then you’ll understand everything.’

Her gaze went from his face to his hand, still gripping her upper arm just a little too tightly and back again several times. Astoundingly, he failed to get the message. ‘Let go of my fucking arm,’ she said finally. He glanced over at his parents, who turned as one to Mrs Anderson. Mrs Anderson’s gaze went to the twins, who passed the look to their respective partners before raising their eyebrows at their mother.

They were all crazy, Renata realized suddenly. She didn’t know what brand of psychosis they were sharing, what it involved or whether it was dangerous, but they were nuts and she wasn’t and by God, she was getting out of there. She bolted for the door, deciding she could live with the loss of her overnight bag and collided with someone else, someone too strong for her to twist away from, who struggled her back from the doorway, bruising her forearms with a hard grip, and forced her down on to the couch in front of the television set.

‘Jules! What—’

He grabbed the stool she had been sitting on and planted it just to her left, sat down on it and seized her arms again. ‘Shut up!’ he bellowed into her face, so close that she could feel how hot his breath was. It was that sensation more than anything that shocked her. She could not remember ever being that physically close to her brother.

‘Now, listen,’’ he growled at her and she was horrified to see tears welling in his eyes. ‘Listen and watch. The suffering is—’ He stopped, breathing hard and deep through his nose, glaring at her.

And again he left the sentence unfinished. At a time like this. Everything is so. The suffering.

Then her father was speaking to her from the television again, the live man performing the task that the dead man had delegated.

‘. to punish myself in more hideous ways than the state would, I think. I had thought of turning myself in, as a matter of fact, but your mother talked me out of it. She said that a man in my health, so many years later — well, the only thing that would really make a difference would be if we could — if I could, actually — try to make it up to you in some way. To get you the help that you’re going to need, for the rest of your life.’

Renata made a disgusted noise. ‘Oh, Christ, what is it? Was there a trust fund and he embezzled—’

‘Shut up,’ her brother warned her quietly.

‘—can never give you back those years of your childhood that I stole. Her father’s voice was beginning to sound whiny. ‘All I can do is tell you I was wrong, beg for your forgiveness from here, beyond the grave, and assure you that you will get only the very best counsellors, doctors, hospitalization when you need it—’

‘‘Hospitalization?’ Warning bells went off in her head to the point where she could not have told the difference if she had been hearing them outside. Abruptly she remembered a basic self-defence move Vinnie had taught her, a way to twist your wrist to get out of a man’s grip so that no matter how big and strong he was, he would have to let you go. My brothers taught me this one, Vinnie had said, they told me that if any guy was gonna beat me up, it would be them, not some stranger. Of course, they never did beat me up, not that I recall, anyway -

She pushed Jules away and stood up. To her surprise, Jules launched himself at her and pinned her down on the couch with his body. Renata cried out, more in anger than anything else. The worst part about it was that no one else in the room had moved, no one, not to help her, not to help Jules, not to do anything, and all the while her father’s voice went on and on and on, talking and talking and talking. Dead Man Talking, she thought, and bit her lip to keep from laughing hysterically.

‘. to treat my beloved daughter in such a hideous fashion. I don’t know what drove me to it, to act out my vile needs on your innocence, to soil and betray your trust in me as your father, your protector..’

‘What?’ Renata said, trying to push Jules off her. ‘What? Stop that! Turn that fucking TV off.’

But no one moved, and her father’s voice whined on, ‘. and you, so pure, so loving, so unwilling to believe that life would have such ugliness in it that you completely repressed all memory of what I had done to you. It was as if your sweet little mind said, “All right, then, if he won’t be a father to me out here, then I will create the loving father that he isn’t in my mind—”‘

‘What?’ She arched her back, trying to buck her brother off but he seemed to get heavier and heavier.

‘“—and if I can’t get anyone to protect me or help me out here, then I will create the support group that I need in my mind—”‘

Support group? Had her father just said support group? Renata was beyond disbelief. This was some kind of horrible joke, it had to be. Some kind of absurd practical joke put on by Jules and her mother. They had been driven mad with grief, they—

‘—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.’