Gaslighted

THERE WAS A TAP‑TAPPING sound. That was all. Was it a clock? No: it was too loud, too irregular. Was it the creaking of an old house? The ticking of a radiator?

The man listened to the sound. Gradually he became aware of certain things – or rather, the absence of things. The absence of light. Of sensation. Of a name.

That was unusual, was it not? He was a man with no name. He had no memory. He was a tabula rasa, an empty vessel. And yet he sensed that he knew many things. This was a paradox.

The ticking sound grew louder. The man struggled to understand. Sensation began to return. He was blind – hooded. His hands and feet were immobilized. Not bound, but strapped. He was lying on a bed. He tried to move. The restraints were soft, comfortable, and effective.

He was not hungry. He was not tired. He was neither hot nor cold. He was not frightened; he felt calm.

Tap, tap, tap‑tap. He listened. A thought came into his head: if he could understand what made that sound, perhaps all else would come back.

He tried to speak, and a sound emerged. The hiss of breath.

The tap‑tapping stopped. Silence.

Then he heard a creaking sound. This he recognized: footfalls on a wooden floor. They were growing closer. A hand grasped the hood, and he heard the sound of Velcro parting. The hood was gently removed and he saw a face drawing toward him. He realized, from the movement of air over his scalp, that his own head had been shaved. He had once had hair – at least he knew that much about himself.

And then the face moved into his field of view. The light was dim but he could make out the face quite distinctly. It was a man in his forties, wearing a gray flannel suit. The face was sharp. It had high cheekbones, an aquiline nose. Bony ridges around the eyes gave it a skull‑like, asymmetric quality. His hair was ginger‑colored and he sported a thick, neatly trimmed beard. But the most startling effect was in his eyes: one was a rich hazel‑green, clear and deep, the pupil dilated. The other was a milky blue, opaque, dead, the pupil contracted to a tiny black point.

The sight of the eyes triggered something – something massive. A Niagara of memory came thundering back, all at once, leaving the man on the bed almost paralyzed with the crushing weight of it. He stared at the man bending over him.

“Diogenes,” he whispered.

“Aloysius,” the man said, his brow furrowed with concern. “Thank God you’re awake.”

Aloysius. Aloysius Pendergast. That was his name: Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast.

“You’re dead,” he said. “This is a dream.”

“No,” said Diogenes, almost tenderly. “You’ve awakened from a dream. Now you’re on the road to healing – at long last.” As he said this, he leaned over and unstrapped his brother’s wrists from their leather restraints. He leaned over to fluff and adjust Pendergast’s pillow, smooth the sheets. “You can sit up if you feel able.”

“You’ve done this to me. This is one of your schemes.”

“Come now, please. Not this again.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Aloysius saw movement. He turned his head. The door to his room had opened and a woman was walking in. It was a woman he recognized instantly: Helen Esterhazy, his wife.

His dead wife.

He stared in horror as she approached. She reached out to take his hand and he pulled it away. “This is a hallucination,” he said.

“This is very real,” she said gently.

“Impossible.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. “We’re alive – both of us. We’re here to assist in your recovery.”

Aloysius Pendergast mutely shook his head. If this wasn’t a dream, then he must be under the influence of drugs. He would not cooperate in whatever was happening to him, whatever they were doing. He closed his eyes and tried to remember how he had gotten to this place; what events led up to this… imprisonment. But his short‑term memory was a blank. What, then, was his last memory? He struggled to find it. But there was nothing – just a long, black road going back as far as his memory would travel.

“We’re here to help you,” Diogenes added.

Pendergast opened his eyes and stared into the heterochromic eyes of his brother. “You? Help me? You’re my worst enemy. And besides, you’re not here. You’re dead.”

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.”

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 do 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.

“I said–”

He fell silent as the barrel of a Smith & Wesson.38–removed from one of the disabled orderlies – was pressed against his head.

“All the radios on the floor,” Pendergast said in a calm, firm voice. “Then the weapons. And all your keys.”

Unnerved at the sight of a gun in a patient’s hand, the orderlies quickly complied, the radios and pistols piling up on the Persian carpet. Pendergast, still covering the head orderly, sorted through the pile, pulling out one of the radios. He removed the batteries from the others and ejected the rounds from the revolvers, stuffing batteries and bullets into the pocket of his jacket. Sorting through the keys, he found a master, stuck it into the keyhole of his room door, and snapped it off. He turned the working radio over in his hands, found the panic button, and pressed it. The alarm shrieked back to life.

“Elopement!” he cried into the radio. “Room 113! He’s got a gun! He went out the window. He’s running toward the woods!” Then he turned off the radio, plucked out its batteries in turn, and tossed it on the floor.

“Good evening, gentlemen.” He nodded at them gravely, then unlatched the window again, and leaped out into the night.

As he pressed himself against the dark side of the mansion, the lawn and grounds suddenly blazed with floodlights. He could hear shouts over the sound of the alarms. Moving alongside the edge of the building, keeping behind the shrubbery, he worked his way along the bulk of the great mansion turned insane asylum. As he had hoped, security officers and orderlies were running across the lawn, flashlight beams dancing about, all operating on the assumption he had fled into the woods.

Instead, Pendergast remained against the building, an almost invisible shadow, moving slowly and carefully. In a few minutes he had worked his way around to the front. Here, he stopped to reconnoiter. A sweeping driveway curved through a vast lawn to a porte cochere at the building’s entrance, tastefully planted with arborvitae. Flitting across the graveled drive, Pendergast secreted himself in the dense shrubbery beside the porte cochere.

It took just under five minutes for a late‑model Lexus to come tearing down the driveway, scattering gravel, and slow to a stop under the porte cochere.

Excellent. Most excellent.

As the door was flung open, Pendergast dashed forward and rammed the driver – it was, as he’d expected, Dr. Augustine – back into the automobile, forcing him into his seat. Keeping the doctor covered with the gun, he quickly slipped into the passenger’s seat.

“Do keep driving,” he said as he closed the door.

The car continued down the driveway and back out toward what was evidently a manned guardhouse and gate. Pendergast slid off the seat and crouched under the dashboard.

“Tell them you forgot something and will be right back. Deviate from the script and you will be shot.”

The doctor complied. The gate opened. Pendergast rose back onto the seat as the vehicle accelerated.

“Turn right.”

The car turned right onto a lonely country road.

Pendergast turned on the vehicle’s GPS and studied it briefly. “Ah. I see we’re nowhere near Saranac Lake, but quite a lot closer to the Canadian border.” He looked over at Dr. Augustine and removed the cell phone from his coat pocket. Keeping his eye on the GPS, he gave the doctor a series of directions. Half an hour later, the car was proceeding down a dirt track, which dead‑ended at a lonely pond.

“Stop here.”

The doctor stopped. His lips were set in a thin line, and he was white‑faced.

“Dr. Augustine, do you realize the consequences of kidnapping a federal agent? I could kill you right now and get a medal for it. Unless, of course, I’m as crazy as you claim, in which case I’ll be locked up. But either way, my dear doctor, you will be dead.”

No answer.

“And I will kill you. I want to kill you. The only thing that will stop me is a full, immediate, and complete explanation of this setup.”

“What makes you think this is a setup?” came the doctor’s quavering voice. “That’s your delusion talking.”

“Because I knew how to pick a lock. I took this revolver away from an orderly as easily as taking candy from a baby.”

“Of course you did. That’s your standard Special Forces training.”

“I’m too strong to have been locked in a mental hospital for six months. I bent the bars in my window.”

“For God’s sake, you spent half your time working out in our gym! Don’t you remember?”

A silence. Then Pendergast said: “It was a masterful job. You almost had me believing you. But I grew suspicious again when Helen did not rise to my comment about the moon – sharing the full moonrise was always our private signal. That put me on my guard. And then I knew for certain it was a setup when Helen took my hands in hers.”

“And how in God’s name did you know that?”

“Because she still had her left hand. There’s one memory in my life that’s so powerful that I know it can’t be a delusion. It occurred during the African hunting expedition in which Helen was attacked by a lion. My memory of the moment when I found her severed hand, still bearing its wedding ring, is seared too deep in my memory to be anything but real.”

The doctor was silent. The moon shone off the small lake. A loon called from some distant shore.

Pendergast cocked the Smith & Wesson. “I’ve endured enough prevarication. Tell me the truth. One more lie and you’re dead.”

“How will you know it’s a lie?” asked the doctor quietly.

“It becomes a lie when I don’t believe it.”

“I see. And what’s in it for me if I cooperate?”

“You’ll be permitted to live.”

The doctor took a deep, shuddering breath. “Let’s start with my name. It’s not Augustine. It’s Grundman. Dr. William Grundman.”

“Keep going.”

“For the past decade, I’ve been experimenting with memory neurons. I discovered a gene known as Npas4.”

“Which is?”

“It controls the neurons of your memory. Memory, you see, is physical. It’s stored through a combination of neurochemicals and trapped electrical potentials. By controlling Npas4, I learned how to locate the neural networks that store specific memories. I learned how to manipulate those neurons. I learned how to erase them. Not delete – that would cause brain damage. But erase. A far more delicate operation.”

He paused. “Do you believe me so far?”

“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

“I discovered that this technique could be very lucrative. I started a clinic – under the cover of the Stony Mountain Sanatorium. While the sanatorium is visible, naturally, what goes on there is quite underground.”

“Continue.”

“People come to my underground clinic to be rid of memories they no longer want. I’m sure you can imagine all sorts of situations in which that would be desirable. I make those memories go away for a price. And for a time, that was satisfactory. But then my research led me to a discovery that was even more extraordinary. I theorized that I could do more than erase memories. I could also create them. I could program new memories. Imagine the potential market for that: for the right price, you could be given the memory of having spent a weekend at Cap d’Antibes with the Hollywood starlet of your choice, or of scaling Everest with Mallory, or of conducting the New York Philharmonic in Mahler’s Ninth.”

As he spoke, the doctor’s eyes shone with a kind of inner light. But then the eyes glanced at the gun again, and they became veiled and anxious once more. “Can’t you lower that gun?”

Pendergast shook his head. “Just keep talking.”

“Okay. Okay. I needed guinea pigs in order to perfect the memory insertion procedure. You can imagine the results of programming the wrong memories. So I arranged to have indigent people, drug addicts, the homeless, secretly transferred up to my clinic from New York City hospitals.”

“Those are the gaunt patients I saw around me.”

“Yes.”

“People nobody would miss.”

“That is correct.”

“And how did I get there?”

“Ah. What a lot of trouble you were. It seems that, as part of some case you were working on, you became suspicious of Stony Mountain. You managed to check yourself into Bellevue, posing as a homeless tubercular, and you were duly transferred up here. But there was an accident, a miscommunication, and your clothes ended up being transferred with you. Those were not the clothes of a homeless drifter. I became suspicious, made inquiries, and ultimately learned who you really were. I couldn’t just kill you – as you pointed out, killing a federal agent is never the best solution. Much better would be to reprogram you with new memories. To gaslight you, as it were: erase from your memory the real reasons for your coming here, and to add new memories that would, in the end, convince your superiors and loved ones that you had become mentally ill. After that, no one listens to a crazy person. No matter what you said, it would be chalked up to your illness.”

“Diogenes and Helen were not real.”

“No. They were phantoms, reconstructed out of your memory by manipulating Npas4.” Grundman paused. “It appears my research into Helen could have been a little more thorough.”

“And the dummy?” Pendergast asked.

“Ah. The dummy. I call him Dr. Augustine. He’s a crucial part of the treatment. He doesn’t exist, either. The dummy isn’t real. He’s the conduit, the vehicle – the Trojan Horse, as it were – which I first insinuate into the patient’s mind. If I can plant Dr. Augustine in your mind, I can use him to leverage any other memory I wish to insert.”

There was a long silence, interrupted by the calling of the loons. The full moon cast a buttery light over the water. Pendergast said nothing.

The doctor stirred nervously in his seat. “I assume that, since you haven’t killed me, you accept my story?”

Pendergast did not answer directly. Instead, he said: “Step out of the car.”

“You’re going to leave me here?”

“It’s a lovely summer evening for a walk. The main road is about ten miles back. The local police will probably pick you up before you have to trek the whole distance.” He waved the doctor’s cell phone meaningfully. “You’ll miss the SWAT team raid on your clinic, of course… lucky you.”

Grundman opened the door and stepped out into the night. Pendergast slid over to the driver’s seat, turned the car around, and headed slowly back down the dirt road. Behind him he could see Grundman, standing at the verge of the lake, silhouetted in the moonlit water.

With Grundman’s phone in his hand, he began to dial the number of the New York field office of the FBI – the first step toward raiding and shutting down Stony Mountain. But he didn’t complete the call. Slowly, he let the phone drop into his lap.

He knew who he was – knew without a shred of doubt. He was Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast of the FBI. This episode at Stony Mountain had been a nightmare, a waking delusion. But now it was over. Dr. Grundman’s treatment had been fiendishly effective – but it had failed in the end, as it must. His mind, his memories, were simply too strong to erase or manipulate for long. Now he knew, with utter conviction, who he really was. He knew his true history – it was coming back to him at last. He could put all this behind him, get on with his life. His real life.

And yet–

He looked down at the phone in his lap. As he did so, he glimpsed something in the rearview mirror – something he unaccountably had not noticed before.

There, sitting in the backseat of the car, staring back at him with blue, unblinking eyes, painted red lips, and dressed in a white lab coat with the polished brown shoes, was Dr. Augustine.