Part 12 (1/2)

”Don't worry, I'll be right down the hall if you need me. You're safe. Get a good night's sleep. Tomorrow we'll go see Dr. Parris. That is, if you want me to go with you?”

”Oh, yes,” she said quickly. ”Please.”

He nodded, wanting to rea.s.sure her in some way, but feeling unable to. At least not with simple words. ”Good night.”

He watched her ascend the stairs, feeling anxious, antsy. He desperately needed to do something, something more than he had so far, something more than talk to a shrink.

She stopped part way up and turned to look back at him. ”Thank you.”

He had done so little, felt so confused, so frustrated. But at least he didn't have blank s.p.a.ces in his life. Except for the last year when he hadn't been able to find her.

”Good night.”

”Good night,” he said again, knowing it would be anything but.

She disappeared up the stairs, him watching after her, longing in every cell of his body. He yearned for the Holly Barrows he'd known. For a moment during the kiss, he'd thought he'd felt the old Holly struggling to get out. But he could have imagined it, he'd wanted it so badly.

He swore, desperate to destroy whoever, whatever had done this to her. To them. Something or someone had brought her back into his life. Either her memory...or something dark and malignant could have sent her to him, setting them both up for a terrible fall.

What scared him was that if someone really had been controlling Holly, couldn't that person s.n.a.t.c.h her away again? Only this time, Holly might not be able to find her way back to him. This time, she might be as lost to him as their baby was to them at this moment.

With a chill, he thought of Inez's call and her insistence that Holly check herself back into Evergreen. Why had Inez been so adamant? Did she truly believe Holly was sick? Or did she know that Holly had begun to remember and was now a liability?

Slade stood in the kitchen, scared of his own thoughts. Did he really believe someone had...brainwashed Holly? He went into Sh.e.l.ley's office, booted up the computer and found the phone number on a Web page under Government Conspiracies.

He hadn't seen Charley Watts in years, not since Charley told him he thought the government was controlling Montana's weather. Slade didn't think the government was that organized.

Charley, a good twenty years older than Slade, had been the hippie janitor at the high school until-as locals called it-”Charley went off the deep end.”

The deep end was government conspiracies.

But right now Charley was the only person Slade could think of to dare even mention the words mind control mind control to. to.

”Hey!” Charley said when he answered. ”Sure I remember you! What's going on?”

”What do you know about mind control?” Slade said, diving right in.

Charley laughed. ”What don't I know? Hey, man, I've spent years researching it.” He rattled off some code names. ”What do you want to know?”

Slade was afraid he'd made a mistake calling Charley, but asked, ”What are those?”

”Government research projects, man. You can't believe it.”

No, Slade thought, he couldn't.

”We're talking using LSD on civilians to see if they would tell their darkest secrets, brainwas.h.i.+ng with radiation, low frequency and ultrasonics, hypnosis-”

”Hypnosis?” Slade heard himself ask.

”Oh, yeah, man. Hypnosis and all kinds of drugs trying to come up with a hypnotic resistance to torture. They implanted secrets with special codes, turned regular men into killing machines and then erased their memories, man.”

”They can erase memory? Give someone a drug, then hypnotize them and make them do things they normally wouldn't do, then erase their memory?”

”Dude, they can do a lot more than that!”

”But I always heard that a person wouldn't do anything under hypnosis that he wouldn't do under normal circ.u.mstances,” Slade said.

”Yeah? Well, here's how it works,” Charley said. ”Say a guy who would never commit murder is drafted into a war. He'll kill on the battlefield, right? Well, with hypnosis, the mind becomes the battlefield. If we're told under hypnosis that it's a battlefield, then we believe it and will kill. It's all a matter of perception.”

Slade frowned. Was it really possible? ”But I thought with hypnosis you went into an-” He parroted the words he'd found in the dictionary. ”-altered state of focused awareness. I've always heard that you're awake, you know what's going on and you can stop it at any time.”

”You've been talking to shrinks, man,” Charley said. ”If they can tell you you can't lift your d.a.m.ned arm during hypnosis, and, no kiddin', you try and you can't lift your arm, then why can't they make you do just about anything? It's all about mind control.”

”It sounds so...crazy.”

”Listen, governments have been doing this kind of research for years and lying about the outcome. They can program a guy to kill, they can get him to keep government secrets because he doesn't really 'know' anything on a conscious level-”

”Like the movie with Frank Sinatra, The Manchurian Candidate? The Manchurian Candidate?” Except that was fiction. Pure fiction, right?

”Kinda. Problem with hypnotically induced amnesia, there's memory leaks and that's how we've found out so much about what they've been doing. Guys are remembering.”

Slade gripped the phone. ”Memory leaks?”

”Bits and pieces of repressed stuff that suddenly pops up in dreams, flashbacks, you know...memories. So the government came up with screen memory. They fed 'em false stories to recall, like seeing s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps and stuff like that, so no one will believe them.”

Slade shook his head, not sure how much of this he was buying. ”You mean the memories may not be real?”

”Not if the guy who programmed 'em did screen memories on 'em.”

Slade let out a sigh as he moved over to the kitchen window and looked out into the night. He felt exposed. He turned off the light. Something whipped by the window, startling him. Just snow blowing off the roof. He moved into the dark living room where the drapes were drawn.

”OK, let's say someone was programmed? How do you get them unprogrammed?”

”Could use hypnotic regression. Depends on how deeply the dude's been programmed. Sometimes just getting off the drugs and away from the programmer...”

”But if they get around the programmer?” Slade asked.

”Oh man, then they can be zapped into another state with just one word. There was this one case of this woman who got involved with this military man. She didn't even remember how they'd met. Missing-time experiences are common. So are personality changes.”

Slade felt his heart begin to pound. It sounded too much like Holly. Too much like her experience with Allan Wellington. ”Charley, you remember that place outside of town, Evergreen Inst.i.tute?” He could hear Charley scrambling for a pen and paper. ”I'm not saying anything is going on out there.”

”Yeah, I got ya. I'll do some checking. I've got friends in low places.” He laughed.

”Well, be careful. It could be dangerous,” Slade said, realizing that that was was something he did believe. something he did believe.