In spite of its brightness, the crypto-fascist atmosphere of the cavernous reception hall so oppressed Bibi that it called to mind a passage of music from Disney’s Fantasia—“Night on Bald Mountain” by Moussorgsky. Recovering from four Taserings, she sat on the floor, her back against the black-granite desk, half seriously wondering if, when the lights went out, trolls would caper in the dark and ogres rise through the quartz floor from a world below, having ascended to devour the unwary.
She was über-wary. She was alert to the unfathomed dangers of being Bibi Blair. She had edited Chubb Coy out of existence. His clothes and other gear had lingered behind, but they had faded away when she looked steadily at them, as if her stare could function as an eraser. She thought she must be going mad. What seemed to have happened couldn’t have happened. She couldn’t eliminate someone by imagining him gone. Since shortly after leaving the hospital two days earlier, since she had allowed Calida Butterfly to seek hidden knowledge on her behalf, Bibi had been aware of supernatural forces at work in the world. But perhaps they had not been supernatural at all. Couldn’t they as easily have been the delusions of a deranged mind? If Chubb Coy was so little real as to be vanquished with a mere wish, wasn’t it possible that Calida, too, and Hoffline-Vorshack and the tattoo artist and the motel clerk and the nameless thugs and Robert Warren Faulkner—alias Terezin—were likewise no more than phantoms caused by a disorder of the stomach, by an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese…? Surely she could eliminate them by imagining them gone—if she had imagined them into existence in the first place. Derangement would not necessarily be apparent to the deranged.
Except…
Except that her struggle to stay free and alive during the past forty-eight hours, her arduous quest, and the search for Ashley Bell had been real enough, excruciatingly actual, verifiable by the myriad pains in her muscles and joints. By the hot throbbing ache in her torn and half-crushed ear. By the alternately recurring and receding pain in her jaw, a paroxysm that flared into higher waves when she clenched her teeth or touched her bruised face. If she couldn’t edit away her pain, then the people who had inflicted it—and the person whom they served, their mother-killing cult leader—had to have been real, as well. Didn’t they?
If Robert Warren Faulkner was a figment of her imagination, so was Terezin, and so was Terezin, Inc. If such a corporation did not exist, the building in which she sat did not exist, either, other than in her fevered imagination. Studying the acre of white quartz dazzling all around her, she tried to edit the structure out of existence, strove to revise recent events backward to the moment when she parked the Honda along Sonomire Way, before she ventured onto the property and encountered Marissa Hoffline-Vorshack. But the reception hall and the building that contained it did not dissolve.
Bibi wasn’t certain if the seeming permanence of the building confirmed its reality or if, in her stubborn insistence on the reality of Terezin, Inc., she resisted editing the place out of the narrative. Regarding the rules of its delusions, a deranged mind was not likely to be consistent.
Adding to her confusion, further testing her sanity, she heard Captain speaking to her. The voice flowed into the reception hall as if from a public-address system, but it must be entirely in her head, remembered or imagined.
“My sweet girl, dear Bibi, this is my apology if it turns out one is needed. I have had a few years…”
She couldn’t listen to this. Captain was dead. He had been dead for more than twelve years. In the months after his aneurysm, she had wanted him back. She had desperately wanted him to be alive again. She had been wrong to want such a thing. If she was unconsciously calling him back, his return would be no more right now than it would have been then.
“…talking about the frightening event that I helped you to forget, but also…”
She refused to listen. By listening, she would begin wanting him back. She could not want him back. Dared not. Long ago, hadn’t she learned why not? Hadn’t she?
She struggled to her feet, leaning for a moment against the black-granite desk. Then she set off across the white quartz toward a distant dark object that could be nothing other than her pistol.
The captain seemed to think she might have forgotten about the memory trick. He began to tell her how it was done.
She reached the pistol and picked it up and turned in a circle, surveying the enormous room, wondering what to do now. Who would come after her next?
The captain kept talking. She could see his face clearly in her mind’s eye. His smile. How much better things would be if Captain were alive. No.
Room 456. Five ideal wave conditions on the EEG. Bibi walking the board somewhere. The four witnesses around the bed. The girl not sleeping, not awake, yet also both of those things, lying in the bed, existing as well in a mysterious Elsewhere.
From the tape recorder, the captain spoke first about the memory trick, but not about why he’d used it. Nancy’s face hardened perhaps with some of the resentment that had embittered her in the days when, as a child herself, she had felt abandoned by him. “What is he saying…that he brainwashed her?”