The other members of my family have increased and multiplied enough to satisfy the most fanatical eugenicist. God—I’ve lost count of the number of cousins I have!
Merde et mon oeil … Go away.
No God damn you I won’t look at her—
!!!Jesus!!! You perverted swine.
Get out of my mind! GET OUT!
It doesn’t matter.
?…
… Mental Man?
It’s nonsense. The Milieu would never permit such a scheme. Besides it wouldn’t work.
My God. Of course!… But—you tantalizing shit!—I’ll forget the solution when I wake up.
You … who are you? What do you want from me?
4
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
ANNE’S STUNNING ANNOUNCEMENT PUT MY BRAIN ON HOLD.
I rejected what she had said and ceased processing input, passing into a state that the shrinks call profound denial. I saw, I heard, I smelled, I felt every aspect of the pleasant old bookshop all about me. I even grinned idiotically at the grieving priest who had placed both her hands on my shoulders to steady me. I was no more capable of rational thought or response than a chunk of firewood. I stood there, sickened to the depths of my soul, while Marcel anxiously stropped my legs and Anne tried in vain to redact my barricaded mind.
She finally took me by the hand and opened the door leading to the building’s small lobby. The little coffeeshop opposite my place was dark, shut up early because of the snowstorm. Anne and I and the cat climbed the creaky old inner staircase and I felt the carpeted treads under my feet and the age-smoothed wood of the banister beneath my fingers. The people in the insurance agency that occupied the second floor of the old Gates House building had all gone home and the wind whipped around the dormers of my third-floor apartment. Outside, the Great White Cold walked abroad, and my heart was lost somewhere in the blizzard along with it.
I didn’t speak until we were in my kitchen, me sitting at the oak table with an untasted Wild Turkey triple before me, she—having checked out the leftovers and rejected them—scratching up the makings of a decent meal for us while she sipped a Scotch rocks made with Bruichladdich.
“Denis can’t be Fury,” I said at last. “You’re full of shit, Annie.”
She found a packet of Nova Scotia lox that I had been saving for a special occasion, a heel of Vermont cheddar, butter, and six eggs in the refrigerator. In the pantry was a flute of gamma French bread and some ready-to-zap Turkish apricot pastries. Tying an apron over her chic black wool pantsuit, she began to grate the cheese.
“I can’t prove my contention, Uncle Rogi—which puts me up the proverbial fecal watercourse without a paddle. But I am morally certain that my father is the malignant entity we call Fury. He doesn’t realize it, of course. That’s what’s so abominable about this situation.”
“I don’t believe it,” said I. “I know Denis better than any of you. He’s like a son to me. Pour I’ amour de dieu—he bonded to me when he was only a few days old!”
“I have only circumstantial evidence to support my belief. But it’s strong. Very strong.”
I took a tentative lap of the whiskey, found it good, and swallowed a sizable belt. “Tell me.”
“The first clue involves the single occasion when I’m positive that the Fury persona actually took over its host’s physical body. That was in 2054, when someone went to Baby Jack’s room in Hitchcock Hospital at Dartmouth and started the fire that was intended to kill him. A living entity was truly there in the flesh. It wasn’t merely a metacreative ‘sending.’ The hospital security monitors proved that, even though the intruder creatively fuzzed his image so it was unrecognizable, and the operant guard at the scene had his mind wiped.”
“But we thought one of the Hydras did it.”
“They couldn’t have. The timing is wrong—but I only proved it much later. Just before the fire, the four Hydra-children were at Paul’s house. They’d killed the housekeeper, poor Jacqui Menard, and were trying to do a snuff-job on you. You told me so yourself.”
“It was kinda confusing,” I mumbled, pouring myself another stiff snort. I was actually half-sozzled at the time. “I’m certain all four of the Hydras were there, ready to fry my brain. I’m still not too sure how I got away from the damn brats, but I did. Then they escaped in a red egg that looked like yours, and there was this sonic boom—”
“They stole my rhocraft earlier in the evening. The time of their takeoff at illegal velocity was precisely noted by a curious college student living in one of the houses nearby. Unfortunately, he never thought to notify the authorities. It took me a long time to track down that witness. The Hanover police and the Galactic Magistratum weren’t especially interested in when Hydra decamped. They just wanted to know where the children had gone. No one bothered to compare the time of the sonic boom with the time-code on the monitor recording of the intruder in Jack’s room. When I finally found the witness, I discovered that it was impossible for the Hydra-children to have started the fire. Ergo, Fury did it personally.”
“And you’re certain … that it was Denis?”
“Every one of my siblings had a verifiable alibi for that time except me—and I know I’m innocent! There was no way you or Marc could have done it. Lucille had gone to comfort Catherine after visiting Marc in the other hospital south of town, but Denis went home alone after dropping off Lucille at Cat’s house. You remember how my sister collapsed after her son Gordo’s death. Mama was going to spend the night with Cat and the other children. Papa has no alibi from the time he left Mama until nearly an hour later, when he came to the hospital after the fire was put out.”
“Why didn’t anyone else think of Denis?”
“The Dynasty never seriously considered him to be a Fury suspect. I didn’t myself. We thought the monster was one of ourselves, or perhaps Marc. That our own father could be the controller of Hydra was inc
onceivable. You must remember that all of the Remillards—including Denis—passed the test on the Cambridge lie-detector machine after Jack’s rescue. The mind-probe reaffirmed that none of us was Fury. We knew about the possibility of Fury being an aspect of a multiple-personality disorder in one of us, which wouldn’t register on the machine, but there was also the faint hope that the monster might not be a family member after all.”
“My head ached for a week after the Cambridge ream-job.” I poured myself some more booze on general principles. “What are you going to do about this mess? Tell the Lylmik?”
“I went to the four Supervisors in Concilium Orb and asked for their help. They said they could do nothing and justified themselves with the usual mystical gobbledygook. They further declined to put the matter to Atoning Unifex, their chief. Apparently, since we Remillards produced this family demon, we’re the ones who will have to exorcise it.”
So the Family Ghost had washed its invisible hands of us! Even as I was cursing the thing inside my skull, a useful idea obtruded, no doubt spawned by the liquor’s lowering of my misery quotient. “We can count on help from Jack and from Dorothée, too. She’ll be part of the family soon.”
Anne considered this without much enthusiasm. “At least it’s worthwhile taking both of them into our confidence. Fury can never probe their paramount minds and learn we’re on its tail. But I’m not at all sure about the other members of the Dynasty. Or Marc.”
“He told me he’s had dreams,” I admitted. “And not harmless ones like mine, unless I misunderstood him. Fury’s trying to tempt him into joining it—like it once tempted Dorothée.”
“And me,” Anne confessed.
“Toi aussi? Ah merde—ça, c’est le comble!” And the first hint that Anne might be lying came tiptoeing into my mind on icy little pygmy crampons.
“That was when I first started to suspect Denis. When Fury tried to convert me to its cause in a series of elaborate dreams.” She replenished her drink. “It happened late in 2054, right after humanity was finally enfranchised in the Galactic Milieu.”
“That’s eighteen years before Dorothée had her encounter,” I said.
“Perhaps she and I share some attribute that made us suitable candidates for Fury’s scheme. In my case, Fury took the form of the goddess Athene and tried to recruit me. I was going to be far superior to Hydra, it said—a kind of sacred vessel of election, but a mind-slave all the same! At the culmination of my dream-temptation I had this sudden devastating insight that my temptor was Fury, not Athene. I rejected the goddess and her plan for a Second Galactic Milieu, but I nearly lost my mind as a consequence. Later, when I had recovered, I recalled that the goddess was Zeus’s favorite, his daughter who had sprung full-grown and fully armed from his own brow, the wise, powerful virgin who sat at his right hand and even used his sacred shield and lightning bolts to administer justice.”
“You used to have a little statue of that goddess on your desk,” I recalled.
“Quite right. In my conscious life I had always seen myself as an Athene-figure. And my Zeus, the beloved father-god whose mind I most admired—”
“Was Denis,” I concluded. “There’s a certain Jungian plausibility.”
“And no logic—but it was then I first became convinced that Papa was the only possible candidate for Fury.”
“Do you have any other evidence?” I was staring into my empty glass, trying to make sense out of all this unwelcome data.
“It derives from Denis’s psychology. The disease that laymen call multiple-personality disorder is brought on by some hideous trauma that probably occurred very early in the patient’s life. The instigating mental injury or injuries are often painfully sexual and involve someone very close to the victim. A person he wanted to love, who betrayed his natural childish trust and devotion. The trauma would have been reinforced later by other damaging experiences associated with this evil person and by intense guilt, eventually resulting in the emergence of the dyscrasic persona. The only living Remillard who can possibly fit this scenario is Denis. And his victimizer—”
The awful light dawned. I looked up and our eyes met. “Donnie!” I blurted. “Oh, God, my own twin brother! From the time Denis was born Don was afraid of him and resented him. But Don could never have … not to his own little boy …” I broke off, too appalled to put the accusation into words.
Anne’s face was bleak. “Don probably would have been drunk the first time it happened, perhaps half out of his mind with frustration and anger because of his wife’s inaccessibility during the later months of her pregnancy with Victor and the postpartum recovery. As I understand it, Donatien Remillard was an insecure man who never managed to come to grips with his metapsychic potential. He was self-centered, susceptible to attacks of depression, and physically aggressive.”
Near tears, I agreed. “We were fraternal twins, not identical. Our temperaments were miles apart. He and Sunny … Don took her away from me. I don’t think he really loved her at all. He wanted her because she’d been planning to marry me. She was his most valued possession.”
Under Anne’s gentle questioning, I told her about my brother’s early life and his oddball relationship to me. Then I shut up and tried to get hold of myself. Anne could still be mistaken. On the other hand, all this made a horrible kind of sense.
Anne unwrapped the loaf of gamma bread and freshened it briefly in the microwave. She slivered the lox and put it in the IR-oven to warm, set the table, poured us glasses of milk, and got butter sizzling in the omelet pan. She wasn’t wearing her priestly rabat and dog collar. A small silver cross with a central cabochon of green jade hung from a thin chain on the breast of her white blouse. Her blonde hair was cut short and she was thin to the point of being haggard, with a wan face and eyes that were deep-sunken and dark.
I asked her how the split-personality thing worked. How lunatic Fury took over from quiet, unpretentious Denis.
“Every case is different,” she said. “But this is the way Denis’s mental illness seems to manifest itself: Most of the time, his core persona is in control and he’s himself—Emeritus Professor of Metapsychology at Dartmouth College, Nobel Laureate, respected theorist and writer, loving husband, your own dear foster son, papa to Phil and Maurie and Sevvy and me and Cat and Adrien and Paul. But sometimes—there’s no telling what sets it off—his dyscrasic personality seizes the ascendant and takes over his mind and body. His rational everyday self is transformed into a thing so filled with pain and hatred that its only release seems to be in violence, murder, and megalomania. This second persona is completely separate from the core. Neither one knows the thoughts of the other. The abnormal persona seems to have goals diametrically opposite to those of the benevolent core. It may even have more powerful metafaculties, drawing upon areas of Denis’s mind that are ordinarily latent.”
“Fury!” I cried. “It named itself Fury. I was right there when it was born … inevitably, it said. I never understood what it meant by that.”
“The dyscrasic aspect of Denis calls itself Fury for an excellent reason. He had a classical education, and in Greek and Roman mythology the Erinyes or Furies were avenging spirits who tormented and destroyed those guilty of violating the natural order.”
“Sacré nom d’un chien,” I muttered, letting the tears flow at last. I had all but accepted Anne’s judgment on my poor foster son.
She broke eggs into a bowl and began whisking them. “Can you think of any incidents in Papa’s early life that might confirm my diagnosis?”
I mopped my face with my handkerchief and reluctantly tried to cogitate. “I remember one time when Denis was tiny—after I’d told Don and Sunny about his strong metabilities and they both agreed to let me teach him how to use them. It must have been about 1970. Denis would have been around three. Don came home plastered and in the mood to play a nasty practical joke on me. He slipped LSD into some cocoa he gave me, but baby Denis innocently blew the gaff and Don was mad enough to shit bricks.
He came at Denis, ready to belt him or something, and the kid coerced him. It was spooky. One second Don was a bull on the rampage, and the next he was helpless and scared out of his mind. Denis said, ‘Papa won’t ever hurt me.’ And my brother just said, ‘No.’ ”
“Perhaps the child had only recently learned to focus his coercion. What Denis was really saying, was: ‘Papa won’t ever hurt me again.’ ”
She seasoned the eggs with salt and pepper and tipped them into the pan. The hot butter smelt wonderfully nutty. She stirred with a fork, then added the small amount of grated cheese. A quick flip folded the omelet. When it was ready she slid it onto a plate and gave it a last swipe of butter to make it shine. She cut it in half and sprinkled it with the warm shredded smoked salmon.
Anne spoke an abbreviated grace (Jesuits are ever practical) and we fell to. I was surprised I had an appetite, but she’d prepared the omelet perfectly—soft but not runny, with the cheese completely melted and the lox adding a perfect garnish. For a time we concentrated on the food. Marcel came to the table, plume waving, and I spared him a hunk with plenty of fish. Outside the double-glazed kitchen window the snowstorm hissed and howled.
“Victor,” Anne said at length. “The second child of Don and Sunny who grew up to be an overt monster. Did you have any idea he might have been abused?”
“Not at the time. Vic was born later that same year, 1970. He looked just like his papa and Don was crazy about him. He wouldn’t let me teach the little guy about operancy, wouldn’t hardly let me near him. Don said he’d take care of this kid’s education himself.”
“And evidently he did just that …” Anne looked away for a moment, her lips tight. “You know, there was a passage in the Gospels that always struck me as particularly apposite—where Jesus uses a little child as an exemplar for his followers and then says, ‘But whoever scandalizes one of these little ones, it would be better for him that a millstone should be hung around his neck, and he should be drowned in the sea.’ Psychologists know now that Jesus was speaking a profound truth. When young children are badly injured by those who should love them, their minds are almost always irreparably damaged. Victor became a sociopath, and I can recall Denis himself conjecturing that Don might have been the source of his son’s viciousness. But Denis never seems to have considered that he might also have been one of Don’s victims.”