Memory Maze

  “Oh, I did,” Cho explained cheerfully. “But a funny thing happened. Before I could get into his head, I got the feeling that somebody was working his way into mine.”

  Braintree was instantly alert. “Someone tried to hypnotize you?”

  “I thought it might be the officer at first. But no, the power wasn’t coming from him.”

  “Who, then?”

  “I never saw who it was,” the arrestee admitted with a shrug. “The cop was in a real hurry to cuff me and hustle me into the squad car — you know, get another menace to society off the street.”

  Braintree rolled his eyes. “Listen to me, Dennison, and listen well. Evelyn and Ivan have both gone missing. I believe that someone is kidnapping sandmen, and you were about to be next, except that your arrest got in the way.”

  Cho looked vaguely pleased. “But who’s doing it? And why?”

  Braintree thought it over. Mako was the obvious enemy, but his target was Jax, not the sandmen. What did he need hypnotists for when he already headed an entire institute full of them? Of course, Mako couldn’t be the only power-mad thug who saw the value of an army of mind-benders. What about Avery Quackenbush? The billionaire was wealthy enough to impose his will any way he chose. What if his illness was just a sham so he could get his hands on an Opus? Maybe he was after even more hypnotists.

  “It’s too early to tell,” Braintree said finally. “The important thing is to be careful. And spread the word to the other sandmen. They’re in danger, too. We all are.”

  The locomotive was big and shiny black. It lumbered around the oval track, pulling a coal car, a flat car, and a red caboose. The hum of the electric motor added to the sounds of metal wheels on metal track. As Jax watched it through the billionaire’s memory, he could tell that it was the most wonderful thing nine-year-old Avery Quackenbush had ever laid eyes on.

  Father said it was called a starter set. More track could be purchased, trestles built, stations added. There were boxcars, passenger coaches, and Pullmans, where tiny seats turned into beds.

  As the details of the memory became more vivid via the mesmeric link, Jax took in the frost on the windows, the tantalizing cooking smells coming from the kitchen, and the gleaming tinsel and ornaments on the tree. It was Christmas morning, he realized. No, it was the greatest Christmas morning ever, which was really saying something from the perspective of someone who had experienced nearly a hundred of them. Jax, who lived in a house filled with computers, game systems, and smartphones, could almost taste young Avery’s amazement and delight at this toy that lit up and moved like a real train.

  Through the mind of the nine-year-old, Jax understood that times were good. Father was doing well at his job, and the family had money to lavish presents on its two children. In the moment of that memory, Jax could detect no knowledge that, a handful of years from now, the world would be sunk into depression, and the Quackenbush brothers would be desperate to catch a fish so they and their mother wouldn’t starve.

  “It’s not fair!”

  Jax frowned. Oscar, age seven, had decided to be jealous of the Lionel train set. Never mind that he had received an entire Civil War battlefield — soldiers and cannons and horses and all the trimmings. It was another starter set that could be built into a lifelong hobby.

  Oscar loved it. At least, he had loved it until he’d seen the locomotive chug off down the electrified track. His soldiers had to be moved by hand, but this ran by itself.

  “Go play with your own present!” Jax heard himself snap.

  And Oscar did, adjusting the fixed bayonet at the end of a tiny rifle. But the instant Father went into the kitchen to help Mother, Oscar sprang into action. That was another thing about Oscar. He didn’t think; he did.

  He snatched up the locomotive in mid-chug, shaking off the other cars from their hooked connectors. Then, shiny black engine in hand, he raced for the basement stairs.

  “You rotten little —” Jax leaped up in pursuit. In full panic mode, he raced after his brother. “Don’t you dare!”

  Too late. He reached the landing just as Oscar let fly with all the pent-up rage of his jealousy. Jax watched his cherished locomotive go. He wasn’t sure if young Avery knew about slow motion in 1926, but that was how Jax saw it — slo-mo, end over end. It crashed to the cement floor and flew apart, pins, nuts, bolts, wheels, and moving pieces scattering in all directions.

  Avery’s fury blinded Jax then. Without even knowing what he was doing, he took hold of his younger brother under the arms and began to force him toward the stairs. Terrified, Oscar sunk his teeth into Jax’s forearm. There was sharp pain, and blood, but no reduction in Jax’s determination to leave Oscar at the bottom of the stairs, in as broken a condition as the Lionel train.

  “Avery! Avery, stop it!” Suddenly Father was on the scene, his powerful arms wresting Oscar from Jax’s control.

  As the basement staircase faded along with the mesmeric connection, Jax understood at last why this domestic scene of Christmas morning had created such a powerful memory even so many years later.

  If Father hadn’t come, I would have done it, he thought. It’s Avery who would have done it, he amended as he disengaged fully and took stock of himself in his chair opposite the billionaire. He might have crippled or even killed his own brother over a toy.

  Quackenbush was watching him curiously. “Okay, out with it. Which part of the magical mystery tour did you take this time?”

  Jax flushed. “Christmas. The train set.”

  Quackenbush nodded thoughtfully. “What determines that? Are you — browsing my brain?”

  “I have no control over where I end up,” Jax tried to explain. “But it seems like the biggest memories are the ones that bubble up to the surface and pull me in. Like D-Day. And I think maybe this one was important because …” He hesitated. “Because this was the day you might have killed your brother.”

  Jax waited in trepidation. It was a very bold thing to say. But after all, this was no intrusion. Quackenbush had invited him in.

  The tycoon was expressionless for a moment. Jax could imagine what it must have been like to face him across a boardroom table.

  The billionaire let out a melancholy sigh. “My father, in his infinite wisdom, came up with a way to punish Oscar for breaking my train. You know what it was? He gave me the Civil War battlefield. I put it back in the crate, and as far as I know, it’s still there, untouched.”

  Jax ran his mind over the memory — the murderous impulse to fling a helpless seven-year-old down the stairs.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing you could shut away in a box.

  Keeping a low profile at Haywood Middle School was getting harder every day. Maybe it was the sunglasses, or the sightings around town of Jax climbing into the Quackenbush limo. The chess championship didn’t help, especially since Mr. Isaacs seemed to have a vivid memory of how brilliant Jax had been in the tournament that had never happened at all. Jax was honored at an assembly, and his picture was placed on the school’s Wall of Fame. They made him take off his sunglasses for that photograph, and there always seemed to be a few people around the bulletin board, just standing and staring.

  That was how Jack Magnus became the first middle-school student ever to be caught defacing his own picture. He blacked out his eyes, and drew a goatee and a curly mustache. This only seemed to add to his legend.

  “You’re even too cool for the things that make you look cool,” Felicity told him.

  “I don’t understand it,” he complained to Braintree. “I’m not hypnotizing anybody, but I’m still getting all this attention!”

  As usual, the founder of the Sandman’s Guild had an explanation. “A weapon doesn’t have to be fired in order for it to have power. It influences the world around it merely when it is wielded. You don’t have to bend anyone for your hypnotic presence to assert itself. There’s an aura about you that sunglasses can never completely conceal.”

  Jax looked worried. It had happened in New Yo
rk, too, where he had been elected to student council without running, and had enjoyed a popularity that had eclipsed his best friend, Tommy, for no real reason. The difference was that, in New York, the entire family’s fate hadn’t hung on Jax’s ability to disappear.

  “So what do I do? How do I fade into the background again?”

  “You’ll have to find a way.”

  It was not the kind of specific game plan Jax had been hoping for. Normally, Braintree was a treasure trove of mesmeric information: Cat owners were harder to bend than dog owners…. It was possible to affect someone’s driving by placing a hypnotic image in his rearview mirror (a charging rhino would speed him up; a police car would slow him down)…. You couldn’t mesmerize someone to fall in love, but you could make sure he always remembered where he’d left the TV remote…. Babies could be hypnotized (the trick was to communicate to them what you wanted them to do)…. It went on and on.

  Lately, though, the old man’s mind had been in New York with his sandmen. And while it was a relief not to be quizzed constantly on which Opus bent Benedict Arnold to turn into a traitor, there was a flip side to this new, distracted Braintree.

  Jax’s main source of support wasn’t quite there anymore.

  Jax continued to visit the mansion every weekday after school. His hypnotic sessions with the billionaire grew increasingly intense as the two minds became more accustomed to each other. The connection was always stressful for Jax. He struggled to maintain his own sense of self as he was drawn into the life of another, thinking and experiencing a strange world as someone else. At times it was hard to get a handle on where the billionaire’s thoughts ended and his own began.

  The memories stretched through most of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. In 1929, the Quackenbush siblings traced a path through downtown streets around long lines of panicked depositors, frantic to get into banks and withdraw money while there was still money to withdraw. Jax relived the brothers’ horror at turning a corner and finding the broken body of a stockbroker who had just jumped from a high window. During the Great Depression that followed, the ever-present hunger of an empty belly and the gnawing fear for the future became Jax’s own. And the horrible war memories — unimaginable death and destruction, all-pervading chaos, crawling on his belly through filth and gore, lethal bullets passing inches above his helmet.

  Jax experienced the billionaire’s business career, too — huge risks, stratospheric celebration, bitter disappointment. There were ruthless dealings that left opponents and competitors not just outmaneuvered, but utterly destroyed.

  In one crushingly vivid memory, he watched a business rival bankrupted so completely that his family was evicted from their home in the middle of the night. Rising titan Avery Quackenbush had observed from his car, parked at the curb, while the man’s weeping wife and children were removed from the premises by the sheriff. As Jax peered out the car window, the clash of the billionaire’s brutal satisfaction and Jax’s own sympathy and guilt nearly tore him in two. The way Quackenbush had attacked that machine-gun pillbox on Omaha Beach was identical to the way he approached everything in life — all out, and with no mercy.

  A man like that made many enemies, but Jax only encountered one directly. He was stepping from his limousine and walking toward the lobby of Quackenbush Tower in London when a conservatively dressed man in a bowler hat stepped out of a red telephone booth, pulling a pistol from his jacket. The impact of the bullet reminded Jax of being struck with a flying pebble kicked up by a passing car. It hurt a lot less than the onslaught of flying bodyguards who lifted him up and jammed him into the safety of the revolving door, imprisoning him. He hung there, stunned, while his protectors chased down the assassin and held him for the police.

  It was only then that Jax looked down and realized that he was clutching his stomach and that dark red blood was seeping through his fingers. The pain came then, white-hot and overwhelming. He was barely conscious by the time the ambulance arrived.

  The most amazing thing about it was that Jax was aware of pain and fear, but surprisingly little anger at the would-be assassin.

  “That’s the cost of doing business,” the billionaire told him after the session was over. “I ruined him, he shot me. I suppose I could have sued for damages, but I already had most of his money, so what would be the point? I didn’t even testify at the trial. The last thing I needed was another trip to England so I could order chips and get fries.”

  Quackenbush was peculiar in many ways. He fought hard for his wealth and social position, and then used it mostly to ignore people. He avoided parties, and never hosted any of his own unless there was some business advantage to be gained. He employed several chefs, but preferred a hamburger or a grilled-cheese sandwich to any gourmet dish they could come up with. He never married, had no children, and didn’t question if he was missing something. He owned a major-league baseball team and had never attended one of their games, not even when they won the World Series. They were simply an investment, like Apple or AT&T.

  Some of the experiences were upsetting simply because Jax, at twelve, had never been through anything like them — Quackenbush’s mother’s funeral in 1969, or his 1985 heart attack, a sensation that felt like his chest was being sucked out of his body by a titanic Shop-Vac.

  There was no chronological order to the memories. One afternoon he might be in his eighties, receiving an award from the grand duke of Luxembourg, or pulling off a coup that netted a hundred million dollars in a single afternoon. The next, he would be back in the Depression as a teenager. Most of the childhood memories involved Oscar. In spite of their fighting, the Quackenbush brothers had apparently been inseparable.

  “Is Oscar still living?” Jax asked Quackenbush one day.

  His response was a rueful snort. “I’m not still living, if you talk to any of these so-called medical men! When you get to my age, everybody’s already in the ground. Wait till my funeral. They’ll hold it in a phone booth.”

  So Oscar was dead. Jax shouldn’t have been surprised. He would have been ninety-four. But Jax had only known him as a young boy so, against all logic, his death seemed untimely and tragic.

  Jax mourned him.

  Even Braintree had to admit that the damage was not small.

  “Look what you’ve done to my car!” the woman wailed, pointing to the bashed-in door of her white BMW. “I just got it last week! It doesn’t have a hundred miles on it!”

  The sandman was trying to calm her. “Well, you know, my car doesn’t look so good either. Look at the fender.”

  “Whose fault is that?” she shrilled. “They teach you in kindergarten that red means stop!”

  Braintree felt a warm wet trickle under his nose. He looked down to see a droplet of blood decorate his white shirt front. “The important thing is no one was injured.”

  “Not yet!” she snapped back. “When my husband sees this car, he’s going to pull your ponytail out through your belly button!”

  He felt the old temptation rising. It would be so much simpler to bend her to believe that the car was in perfect condition, not even scratched. But how would he ever face the guild if he used hypnotism to take the easy way out here? He’d be a hypocrite. Worse, he’d lose all moral authority as the leader of his flock.

  “Ma’am, please put your cell phone away. I’m sure we can come to a civilized agreement.”

  “Dave!” she barked into the handset. “You’re never going to believe this! I was pulling out of the plaza, and some old geezer plowed into me!”

  To make matters worse, his own cell phone rang — not his regular one, but the throwaway phone he used to make emergency calls to the sandmen.

  He didn’t recognize the incoming number. “Yes, yes, who is this?”

  “Axel … Axel …” The voice was barely a whisper, full of panic. “Axel, it’s me — Evelyn!”

  Braintree was instantly breathless. “What happened to you? Are you safe?”

  “They’re after me!?
?? Lolis rasped. “I’ve hurt my leg! I think my ankle’s broken!”

  “Where’s Ivan?” Braintree persisted. “Who else is with you?” There was no way Evelyn could have this number unless she’d gotten it from one of the handful of sandmen Braintree had shared it with. That meant at least one more must have been kidnapped.

  “I’m at the corner of Eighty-Ninth and Crummel in the Bronx — a big warehouse building with a water tower on top! I don’t think I can make it on my own! I’ve been bent three ways to Sunday! Who knows what post-hypnotic suggestions they’ve planted in my head?”

  “Who’s bent you?” Braintree demanded, his voice rising. “Who’s got you?”

  But at that moment, the connection broke. He hit *69, but received a message that the number was not in service.

  “Dave says to wait with the cars until he gets here,” the BMW lady informed him. “He’s got a cop friend who’s meeting us.”

  There were times, Braintree reflected sadly, that even the founder of the Sandman’s Guild had to break the rules for the greater good. He could not risk getting hung up here when Evelyn needed his help. He stepped in front of the woman and gazed into her eyes. Although he knew this was absolutely necessary, he felt a deep sense of shame.

  “You are standing beside a BMW that is in perfect condition….”

  “Did you have to wear those sunglasses in your school picture?”

  “Yes, Mom,” Jax replied wearily. “Because I didn’t want to have to tell the photographer which button to press by hypnotic command.”

  She grimaced. “I still don’t understand how your father can be so perfectly normal and have passed on this hocus-pocus to his son.”

  “I told you. It skips generations sometimes. And stop blaming Dad alone. I’m not only an Opus; I’m a Sparks, too.”

  Her lips got thinner. “Well, the jury is still out on that one. I never knew any relatives named Sparks.”