Nightjack by Tom Piccirilli Page B

expressions frozen and unnatural. The one after that, Pacella had said, Forget the camera, and him and Jane were beginning to kiss, lips about a half inch away. Pacella’s eyes shut and Jane’s open, adoring.
    “Who is this?” Maureen asked.
    “Jane.”
    “And the man?”
    Another trick question. He could say, It’s me, though it really wasn’t. It didn’t seem to matter that much because Jane was always the best part of Pacella anyway. Seeing the two of them together, you really wanted to be that cocoa-drinking, Chaucer-reading, wimpy son of bitch.
    “It’s me,” he said.
    “That’s right. William Pacella.”
    All of those degrees, probably twenty of them on the walls of her office, and she’d never learned that you can’t use logic to win out over a psychotic.
    Really, she just had to be fucking crazy.
    She drew out a photo of Pacella and Jane seated on a boardwalk sharing an ice cream cone while the waves rolled in behind them.
    “And this?”
    “Me and Jane.”
    “Yes.”
    But that wasn’t good enough. Maureen Brandt needed to drive home her point, spearing it in there so it would skewer him. She pulled out a folded up newspaper, dated six months after Jane died. Had it been here in the house or had she carried the damn thing all the way from the hospital? His face was spread across the fifth page. It was the first time Pacella had been brought in by the cops in connection with the Ganooch hits. He looked calm and a little tired, but very amenable and incapable of even winning at arm wrestling. You had to know what to look for. Pace saw that Pacella’s eyes were no more than twin blazing fissures of agony and fury.
    “And this is you, Will.”
    “No,” Pace said. “That’s Jack.”
    Thursday’s Child tells the lie that causes Friday’s Child to die.
    She let out an exhausted sigh. It had been a long day.
    “You didn’t answer my question,” he said.
    “Fess up,” Pia said. “Come on, this I want to hear.”
    “No,” Dr. Brandt said. “We were never lovers.”
    Pia laid back on the couch in a sultry pose, smiling with pride in herself, like she’d caught the cat with the headless canary. “You’re a lying bitch.”
    Pace faced Dr. Brandt, feeling a little twitchy. He thought she was lying too. Had she hopped up on top of him while he was in that full body straitjacket, suspended in mid-air, weightless? Like one of those sex chairs with the ropes and chains, you get in and even if you can’t figure the thing out it’s still got to be pretty good. Was there some easy way to expose his crank in the jacket? Some kind of ripcord—she walks into the room horny as hell, yanks on a string and out falls his package.
    “Will—”
    “Vindi also said that Kaltzas and I had once been friends. He told me I’d met him before.”
    “It’s not true. His daughter was in Garden Falls, but he never saw her. No one did.”
    “Not even Vindi?”
    “Not so far as I know. A lot of reporters pretending to be friends of the family showed up, but we screened them out.”
    “He said he bribed people on the ward. For information. Maybe the guards let him in and out.”
    “Possibly. But I find it more likely that if you did know Kaltzas or this Vindi, you knew them before the hospital. Your selective amnesia allows you to remember significant amounts of your core personality’s history, as well as that of your alternates.”
    “I am an alternate,” he said. The fact didn’t bother him much.
    “A very highly developed provisional surrogate identity. You’re William Pacella’s stronger half, devoid of suffering. Without his need for revenge. You must allow those repressed memories forward.”
    “Fuck no!” shouted the other three as one.
    It got Pace smiling. “They’re right. You don’t want that. The memories are what drove Pacella insane in the first place. If they come back, you get Jack.”
    “He’s gone, Will. He had no reason to exist after Joseph Ganucci...died.”
    “You’re