F Paul Wilson - Novel 05 Read Online Free Page A

step inside
and look around. The foyer is huge; the ceiling towers twenty or thirty feet
above you. It never fails to remind you of the Yorkshire manor that was your
childhood home.
                 And
for a second you flash on your uncle Eathan's "urgent" call. You hope
it's not that urgent.
                 "Good
lord.' The perspective's all wrong."
                 "Not
if you're a child, and we're obviously in a child's perspective. If we turned
around and reentered, we'd — Here, I'll show you."
                 You
back onto the porch, pull the door closed, then push it open again. You move
forward and the foyer seems normal size now.
                 "Now
we're viewing the environment from an older perspective, possibly a
teenager's. This is one of the unpredictables within the memoryscape. Time is
elastic here. If the subject spent many years in an environment — or decades, in the case of this house — you can never be sure from which time frame you'll be
viewing it. We're not too sure what determines the hierarchy of memories. But
we think it has to do with the subject's most current experiences ... and how
they relate to the past."
                 "Was
she ever an adult in this house?"
                "Not in a real sense. She visited
for weeks at a time during her college years, but didn’t really live here
then."
                 You
glide into the living room. It's dark except for the TV! By its light you can
see a couple locked in an embrace on the couch. The boy is sneaking his hand
under the girl's sweater and the girl is pushing it away.
                 "This looks interesting," Henderson says.
                 Typical
voyeuristic male, you think. You bite your tongue.
                 "That's
her first steady boyfriend. He lasted about four months. She never let him get
much beyond what you see here."
                 You
move into the dining room. Seventeen-year-old Lorraine , her brother, and her
parents sit around the table in stiff silence. You can almost smell the tension
in the air. You remember plenty of similar scenes like this from your own teen
years — although you were never the
cause.
                 "Uh
oh. This doesn't look like a happy group."
                 "Want
to know why? I'll show you."
                 You
return to the living room, where it's night and all the lights are on. It's
packed with teenagers now, many of them drunk or stoned as Bruce Springsteen
shouts about how he was born in the USA. A Saturday night in the summer.
Lorraine's parents are away for the weekend — you
caught the parental good-byes and warnings to Lorraine in an earlier visit. The
cats are away, and now it's Lorraine's time to party.
                 As
you weave through the crowd a fight breaks out. A lamp is knocked over and
smashes on the floor. Lorraine screams for them to stop but the fight only gets
worse.
                 "This
is fascinating," Henderson whispers. "Utterly fascinatings !”
                 You
pass into the kitchen, where you find Lorraine standing by the sink
looking defiant while her mother sits at the kitchen table and cries.
Lorraine's formerly long and glossy chestnut hair has been chopped to a
two-inch length, dyed bright orange, and moussed into a dozen spikes.
                 "The
rebellious years. We all had them," you say, but you don't remember
rebelling like this.
                 That
was your sister's department.
                 "Where's
the regular day-to-day life? Everything here seems so emotionally
charged."
                "Adrenaline, remember? Strong
emotions flood the bloodstream with adrenaline and noradrenaline. They
activate the amygdala, which in turn makes the cortex more receptive to memory.
As a result, emotionally charged events — happy,
sad, frightening — are more