Chapter 1

The dream was wild, far out, surrealistic.

Naked as a needle, he was in a small windowless room with three women, equally naked. One was a blonde, one a brunette, the third, a flaming redhead. Their dimensions were Amazonic, and they grew larger as the dream continued, while the room grew smaller. They were trying to seduce him, fighting among themselves for the privilege. They stopped now and then in their pursuit of him to hack at one another, clawing and snarling. He was trying to escape and yet he wasn't. Of course he knew it was a dream. He tried to wake up. He couldn't. Try as he would, he couldn't wake up.

Suddenly the contracting room boiled with violence. Magically, the blonde had a heavy piece of sculpture in her hand. She struck right, then left. Blood spurted, and the brunette and the redhead fell with crushed skulls, then vanished. The blonde advanced on him, breasts bobbing, haunches quivering. He tried to evade her. She pounced, pinning him to the floor. She mounted him in flaming, all-consuming lust.

It was then he realized there was no sound. He wanted to shout as he was seized by a scald of unbelievable sensation. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came from his lips. His arms and legs seemed to be chained to the floor in some way he couldn't comprehend. Yet it wasn't necessary for him to move. The blonde rose and fell on him, her loins pounding at him in a frenzy.

He spun down and down into a whirlpool of pleasure. The walls of the small room were closing in steadily. He had trouble breathing, and his heart threatened to burst free of his rib cage. His ecstasy reached a shuddering peak. The blonde heaved mightily, coming down on him with all her weight. Her head darted at him; her teeth fastened on his lip until the blood came. Then she, too, was gone, and the walls closed in on him with a snap, and the silken dream of pleasure became a hellish nightmare....

He heard the sound of screaming before he was fully awake. The sound scraped at his mind like a scalpel as he struggled up toward consciousness. Wade Carson opened his eyes, and the scream cut off abruptly. The room swam slowly into focus. It was a small, barren room with blinding white walls and ceiling; the only piece of furniture was the narrow bed on which he lay.

Where was he? A hospital? He swallowed convulsively. His throat was raw and painful. Then he saw the screen mesh on the single window and felt the constriction on his chest and arms, and memory hit him like a blow. He knew then that the voice he had heard screaming had been his own. He licked his lip and tasted blood where he had bitten it. His mind churned with panic, and he struggled anew against the strait jacket binding him. He stopped struggling before his mind told him it was futile.

The tiny window in the door opened and the blandly smiling face of the ward attendant appeared. There was nothing brutish about the face. It was nothing like the Frankenstein visage so often worn by asylum attendants in horror movies. It had remained sunny during those terrifying moments when Wade, writhing and screaming during electro-convulsive therapy, had to be forcibly held on the table as the voltage jolted through his brain.

The attendant said pleasantly, "How are you feeling, Mr. Evans? Better, I trust?"

Carson, not Evans, doddammit! But the words never passed his lips. After uncounted injections of Metrazol and countless electroshock treatments, he had finally learned restraint. Restraint. Now there was a dandy word for these surroundings!

He said weakly, "I'm fine, thank you."

The attendant's eyes widened. "Well! We are better, aren't we?"

What was his name? Jocko? Yes, Jocko Remly. Ironic that he should remember this man's name when there seemed so much confusion about his own. He thought it was Wade Carson, but the people in the sanitarium and the svelte blonde who claimed to be his wife said his name was Bart Evans. He tried a smile. "I think so, Jocko."

Jocko's smile broadened. "Indeed, we are making progress. I think the doctor should know about this." The attendant's bland face disappeared from the window.

What was the medical term bandied about his head like a volley ball ? Schizophrenia. Split personality. Two people in one body. He claimed he was one person while people who should know, including his wife (his wife?), stoutly maintained he was someone else. He lay as relaxed as was possible laced in a straitjacket and waited for Jocko to trot down the hall and alert Dr. Max Hunter to the patient's change for. the better.

Dr. Hunter, the head psychiatrist at Shady Glen Sanitarium, was a short, plump man who, standing, bounced like a yo-yo on his built-up heels. Pompous as a politician three terms in office, he irritated Wade's nerve ends like sandpaper. He was a smiler too. He had smiled his way through a million interrogations, had smiled cheerfully while overseeing delicate tortures, and some not so delicate, on the person of Wade Carson. His smile, Wade was sure, was much like that adorning the pure Aryan countenances of Nazi doctors surveying the lines shuffling into gas chambers while mentally tanning hides for lampshades.

But now, without knowing exactly when the decision had come to him or why he had so decided, he made up his mind to go along with everyone. They said he was a man named Bart Evans, so he would be Bart Evans, at least for long enough to escape Dr. Hunter's nut farm. He'd tried resisting and all that had gained him had been a month of mental and physical hell. Or perhaps it had been longer; he was a little vague about time.

Actually, he had little choice. Just last night he had overheard talk of a lobotomy. The blonde woman who claimed to be his wife had been in his room last night when they'd brought him back from electroshock treatments. Yesterday he had been particularly obstreperous and Dr. Hunter had punished him for it. Not that the good doctor would admit to that. It was always, "For your own benefit, Mr. Evans. After treatment, you will feel much better."

Anyway, Wade had come out of it a little early, and the blonde and Dr. Hunter had been at his bedside, conversing in low voices. Wade had feigned unconsciousness and listened.

"Doctor, it has been so long now, and I can't see any change for the better. He still doesn't know who he really is or who I am."

Dr. Hunter had loosed a windy sigh. "These things take time, Mrs. Evans. I can only counsel patience."

"But if he never gets any better? What then?"

"There are several alternatives open to us. We can keep him here indefinitely, under restraints if necessary...."

"But that seems too cruel! And those horrible shock treatments!"

"Well ... there is a lobotomy."

"That's an operation, isn't it?"

Wade's dazed brain had seized on this little tidbit of information with growing horror. He knew what a lobotomy was, knew what it would do to him. It would turn him into a passive animal, a vegetable capable of sleeping, eating, defecating, and little else.

"If you think that's necessary, Doctor. Anything that will bring Bart back to something like normal."

"That is always a last resort, of course, but it is well we are prepared for it. It may become necessary in the end...."

They had been moving out of the room by then, but Wade had heard more than enough....

Jocko came back, interrupting Wade's thoughts. This time Jocko came into the room, a man of forty-odd built like a gorilla, with hands like dangling hams. Wade had felt the brutal power of those hands. Often when he had acted up during the past month Jocko had bounced him off the walls as casually, as easily, as he'd swat a handball.

"Doctor would like to see you now, Mr. Evans."

He released Wade from the strait jacket and helped him sit up on the edge of the bed. The jacket had been so tight that Wade's limbs were numb. Needles of pain jabbed his flesh as feeling slowly returned. Jocko helped him into the bathroom and then left him alone, a rare show of trust. Not that there was anything in the bathroom Wade could use to harm himself or anyone else, nothing more dangerous than a bar of soap.

He took a quick shower and accepted the fresh clothes Jocko handed him through the door. He examined his face in the bathroom mirror. He needed a shave but, since he wasn't allowed a razor, Jocko attended to that, and he'd be damned if he'd ask him for any favors.

The face he saw in the mirror was gaunt, the black eyes receded into deep sockets. His face had always been narrow; now it had the honed look of an axe blade! And he had lost at least ten pounds these past thirty days. He wouldn't have believed it possible. His six-foot frame had always been as lean as rawhide. He was twenty-eight and he felt, at the moment, at least a hundred.

He limped slightly as he turned away from the mirror. The broken hip he'd received at the Pendleton rodeo when Keg O' Dynamite had thrown him like a drunk tossing his cookies didn't normally bother him, but long confinement in the straitjacket and the resultant poor circulation made it act up.

Dressed, he swung around the bathroom door and into the sunniness of Jocko's smile. "Are you ready to see the doctor now?" the attendant asked.

Not trusting himself to speak, fearful his vocal chords had rusted from disuse, Wade merely nodded. He trailed Jocko down the hall, which was another sign of new trust; usually they marched down the hall in tandem, Jocko ever alert for possible flight. Jocko opened the door to Dr. Hunter's office, ushered Wade inside, and closed the door. Wade knew the man would take up his vigil outside the door, legs planted like oaks growing out of the floor.

Wade crossed toward the doctor's desk, feet sinking into the inch-deep carpet with every step. Three walls of the large office were lined with books, books both expensive and esoteric. The fourth wall had two big windows providing a sweeping view westward across the verdant acreage of Shady Glen. Only the delicate tracery of bars across the windows hinted at what the building housed.

The doctor's desk was huge, rich walnut with a high gloss. The top held a pen and pencil set, a desk blotter, a desk calendar, an appointment book, and nothing else. All objects were neatly aligned. Dr. Hunter had a mania for neatness and order that made Wade wonder if there wasn't a case history in one of the books of which the doctor was a classic example.

The doctor arose to greet him. "Ah, Mr. Evans! Jocko tells me you're much improved today."

Wade noted with satisfaction the fading discoloration of the black eye he'd given the doctor a week ago. He said, "If you mean I'm not raving, frothing at the mouth today ... yes, I'm much improved."

The doctor winced visibly. "Please, Mr. Evans! We dislike those terms exceedingly."

Dr. Hunter was, in Wade's limited experience with psychiatrists, a great mincer of words. He had never told Wade to his face that he was crazy; his strongest term had been mentally disturbed. Wade said, "Let's just say I'm not so ... disturbed, then."

Dr. Hunter bounced happily. "Good, good! You do know you're Bart Evans?"

"Yes, I know now that I'm Bart Evans," Wade lied.

"Better and better!" He motioned Wade to the leather chair before the desk, bounced once more and plopped down into his own chair. "And what else do we remember?"

"Not much else, I'm afraid, beyond my first days here."

"That's to be expected, Mr. Evans. The mind often blots out the memory of unpleasantness."

What unpleasantness would the real Bart Evans wish to blot from his memory? It was a question he wanted desperately to ask, but he decided not to push his luck.

Dr. Hunter was saying, "...form of temporary amnesia. It will correct itself in good time, I'm confident. But the important fact is that you recognize your true identity. Equally important, that you admit to that identity. If improvement along other lines is as marked, I can promise you may go home soon to your sweet wife, Janis." His smile stretched. "You'd like that, wouldn't you, Mr. Evans?"

Wade wondered suddenly if the good doctor was banging the blonde Janis. Was that the reason he'd been committed here? But that didn't make any kind of sense! That would mean he really was Bart Evans. And if that were true, the doctor wouldn't be promising to send him home.

Home? Where was home? The last place he remembered thinking of as home was a small apartment just off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. All his things were there ... had been there. Or was it all the imagine of a sick mind ?

As had been the case so often these past weeks, his mind boggled at all the questions, his thoughts fragmenting and going off in several different directions.

For the rest of his time with the doctor, Wade remained sunk in a sort of self-protective apathy, having to force himself to make the responses he thought the doctor wanted to his questions. Apparently he managed a passing grade because Dr. Hunter was still smiling when he handed Wade over to Jocko. Wade's last glimpse showed the doctor bouncing merrily on his built-up heels, chubby hands laced together behind his back.

Jocko locked the door to Wade's room but he took the straitjacket with him, remarking, "If things keep on this way, we won't be needing this anymore."

It was only midafternoon and dinner would be served shortly, but Wade stretched out on the bed fully clothed and drifted slowly toward sleep. He hadn't slept without being drugged since the morning he'd awakened here. Now he felt that he could. His mind was still plagued with questions but he knew he would never find the answers at Shady Glen. He didn't know what awaited him outside, what answers he might find that he didn't like, but at least he'd have some freedom, certainly more freedom, than he had in here.

For the next two weeks, he was a model patient. He endured the doctor's almost daily inquisition stoically, learned to anticipate the questions, and managed to fabricate satisfactory answers. Now that he was no longer under restraints or existing in a drug-daze, he ate and slept well and gained back the pounds he'd lost. At the end of the two weeks he still had those moments when doubts of his sanity rode his back like a gibbering monkey, but at least his body was healthy again.

One thing did bother him, but he said nothing about it. Most of his time at Shady Glen he'd been hustled back and forth in a robe and slippers, seldom having the occasion to dress. Now that he had more freedom, he was allowed to get dressed every day. The clothes were new sports clothes, rather gaudy for his taste, and fit him perfectly. But no jeans, no cowboy boots. It was the first time in many years he'd worn anything on his small feet but high-heeled boots. Yet he knew better than to ask them for cowboy boots and jeans; those items of clothing belonged to Wade Carson and, for now at least, he was Bart Evans.

A the end of those two weeks, a warm Sunday afternoon, he left Shady Glen, riding in a sky-blue Volkswagen with Janis Evans driving. Dr. Hunter and Jocko Rently smiled widely, as pleased as proud parents, as he departed with Janis.

As the Volkswagen chugged under the archway, he twisted around for a last look at Shady Glen. From this viewpoint it looked like a huge, sprawling inn, Gothic style, a summering place for the wealthy; there were no outward indications of the horrors within.

"So long, Dr. Hunter. God help your mentally disturbed," he muttered. "And good-bye to you, too, Jocko, you smiling, sadistic bastard!"

As he faced around again, Janis slanted sea-green eyes at him and said in her throaty voice, "Poor baby. Was it awful for you?"

"As they say, it was no damned picnic."

"It'll be all better now. You'll see. I've missed you, darling. Do you realize we've never been apart this long since we got married? Not even with you traveling so much. We have a lot of catching up to do."

Again he had that weird feeling of disorientation. Here was this dish-and she was a dish, with honey-blonde hair cropped short, creamy complexion, and pouting rosebud mouth, large firm breasts saucily punching a tight green sweater, lovely long legs exposed by her fucked tweed skirt, about twenty-four, the juices of full womanhood flowing hot in her marvelous body. Here she was pretending to be his wife, hinting at erotic delights to come, and he could find no flicker of response within himself. Or was she pretending?

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, aware of the warmth of her hand on his thigh until she turned onto the freeway and needed both hands for driving. Wade let his thoughts spiral back once more, remembering what he could of those events leading up to the morning when he awoke in a straitjacket, a guest at Shady Glen....