Chase by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

subconsciously wanted to be killed.’
    ‘Do you believe that analysis, or do you think it's just something I made up to degrade your medal?’
    Chase said, ‘I believe it. I never wanted the medal in the first place.’
    ‘Now,’ Cauvel said, unsteepling his fingers, ‘lets extend that analysis just a bit. Though you hoped to be shot and killed in that ambush, took absurd risks to make it a certainty, the opposite transpired. You became a national hero. When you learned Lieutenant Zacharia had submitted your name for consideration, you suffered a nervous breakdown that hospitalized you and eventually led to your honourable discharge. The breakdown was an attempt to punish yourself, once you'd failed to get yourself killed, but it failed too. Well regarded, honourably discharged, too strong not to recover from the breakdown, you still carried your burden of guilt.’
    There was a pause. Chase was silent.
    Cauvel continued: ‘Perhaps when you chanced upon that scene in the park on Kanackaway, you recognized another opportunity to punish yourself. You must have realized that there was a strong possibility that you would be hurt or killed, and you must have subconsciously anticipated that agreeably enough.’
    ‘You're wrong,’ Chase said. ‘It wasn't like that at all. I had thirty pounds on him, and I knew what I was doing. He was an amateur. He had no hope of really hurting me.’
    Cauvel said nothing. Several minutes passed until Chase recognized the scene they were acting out and had acted out in a number of other sessions. When he apologized at last, Cauvel smiled at him. ‘Well, you aren't a psychiatrist, so we can't expect you to see into it quite so clearly. You aren't detached from it like I am.’ He cleared his throat, looked back at the blue terrier. He said, ‘Now that we have come this far, why did you solicit this extra session, Ben?’
    Once he began, Chase found the telling easy. In ten minutes he had related the events of the previous day and repeated, almost word for word, the conversations he had with Judge.
    When he had finished, Cauvel asked, ‘What do you want of me, then?’
    ‘I want to know how to handle it, some advice. When he calls, it's more than just the threats that upset me. It's - a feeling of detachment from everything, like I was in the hospital.’
    ‘Another breakdown?’
    ‘I'm afraid there might be.’
    Cauvel said, ‘My advice is to ignore him.’
    ‘I can't.’
    ‘You must,’ Cauvel said.
    ‘What if he's serious? What if he's really going to kill me?’
    ‘He won't.’
    ‘How can you be sure?’ Chase was perspiring heavily. Great dark circles stained the underarms of his shirt and plastered it to his back.
    Cauvel smiled at the blue terrier, shifted his gaze to a greyhound blown in amber, that smug, self-assured look drifting over his face like a mask. ‘I can be so sure of that, because Judge does not exist.’
    For a moment Chase did not understand the reply. When he grasped the import of it, he did not like it. He said, ‘How could I have hallucinated it? The part about the murder and the girl are in the papers.’
    ‘Oh, that was real enough,’ Cauvel said. ‘But these phone calls are all so much illusion.’
    ‘It can't be.’
    Cauvel ignored that and said, ‘I've noticed for some time that you have begun to shake off this unnatural desire for privacy and that you're facing the world a little bit more squarely on, week by week. You've felt yourself growing curious about the rest of the world, and you've become restless to do something. Is that correct?’
    ‘I don't know,’ Chase said. But he did know, it was correct, and it bothered him that it was so.
    ‘Perhaps you even felt a renewal of your sexual urge, but perhaps not that much yet. A counter-reaction of guilt set in, because you had not yet been punished for the things that happened in that tunnel, and you didn't want to lead a normal life until you felt you'd suffered enough.’
    Chase said