Strangers by Dean Koontz
there had never been a word before. The picture had been defaced with a name: Dominick. He recognized his own handwriting, but he could not remember having scrawled that name across the moon. Then his eye was caught by another name written on another poster: Ginger. And then a third name on a third poster: Faye. And a fourth: Ernie. Suddenly anxious, Zeb stumbled around the room, checking the other posters, but he found no more names.
In addition to being unable to recall writing those words, he could not think of anyone he knew named Dominick, Ginger, or Faye. He knew a couple of Ernies, though neither was a close friend, and the appearance of that name on one of the moons was no less mysterious than the three others. Staring at the names, he grew increasingly uneasy, for he had the odd feeling that he did know them, that they had played a terribly important role in his life, and that his very sanity and survival depended on remembering who they were.
Some long-forgotten memory swelled in him like a steadily inflating balloon, and intuitively he knew that when the balloon popped he would recollect everything, not only the identities of these four people, but also the origins of his fevered fascination with—and underlying fear of—the moon. But as the memory balloon swelled within him, his fear grew as well, and he began to sweat and then to shake uncontrollably.
He turned from the posters, suddenly terrified of remembering, and lurched out to the kitchen, driven by that gnawing hunger that was always occasioned by thoughts that made him nervous. He wrenched open the refrigerator door and was startled to discover that the shelves were bare. They held dirty bowls and empty plastic containers in which food had been kept, two empty milk cartons, an egg carton with one broken and dried egg. He looked in the freezer, found only frost.
Zeb tried to remember when he had last been to the supermarket. It might have been days or weeks since his most recent shopping expedition. He could not remember because, in his moon-filled world, time no longer had any meaning. And how much time had passed since his last meal? He vaguely remembered having some canned pudding, but he was not clear whether that had been earlier today or yesterday or even two days ago.
Zebediah Lomack was so shocked by this development that his mind cleared for the first time in weeks, and when he looked around the kitchen, he made a strangled sound of disgust and fear. For the first time he saw—really saw—the mess in which he’d been living, a situation previously masked by his all-encompassing fascination with the moon. Garbage covered the floor: discarded cans sticky with fruit juice, slimy with traces of rancid gravy; empty cereal boxes and a score of drained milk cartons; dozens of wadded-up and discarded potato-chip bags and candy wrappers. And roaches. They squirmed, scuttled, and jigged through the garbage, raced across the floor, climbed walls, crouched on counters, and lurked in the sink.
“My God,” Zeb said in a voice that was hardly more than a croak, “what’s happened to me? What’ve I been doing? What’s wrong with me?”
He put one hand to his face and twitched with surprise when he felt a beard. He had always been clean-shaven, and he had thought he shaved just this morning. The wiry hair on his face sent him in a panic to the bathroom, where he could look in the mirror. He saw a stranger: filthy, matted hair hanging in tangled clumps; pale, soft, sickly-looking skin; a two-week beard crusted with food and dirt; wild eyes. He became aware of his body odor: His stink was so rank that he gagged on his own aroma. Apparently, he had not bathed in days, weeks.
He needed help. He was sick. Confused and sick. He could not understand what had happened to him, but he knew that he must go to the telephone and call for help.
But he did not go immediately to the phone because he was afraid they’d say he was hopelessly insane and would lock him away forever. Like they had locked away his father. When Zebediah was eight, his father pitched a terrible fit, ranting and raving about lizard-things that were crawling out of the walls, and the doctors took him to the hospital to dry him out. But that time, unlike before, the DTs had not gone away, and Zeb’s dad had been institutionalized for the rest of his life. Ever after, Zeb had been afraid his own mind might be flawed, too. Staring at his pale face in the mirror, he knew he could not call for help until he made himself presentable and straightened up the house; otherwise, they would lock him up and throw away the key.
He could not bear to look at his reflection long enough to shave, so he decided to deal with the house first. Keeping his head down to avoid seeing the moons, which exerted a tidal force on him as real as the true moon’s effect on the seas, he scurried into the bedroom, opened the closet, shoved the clothes aside, located his Remington .12-gauge and a box of shells. Head bowed, fighting the urge to look up, he made his way to the kitchen, where he loaded the shotgun and put it on the garbage-strewn table. Speaking aloud, he made a bargain with himself:
“You get rid of the moon books, tear down the pictures so this place don’t look so crazy, clean the kitchen, shave, bathe. Then maybe you’ll get your head clear enough to figure what the hell’s wrong with you. Then you can get help—just not while things are like this.”
The shotgun was the unspoken part of the bargain. He had been fortunate to rise briefly out of the moon-dream in which he had been living, shocked to his senses by the lack of food in the refrigerator, but if he drifted back into that nightmare, he could not count on being jolted awake again. Therefore, if he could not resist the siren song of the moons on the walls, he would quickly return to the kitchen, pick up the shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pull the trigger.
Death was better than this.
And death was better than being locked up forever like his father.
Now, in the living room once more, keeping his eyes on the floor, he began to gather up the books. Some had once boasted jackets with photos of the moon, but he had clipped those pictures. He hefted an armload of them and went outside to the snow-covered back yard, where there was a barbecue pit lined with concrete blocks. Shivering in the crisp winter air, he dumped the books into the pit and headed back to the house for more, not daring to look at the night sky for fear of the great luminous body suspended in it.
As he worked, the urge to return to the study of the moon was as intense and demanding as the hideous need that forced a heroin addict to return again and again to the needle, but Zeb fought it.
Likewise, as he made trip after trip to the barbecue pit, he felt that memory of some long-forgotten event continuing to swell within him: Dominick, Ginger, Faye, Ernie ... Instinctively, he knew that he would understand the cause of his fascination with the moon if only he could recall who those four people were. He concentrated on the names, trying to use them to block out the alluring summons of the moon, and it seemed to work because soon he had disposed of two or three hundred volumes in the barbecue pit and was ready to set them ablaze.
But when he struck a match and leaned down to light the pages of a book, he discovered the pit was empty. He stared in shock and horror. Dropping the matches, he raced back to the house, threw open the kitchen door, stumbled inside, and saw what he had been most afraid of seeing. The books were piled there, damp with snow, smeared with wet ashes from the pit. He had indeed disposed of them, but then the lunacy had taken him again; under its spell and without knowing what he was doing, he had carried every volume back into the house.
He began to cry, but he was still determined he would not wind up in a padded room. He picked up a score of books and headed back toward the barbecue pit, feeling as if he were in hell and condemned, for eternity, to the performance of this frantic ritual.
When he figured he had filled the pit again, he suddenly realized he was not carrying books to the place of burning but away from it. Again, he had drifted off into his moon-dream and, instead of destroying the objects of his obsession, he was re-collecting them.
As he headed back toward the house, he noticed how the crust of snow glimmered with a scintillant, reflected light. Against his will, his head came up. He looked into the deep and nearly cloudless sky.
He knew then that he was a dead man.
Laguna Beach, California.
For Dominick Corvaisis, Christmas was usually not much different from other days. He had no wife or children to make it special. Raised in foster homes, he had no relatives with whom he could share a turkey and mincemeat pie. A couple of friends, including Parker Faine, always invited him to join in their festivities, but he declined, for he knew he would feel like the proverbial fifth wheel. However, Christmas was not sad or lonely. He was never bored by his own company, and his home overflowed with good books that could fill the day with delight.
But this Christmas Dom could not concentrate to read, for he was preoccupied by the mysterious mail he had received the previous day and by the need to resist the urge to pop a Valium. Though he had been afraid that he would dream and walk in his sleep, he had taken no Valium yesterday and no Dalmane last night. He was determined to avoid any further reliance on chemicals, though he continued to crave them.
In fact, the craving became so bad that he emptied the pills into the toilet and flushed them away, because he did not trust himself. As the day wore on, his anxiety rose to the level he had experienced before he had begun drug therapy.
At seven o‘clock Christmas night, Dom arrived at Parker’s rambling hillside contemporary and accepted a glass of homemade eggnog with a cinnamon stick in it. The burly painter’s beard, usually bushy and untamed, was neatly trimmed, and his mane of hair was newly cut and combed in honor of the holiday. Though he was more conservatively groomed and more subdued in dress than was his habit, he was every bit as ebullient as one expected him to be. “What a Christmas! Peace and love reigned in this house today, I tell you! My cherished brother made only forty or fifty nasty and envious remarks about my success, which is not half as many as he lets loose with on a less blessed occasion. My sainted half-sister, Carla, only once called her sister-in-law Doreen a bitch, and even that might be considered justified in light of the fact that Doreen started it by calling Carla a ‘brainless New Age crackpot full of psychobabble.’ Ah, truly a day of fellowship and caring! Not one punch thrown this year, if you can believe it. And Carla’s husband, though he got plastered as usual, did not throw up or fall down a flight of stairs, as in past years, though he did insist on doing his Bette Midler imitation at least a dozen times.”
As they moved toward a grouping of chairs by the window-wall overlooking the sea, Dom said, “I’m going on a trip, a long drive. I’ll fly to Portland and rent a car up there. Then I’ll retrace the journey I took the summer before last, from Portland down to Reno, across Nevada and half of Utah on Interstate 80, then to Mountainview.”
Dom sat down as he spoke, but Parker remained on his feet, very still. The announcement pleasantly electrified him. “What’s happened? That’s no vacation. That’s not a route you’d take for pleasure. Are you sleepwalking again? Must be. And something’s happened to convince you this is related to the changes you underwent that summer.”
“I haven’t begun sleepwalking again, but I’m sure I will, probably tonight, because I’ve thrown the damn drugs away. They weren’t curing me. I lied. I was getting hooked, Parker. I didn’t care because it seemed that being hooked was better than enduring the things I did while sleepwalking. But now all that’s changed because of these.” He held up the two notes from his unknown correspondent. “The problem’s not just within me, not just psychological. There’s something stranger at work here.” He gave the first note to Parker. His fearful state of mind was betrayed by the sheet of paper, which shook in his hand.
When the painter read it, he looked baffled.
Dom said, “It came in the mail yesterday at the post office. No return address. There was another note delivered to the house.” He explained about having typed the words “the moon” on his word processor hundreds of times in his sleep and about waking from a dream with those same words on his lips, then passed the second note to Parker.
“But if I’m the first one you’ve told about this moon thing, how could anyone have known enough to send such a note?”
“Whoever he is,” Dom said, “he knows about my sleepwalking, maybe because I’ve gone to a doctor about it—”
“You’re saying you’re being watched?”
“Apparently, to a degree. Periodically monitored if not constantly watched. But while the monitor knows about my sleepwalking, he probably doesn’t know about my typing those words on the Displaywriter, or that I woke up repeating them in the night. Not unless he was standing beside my bed, which he wasn’t. However, he indisputably does know that I’ll react to ‘the moon,’ that those words’ll frighten me. So he must know what lies behind this whole crazy mess.”
At last Parker sat down on the edge of a chair. “Find him, and you’ll know what’s going on.”
“New York is a big place,” Dom said. “I have no starting point there. But when I got this first note—this business about the answer to my sleepwalking lying in the past—I realized you must be right about this personality crisis being tied to the previous one. The dramatic change I went through on the trip from Portland to Mountainview is somehow connected. If I make that trip again, stop at the same motels, eat in the same roadside restaurants, try to recreate it as exactly as I can ... something might turn up. My memory might be jogged.”
“But how could you have forgotten something so major?”
“Maybe I didn’t forget it. Maybe the memory was taken from me.”
Leaving that possibility for later exploration, Parker said, “Whoever the hell this guy is—what reasons would he have for sending these notes? I mean, you’ve imagined a situation where it’s you against Them, some unknown Them, and so this guy is on their side, not yours.”
“Maybe he doesn’t agree with everything that’s been done to me—whatever it is that I’ve forgotten was done to me.”
“Done to you? What’re we talking about here?”
Dom nervously turned his glass of eggnog around and around in his hands. “I don’t know. But this correspondent ... he obviously wants me to know my problem’s not psychological, that there’s something more behind it. I think maybe he wants to help me find the truth.”
“So why doesn’t he just call you up and tell you the truth?”
“The only thing I can figure is that he doesn’t dare risk telling me. He must be part of some conspiracy, God knows what, but part of some group that doesn’t want the truth to come out. If he approaches me directly, the others will know, and he’ll be in deep shit.”
As if it helped him think, Parker ran one hand through his hair several times, mussing it badly. “You make this sound like some all-knowing secret society is on your ass—like the Illuminatus Society, Rosicrucians, CIA, and the Fraternal Order of Masons all rolled into one! You actually think you’ve been brainwashed?”
“If you want to call it that. Whatever traumatic episode I’ve forgotten, I didn’t forget it without assistance. Whatever I saw or experienced was apparently so shocking, so traumatic, that it’s still festering in my subconscious, trying to reach me through sleepwalking and through the messages I leave on the Displaywriter. It was so damned big that even brainwashing hasn’t been able to wipe it out, so big that one of the conspirators is risking his own neck to send me hints.”
After reading them one more time, Parker returned the two notes to Dom, chugged down his own eggnog. “Shit. I think you’ve got to be right, which upsets me. I don’t want to believe it. It sounds too much as if you’ve let your novelistic imagination run wild, as if you’re trying out the plot of a new book on me, something a bit more colorful than you should write. But crazy as the whole thing sounds, I can’t think of any other answer.”
Dom realized he was squeezing the eggnog glass so tightly that he was in danger of shattering it. He put it on a small table and blotted his hands on his slacks. “Me neither. There’s nothing else that explains both the crazy damn sleepwalking, and my personali
His face lined with worry, Parker said, “What could it have been, Dom? What did you stumble into when you were out there on the road?”
“I don’t have the foggiest.”
“Have you considered that it might be something so bad ... so damn dangerous that you’d be better off not knowing?”
Dom nodded. “But if I don’t learn the truth, I won’t be able to stop the sleepwalking for good. In my sleep I’m running from the memory of whatever happened to me out there on the road, the summer before last, and to stop running I’ve got to find out what it was, face up to it. ’Cause if I don’t stop the sleepwalking, it’ll eventually drive me mad. That might sound a bit melodramatic, too, but it’s true. If I don’t learn the truth, then the thing I fear in my dreams is going to start haunting the waking hours as well, and I’m not going to have a moment’s peace, waking or sleeping, and eventually the only solution will be to put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.”
“Jesus.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do. God help you, my friend, I know you do.”
Reno, Nevada.
A cloud saved Zeb Lomack. It drifted across the moon before the grip of the lunar obsession had completely reclaimed him. With the empyreal lantern briefly dimmed, Zebediah abruptly became aware that he was standing coatless in the freezing December night, gaping up at the sky, mesmerized by moonbeams. If the cloud had not broken the trance, he might have stood there until the object of his grim fascination had descended past the horizon. Then, having sunk back into his lunacy, he might have returned to one of the rooms papered with the ancient god-face that the Greeks called Cynthia, that the Romans called Diana, there to lie in a stupor until, days hence, he had starved to death.
Reprieved, he let out a wretched cry and ran to the house. He slipped and fell in the snow, fell again on the porch steps, but immediately scrambled up, desperately seeking the safety of the indoors, where the face of the moon could not work its charms on him. But of course there was no safety inside, either. Though he closed his eyes and began at once to tear blindly at the moon pictures, ripping them from the kitchen walls and casting them on the garbage-covered floor, he began to succumb to his obsession yet again. Eyes tightly shut, he could not see the cratered images, but he could feel them. He could feel the pale light of a hundred moons upon his face, and he could feel the roundness of the moons in his hands as he tore them off the wall, which was crazy because they were only pictures that could not produce light or warmth and could not convey by touch the roundness of the lunar globe, yet he nevertheless felt those things strongly. He opened his eyes and was instantly captured by the familiar celestial body.
Just like my dad. Asylum-bound.
Like a distant crackle of lightning, that thought flickered through Zeb Lomack’s rapidly dimming mind. It jolted him and allowed him to recover just long enough to turn away from the living room door and fling himself toward the kitchen table, where the loaded shotgun waited.
Chicago, Illinois.
Father Stefan Wycazik, descendant of strong-willed Poles, rescuer of troubled priests, was not accustomed to failure, and he did not handle it well. “But after everything I’ve told you, how can you still not believe?” he demanded.
Brendan Cronin said, “Father Stefan, I’m sorry. But I simply don’t feel any stronger about the existence of God than I did yesterday.”
They were in a bedroom on the second floor of Brendan’s parents’ gingersnap brick house in the Irish neighborhood called Bridgeport, where the young priest was spending the holiday according to Father Wycazik’s orders, issued yesterday after the Uptown shootout. Brendan, dressed in gray slacks and a white shirt, was sitting on the edge of a double bed that was covered by a worn, yellow chenille spread. Stefan, choosing to feel needled by his curate’s stubbornness, moved constantly around the room from dresser to highboy to window to bed to dresser again, as if trying to avoid the prickling pain of his failure.
“Tonight,” Father Wycazik said, “I met an atheist who was half-converted by Tolk’s incredible recovery. But you’re unimpressed. ”
“I’m happy for Dr. Sonneford,” Brendan said mildly, “but his renewed belief doesn’t rekindle my own.”
The curate’s refusal to be properly impressed by recent miraculous events was not the only thing that irritated Father Wycazik. The young priest’s pacific demeanor was also bothersome. If he could not find the will to believe in God again, then it seemed he should at least be disheartened and downcast by his continued lack of faith. Instead, Brendan appeared untroubled by his miserable spiritual condition, which was quite different from his attitude when Father Wycazik had seen him last. He had changed dramatically; for reasons that were not at all clear, a great peace seemed to have settled over Brendan.
Still determinedly pressing his argument, Stefan said, “It was you, Brendan, who cured Emmy Halbourg and healed Winton Tolk. It was you, through the power of those stigmata on your hands. Stigmata that God visited upon you as a sign.”
Brendan looked at his palms, now unmarked. “I believe ... somehow I did heal Emmy and Winton. But it wasn’t God acting through me.”
“Who else but God could’ve granted you such curing power?”
“I don’t know,” Brendan said. “Wish I did. But it wasn’t God. I felt no divine presence, Father.”
“Good grief, how much more strongly do you expect Him to make His presence felt? Do you expect Him to thump you on the head with His great Staff of Justice, tip His diadem to you, and introduce Himself? You’ve got to meet Him halfway, Brendan.”
The curate smiled and shrugged. “Father, I know these amazing events seem to have no explanation other than a religious one. But I feel very strongly that something other than God lies behind it.”
“Like what?” Stefan challenged.
“I don’t know. Something tremendously important, something really wonderful and magnificent ... but not God. Look, you’ve said that the rings were stigmata. But if that’s what they were, why wouldn’t they have been in a form that had some Christian significance? Why rings—which seem to have no relation to the message of Christ?”
When Brendan began Stefan’s unconventional course of psychological therapy at St. Joseph’s Hospital for Children three weeks ago, the young priest had been so troubled by his loss of faith that he’d been growing rapidly thinner. Now he had stopped losing weight. He was still thirty pounds lighter than usual, but he was no longer as wan and haggard as he had been following his shocking outburst during Mass on the first of December. In spite of his spiritual fall, there was a glow to his skin and a light in his eyes that was almost ... beatific.
“You feel splendid, don’t you?” Stefan asked.
“Yes, though I’m not sure why.”
“Your soul’s no longer troubled.”
“No.”
“Even though you’ve still not found your way back to God.”
“Even though,” Brendan agreed. “Maybe it has something to do with the dream I had last night.”