Strangers by Dean Koontz
As Christophson folded and passed to her the slip of paper on which he had been printing, Ginger realized that he had managed to put his back to all of the remaining mourners before he had removed the notepad and pen from his coat. No one could have seen what he had done.
He said, “I’ve just given you the phone number of an antique store in Greenwich, Connecticut. My younger brother, Philip, owns the place. You can’t call me direct because the wrong people may have seen us talking; my telephone might be tapped. I won’t risk associating with you, Dr. Weiss, and I won’t pursue any investigation of your problem. However, I have many years of broad experience in these matters, and there may be times when that experience will be of help to you. You may encounter something you don’t understand, a situation you don’t know how to deal with, and I may be able to offer advice. Just call Philip and leave your number with him. He’ll immediately call me at home and use a prearranged codeword. Then I’ll go out to a pay phone, return his call, get the number you left with him, and contact you as quickly as possible. Experience, my peculiar kind of malevolent experience, is all I’m willing to offer you, Dr. Weiss.”
“It’s more than enough. You’re not obligated to help me at all.”
“Good luck.” He turned abruptly and walked away, his boots crunching in the frozen snow.
Ginger returned to the grave, where Rita, the mortician, and two laborers were the only people remaining. The velvet curtain around the grave had been collapsed and removed. A plastic tarpaulin had been pulled off a waiting mound of earth.
“What was that all about?” Rita asked.
“Tell you later,” Ginger said, bending down to pick up a rose from the pile of flowers beside Pablo Jackson’s final resting place. She leaned forward and tossed the bloom into the hole, on top of the casket. “Alav ha-sholem. May this sleep be only a little dream between this world and something better. Baruch ha-Shem.”
As she and Rita walked away, Ginger heard the laborers begin to shovel dirt onto the casket.
Elko County, Nevada.
On Thursday, Dr. Fontelaine was satisfied that Ernie Block was cured of his disabling nyctophobia. “Fastest cure I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I guess you Marines are tougher than ordinary mortals.”
On Saturday, January 11, after only four weeks in Milwaukee, Ernie and Faye went home. They flew into Reno on United, then caught a ten-seat commuter flight to Elko, arriving at eleven-twenty-seven in the morning.
Sandy Sarver met them at the airport in Elko, though Ernie did not immediately recognize her. She was standing by the small terminal, in the crystalline winter sunshine, waving as Ernie and Faye disembarked. Gone was the pale-faced mouse, the familiar slump-shouldered frump. For the first time since Ernie had known her, Sandy was wearing a little makeup, eye shadow, and lipstick. Her nails were no longer bitten. Her hair, always limp and dull and neglected in the past, was now full, glossy. She had gained ten pounds. She had always looked older than she was. Now she looked years younger.
She blushed when Ernie and Faye raved about her make-over. She pretended the changes were of little consequence, but she was clearly pleased by their praise, approval, and delight.
She had changed in other ways, as well. For one thing, she was usually reticent and shy, but as they walked to the parking lot and put the baggage in the back of her red pickup, she asked lots of questions about Lucy, Frank, and the grandchildren. She did not ask about Ernie’s phobia because she knew nothing of it; they had kept his condition secret and had explained the extension of their Wisconsin visit by saying they wanted to spend more time with the grandchildren. In the truck, as Sandy drove through Elko and onto the interstate, she was downright garrulous as she spoke of the Christmas just past and of business at the Tranquility Grille.
As much as anything, Sandy’s driving surprised Ernie. He knew she had an aversion to four-wheel travel. But now she drove fast, with an ease and skill Ernie had never seen in her before.
Faye, sitting between Ernie and Sandy, was aware of this change, too, for she gave Ernie meaningful looks when Sandy maneuvered the pickup with special fluidity and audacity.
Then a bad thing happened.
Less than a mile from the motel, Ernie’s interest in Sandy’s metamorphosis was suddenly displaced by the queer feeling that had first seized him on December 10, when he’d been coming home from Elko with the new lighting fixtures: the feeling that a particular piece of ground, half a mile ahead, south of the highway, was calling him. The feeling that something strange had happened to him out there. As before, it was simultaneously an absurd and gripping feeling, characterized by the eerie attraction of a talismanic place in a dream.
This was an unsettling development because Ernie had supposed that the peculiar magnetism of that place had been, somehow, a part of the same mental disturbance that resulted in his crippling dread of the dark. His nyctophobia cured, he had assumed that all other symptoms of his temporary psychological imbalance would disappear along with his fear of the night. So this seemed like a bad sign. He did not want to consider what it might indicate about the permanency of his cure.
Faye was telling Sandy about Christmas morning with the grandkids, and Sandy was laughing, but to Ernie the laughter and conversation faded. As they drew nearer the plot of ground that exerted a mesmeric attraction on him, Ernie squinted through the sun-streaked windshield, possessed by a sense of impending epiphany. Something of monumental importance seemed about to happen, and he was filled with fear and awe.
Then, as they were passing that beguiling place, Ernie became aware that their speed had dropped. Sandy had slowed to under forty miles an hour, half the speed she had maintained since Elko. Even as Ernie realized the truck had slowed, it accelerated again. He looked at Sandy too late to be certain that she also had been temporarily spellbound by that same portion of the landscape, for now she was listening to Faye and watching the road ahead and bringing the pickup back to speed. But it seemed to him there was a strange look on her face, and he stared at her in bewilderment, wondering how she could share his mysterious and irrational fascination with that piece of quite ordinary land.
“It’s good to be home,” Faye said as Sandy switched on the right-turn signal and steered the truck toward the exit lane.
Ernie watched Sandy for an indication that she had slowed the truck in answer to the same eerie call that he felt, but he saw none of the fear that the call engendered in him. She was smiling. He must have been wrong. She had slowed the truck for some other reason.
A chill had taken residence in his bones, and now as they drove up the sloped county road and turned into the motel lot, he felt a cold damp dew of sweat on his palms, on his scalp.
He looked at his watch. Not because he needed to know the time. But because he wanted to know how long until sundown. About five hours.
What if it wasn’t darkness in general that he feared? What if it was a specific darkness? Perhaps he had quickly overcome his phobia in Milwaukee because he was only mildly frightened by the night out there. Perhaps his real fear, his deep fear, was of the darkness of the Nevada plains. Could a phobia be that narrowly focused, that localized?
Surely not. Yet he looked at his watch.
Sandy parked in front of the motel office, and when they got out of the truck and went around to the tailgate to get the luggage, she hugged both Faye and Ernie. “I’m glad you’re back. I missed you both. Now I’d better get over to the diner and help Ned. Lunch hour’s started.”
Ernie and Faye watched Sandy as she hurried away, and Faye said, “What on earth do you suppose happened to her?”
“Damned if I know,” Ernie said.
Her breath steaming in the cold air, Faye said, “At first, I thought she must’ve learned she’s pregnant. But now I don’t think so. If she was pregnant and overjoyed about it, she’d have told us. She’d have been bursting with the news. I think it’s something ... else.”
Ernie pulled two of the four suitcases out of the back
Faye sighed. “Well, whatever the cause, I’m sure happy for her.”
“Me, too,” Ernie said, lifting the other two bags out of the truck.
“‘Me, too,’ ” Faye said, affectionately mimicking him as she picked up the two lightest suitcases. “Don’t play cool with me, you big softy. I know you’ve worried about her almost like you used to worry about our own Lucy. When you first saw the change in Sandy back at the airport, I was watching you, and I thought your heart was going to melt.”
He followed her with the two heavier bags. “Do they have a medical term for a calamity like that, for a melting heart?”
“Sure. Cardio-liquefaction.”
He laughed in spite of the tension that knotted his stomach. Faye was always able to make him laugh—usually when he needed it most. When they got inside, he would put his arms around her, kiss her, and convey her straight upstairs and into bed. Nothing else would be as certain to chase away the fear that had popped up in him like a jack-in-the-box. Time spent with Faye was always the best medicine.
She put her two bags down by the office door and fished her keys out of her purse.
When it had become clear, early on, that Ernie was likely to have an exceptionally swift recovery and that they would not need to stay in Milwaukee for months, Faye had decided against flying home to search for a motel manager. They simply kept the place closed. Now they needed to unlock, turn up the thermostat, clean away the accumulated dust.
A lot of work to be done ... but still enough time for a little horizontal dancing first, Ernie thought with a grin.
He was standing behind Faye as she put the key in the office door, so fortunately she did not see him twitch and jump in surprise when the bright day was suddenly claimed by shadows. They were not actually plunged into darkness; a large cloud merely moved across the sun; the level of light dropped by no more than twenty percent. Yet even that was sufficient to startle and unnerve him.
He looked at his watch.
He looked toward the east, from whence the night would come.
I’ll be all right, he thought. I’m cured.
On the road: Reno to Elko County.
Following the paranormal experience in Lomack’s house on Tuesday, when countless paper moons took orbit around him, Dominick Corvaisis spent a few days in Reno. On his previous journey from Portland to Mountainview, he had stayed over to research a series of short stories about gambling. Re-creating that trip, he passed Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in “The Biggest Little City in the World.”
Dom wandered from casino to casino, watching gamblers. There were young couples, retirees, pretty young women, middle-aged women in stretch pants and cardigans, leather-faced cowboys fresh from the range and soft-faced rich men on junkets from far cities, secretaries, truckers, executives, doctors, ex-cons and off-duty cops, hustlers and dreamers, escapees from every social background, drawn together by the hope and thrill of organized games of chance, surely the most democratizing industry on earth.
As during his previous visit, Dom gambled only enough to be part of the scene, for his primary purpose was to observe. After the storm of paper moons, he had reason to believe that Reno was the place where his life had been changed forever and where he would find the key to unlock his imprisoned memories. Those around him laughed, chattered, grumbled about the unkindness of cards, shouted to encourage the rolling dice, but Dom remained cool and alert, among them yet distanced from them, the better to spot any clue to the unremembered events in his past.
No clue was revealed.
Each night he contacted Parker Faine in Laguna Beach, hoping that the unknown correspondent had sent an additional message.
No message was received.
Each night before sleep came, he tried to understand the impossible dance of paper moons. And he sought an explanation of the circular, swollen, red rings in his hands, which he had watched fade as he knelt in a drift of moons in Lomack’s living room. No understanding came.
Day by day, his craving for Valium and Dalmane diminished, but his unremembered nightmares—the moon—grew worse. Each night, he fought fiercely against the tether with which he moored himself to his bed.
By Saturday, Dom still suspected that the answer to his night fear and somnambulism lay in Reno. But he decided that he must not change his plans, must go on to Mountainview. If he concluded the journey without achieving satori, he could return to Reno at that time.
The summer before last, he departed Harrah’s at ten-thirty a.m. Friday, July 6, after an early lunch. On Saturday, January 11, he therefore followed that timetable, driving onto 1-80 at ten-forty, heading northeast across the Nevada waste-land toward distant Winnemucca, where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had robbed a bank in another age.
The immense unpopulated expanses of land were little different from the way they had been a thousand years ago. The highway and power lines, often the only signs of civilization, followed the route that had been called the Humboldt Trail in the days of wagon trains. Dom drove over barren plains and hills bearded with scrub, through an uninviting yet starkly beautiful primeval world of sagebrush, sand, alkaline flats, dry lakes, solidified lava beds with columnar crystallizations, distant mountains. Sheered bluffs and veined monoliths showed traces of borax, sulfur, alum, and salt. Isolated rocky buttes were splendidly painted in ocher, amber, umber, and gray. North of the trackless Humboldt Sink, where the Humboldt River simply vanished into the thirsty earth, were more streams, as well as the Humboldt itself, and here the forbidding land featured some contrastingly fertile valleys with lush grasses and trees—cottonwoods, willows, though not in profusion. Adequate water meant communities and agriculture, but even in the hospitable valleys, the settlements were small, the grip of civilization tenuous.
As always, Dom was humbled by the vastness of the West. But the landscape also aroused new feelings this time: a sense of mystery and an unsettling awareness of limitless—and eerie—possibilities. Hurtling through this lonely realm, it was easy to believe something frightening had happened to him here.
At two-forty-five he stopped for gasoline and a sandwich in Winnemucca, a town of only five thousand souls yet by far the largest in a county of sixteen thousand square miles. Then I-80 turned eastward. The land rose gradually toward the rim of the Great Basin. More mountains peaked on every horizon, with snow far down their slopes, and more bunch-grass appeared midst the sagebrush, and there were genuine meadows in some places, though the desert was by no means left entirely behind.
At sunset, Dom pulled off the interstate at the Tranquility Motel, parked near the office, got out of the car, and was surprised by a cold wind. Having driven so long through deserts, he was psychologically prepared for heat, though he knew it was winter on the high plains. He reached into the car, grabbed a fleece-lined suede jacket, and put it on. He started toward the motel ... then stopped, suddenly apprehensive.
This was the place.
He did not know how he knew. But he knew.
Here, something strange had happened.
He had stopped here on Friday evening, July 6, the summer before last. He had found the curious isolation of the place and the majesty of the land enormously appealing and inspiring. Indeed, he had become convinced that this territory was good material for fiction, and he had decided to stay a couple of days to familiarize himself with it and to brood about story ideas suitable to the background. He had not left for Mountainview, Utah, until Tuesday morning, the 10th of July.
Now, he turned slowly, studying the scene in the fast-fading light, hoping to prick his memory. As he turned, he became convinced that what had happened to him here was more important than anything that would ever happen to him, anywhere, as long as he lived.
The diner, with its big windows and blue neon sign, was at the western end of the complex, detached from the motel, surrounded by
Moment by moment, Dom’s apprehension grew, until he had turned in a complete circle and was looking once more at the Tranquility Grille. As if in a dream, he moved toward the diner. By the time he reached the door, his heart was hammering. He had the urge to flee.
Steeling himself, he opened the door and went inside.
It was a clean well-lighted place, cozy and warm. Delicious odors filled the air: french fries, onions, fresh hamburger sizzling on the griddle, frying ham.
In dreamlike fear, he crossed to an empty table. A ketchup bottle, a squeeze-bottle of mustard, a sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers, and an ashtray were clustered in the center. He picked up the salt shaker.
For a moment he did not know why he had picked it up, but then he remembered sitting at this very table the summer before last, his first night at the Tranquility Motel. He had spilled a bit of salt and had reflexively cast a pinch of it over his shoulder, inadvertently throwing it in the face of a young woman approaching behind him.
He sensed that the incident was important, but he did not know why. Because of the woman? Who had she been? A stranger. What had she looked like? He tried to recall her face but could not.
His heart raced without apparent reason. He felt as if he were on the brink of some devastating revelation.
He strove to recall additional details, but they eluded him.
He put the salt shaker down. Still moving dreamily, shivering with unfocused anxiety, he crossed to the comer booth by the front windows. It was unoccupied, but Dom was sure that the young woman, having blinked the salt out of her eyelashes, had come here that other night.
“Can I help you?”
Dom was aware that a waitress in a yellow sweater was standing beside him and had spoken to him, but he remained spellbound by the tantalizing ascension of some terrible memory. It had not swum into view yet, but it was rising, rising. The woman out of his past, whose face remained a blank to him, had sat in this booth, radiantly beautiful in the orange light of the sunset.
“Mister? Is something wrong?”
The young woman had ordered dinner, and Dom had gone on with his meal, and the sunset had faded, and night had fallen, and—No!
The memory swam out of the deeps, almost broke through the murky surface into light, into his consciousness, but at the last moment he recoiled from it in panic, as if he had seen the horrible face of some monstrously evil leviathan streaking toward him. Abruptly not wanting to remember, refusing, Dom loosed a wordless cry, stumbled back, turned away from the startled waitress, and ran. He was aware of people staring, aware that he was making a scene, but he did not give a damn. All he cared about was getting out. He hit the door, flung it open, and rushed out under a post-sunset, black, purple, and scarlet sky.
He was afraid. Afraid of the past. Afraid of the future. But afraid mostly because he did not know why he was afraid.
Chicago, Illinois.
Brendan Cronin was saving his announcement for after dinner, when Father Wycazik, with a full belly and with a glass of brandy in hand, would be in his best mood of the day. Meanwhile, in the company of Fathers Wycazik and Gerrano, he ate a hearty dinner: double portions of potatoes and beans and ham, disposing of a third of a loaf of homemade bread.
Though he had regained his appetite, he had not regained his faith. When his belief in God had collapsed, it had left in him a terrible dark emptiness and despair, but now the despair was gone, and the emptiness, though not entirely filled, was shrinking. He was beginning to perceive that one day he might lead a meaningful life that had nothing to do with the Church. For Brendan—for whom no temporal pleasures had been as enticing as the spiritual joy of the Mass—the mere contemplation of a secular life was a revolutionary development.
Perhaps his despair had lifted because, since Christmas, he had at least journeyed along from atheism to a qualified agnosticism. Recent events had conspired to make him consider the existence of a Power that, though not necessarily God, was nevertheless above nature.
After dinner, Father Gerrano went upstairs to spend a few hours with the latest novel by James Blaylock, the fantasist whom Brendan, too, found interesting, but whose colorful tales of bizarre fantasy creatures and even more bizarre human beings were too imaginative for a hard-nosed realist like Father Wycazik. Adjourning to the study with Brendan, the rector said, “He writes well, but when I’m finished with one of his stories, I get the peculiar feeling that nothing’s what it seems to be, and I don’t like that feeling.”
“Maybe nothing is what it seems to be,” Brendan said.
The rector shook his head, and his gray hair caught the light in such a way that it looked like steel wire. “No, when I read for entertainment, I prefer it in big, solid, heavy blocks that let you grapple with the reality of life.”
Grinning broadly, Brendan said, “If there’s a heaven, Father, and if I somehow manage to get there with you, I hope I’ll have a chance to arrange a meeting between you and Walt Disney. I’d love to see you convince him that he should’ve spent his time animating the collected works of Dostoevsky instead of the adventures of Mickey Mouse.”
Laughing at himself, the rector poured their drinks, and they settled into armchairs, the fallen priest with a glass of schnapps, his superior with a small brandy.
Deciding there would be no better time for his news, Brendan said, “If it’s all right with you, I’ll be going away for a while, Father. I’d like to leave on Monday, if I can. I need to go to Nevada.”
“Nevada?” Father Wycazik made it sound as if his curate had just said Bangkok or Timbuktu. “Why Nevada?”