Strangers by Dean Koontz
1. Sunday, January 12
Air as dense as molten iron.
In the nightmare, Dom could not draw breath. A tremendous pressure bore down on him. He was choking violently. He was dying.
He could not see much; his vision was clouded. Then two men came close, both wearing white vinyl decontamination suits with dark-visored helmets similar to those of astronauts. One man was at Dom’s right, frantically disconnecting the IV line, withdrawing the intravenous spike from his arm. The other man, on the left, was cursing the cardiological data on the video readout of the EKG machine. One of them unbuckled the straps and tore off the electrodes connecting Dom to the EKG, and the other lifted him into a sitting position. They pressed a glass to his lips, but he could not drink, so they tipped his head back and forced his mouth open and poured some noxious stuff down his throat.
The men communicated with each other via radios built into their helmets, but they were leaning so close to Dom that he could hear their voices clearly even through the muffling Plexiglas of their dark visors. One of them said, “How many detainees were poisoned?” And the other said, “Nobody’s sure yet. Looks like at least a dozen.” The first said, “But who’d want to poison them?” And the second said, “One guess.” The first said, “Colonel Falkirk. Colonel fucking Falkirk.” The second man said, “But we’ll never prove it, never nail the bastard.”
Flash-cut. The motel bathroom. The men were holding Dom on his feet, forcing his face down into the sink. This time, he understood what they were saying to him. With growing urgency, they were insisting that he vomit. Colonel fucking Falkirk had somehow had him poisoned, and these guys had made him drink a foul-tasting emetic, and now he was supposed to purge himself of the poison that was killing him. But even as sick as he was, he still could not puke. He gagged, retched; his stomach roiled; sweat poured off him like melting fat off a broiling chicken; but he could not rid himself of the poison. The first man said, “We need a stomach pump.” And the second said, “We don’t have a stomach pump.” They pressed Dom’s face deeper into the porcelain bowl. The crushing pressure grew worse, and Dom could hardly breathe at all now, and hot greasy waves of nausea washed through him, and sweat gushed from him, but he could not puke, could not, could not. And then he did.
Flash-cut. In bed again. Weak, kitten-weak. But able to breathe, thank God. The men in the decontamination suits had cleaned him up and strapped him to the mattress once more. The one on the right prepared a hypodermic and administered an injection of something apparently meant to counteract the remaining effects of the poison. The one on the left reconnected him to the intravenous drip from which he was receiving drugs, not nourishment. Dom was woozy, holding on to consciousness only with considerable effort. They hooked him to the EKG again, and as they worked, they talked. “Falkirk’s an idiot. We can keep a lid’on this, given half a chance.” “He’s afraid the memory block will wear off. He’s afraid that some of them will eventually remember what they saw.” “Well, he may be right. But if the asshole kills them all, how’s he going to explain the bodies? That’s going to draw reporters like raw meat draws jackals, and then there’ll be no way to keep the lid on. A nice memory wipe—that’s the only sensible answer.” “You don’t have to convince me. Go burn Falkirk’s ear about it.”
The dream-figures faded away, as did their voices, and Dom passed into a different nightmare country. He no longer felt weak, no longer sick, but his fear exploded into stark terror, and he began to run with that maddening slow-motion panic indigenous to nightmares. He did not know what he was running from, but he was certain that something was pursuing him, something threatening and inhuman, he could sense it right behind him, closer, reaching for him, closer, and finally he knew he could not outrun it, knew he must face it, so he stopped and turned and looked up and cried out in surprise: “The moon!”
Dom was awakened by his own cry. He was in Room 20, on the floor beside the bed, kicking, flailing. He got up and sat on the bed.
He looked at his travel clock. Three-oh-seven A.M.
Shivering, he blotted his damp palms on the sheets.
Room 20 was having precisely the effect on him that he had thought it would. The bad vibrations of the place stimulated his memory, made his nightmares more vivid and more detailed than ever.
These dreams were radically different from all others he had ever known, for they were not fantasies but glimpses of a past reality seen through a distorting lens. They were not dreams as much as they were memories, forbidden recollections that had been weighted and dropped into the black sea of his subconscious, like dead bodies encumbered with cement shoes and thrown from a bridge into the deeps. Finally, the memories had slipped out of the cement and were surging to the surface.
He really had been imprisoned here, drugged, brainwashed. And during that ordeal, someone named Colonel Falkirk had actually poisoned him to prevent him from talking about whatever he had seen.
Falkirk was right, Dom thought. Eventually, we’ll overcome the brainwashing and remember the truth. He should have killed us all.
Sunday morning, Ernie purchased panels of plyboard from a friend in Elko who owned a building supply. With his portable tablesaw, he cut the panels to fit the busted-out diner windows. Ned and Dom helped nail the plyboard in place, and by noon they had completed the job.
Ernie did not want to call a glazier and have the windows replaced because last night’s phenomena might recur. Until they knew what had caused the thunderous noise and shaking, installing new glass seemed foolhardy. In the interim, the Tranquility Grille would not be open.
The Tranquility Motel also would be closed. Ernie did not want business to distract him from helping Dom and the others probe into the mystery of the “toxic spill.” When the last of yesterday’s check-ins departed later today, the motel would house only Ernie, Faye, Dom, and any other victims who, when contacted, might decide to journey to Elko County to participate in the investigation. He did not know how many rooms he might need for those fellow-sufferers, so he decided to reserve all twenty. For the time being, the Tranquility was less a motel than a barracks, where the troops would be quartered until this war with an unknown enemy was finally brought to a conclusion.
When the diner was boarded up, they all got into the motel’s Dodge van, and Faye drove them down to the interstate and just over a quarter of a mile east, where she parked on the shoulder of the highway near the place that had a special attraction for Ernie and Sandy. The five of them stood along the guardrail, staring south, seeking a communion with the landscape that might illuminate the past. The winter solstice was three weeks behind them, so the sunlight was almost as hard and flat and cold as fluorescent light. In the grip of January, the scrub- and grass-covered plains, rugged hills, arroyos and gnarled rock formations were basically trichromatic, rendered in browns and grays and deep reds, with only an occasional patch of white sand, snow, or vein of borax. The scene was stark and dreary under a sky that grew more clouded and gray by the hour, but it also possessed an undeniable austere grandeur.
Faye wanted very much to feel something special about this place, for if she felt nothing, that would mean the people who brainwashed her had totally controlled her, totally violated her. She allowed no room in her self-image for the concept of absolute submission. She was a proud, capable woman. But she felt nothing other than the winter wind.
Ned and Dom appeared to be no more moved than Faye was, but she could see that Ernie and Sandy were receiving some cryptic message from the vista before them. Sandy was smiling beatifically. But Ernie had that look he got when night fell: pale, drawn, with haunted eyes.
“Let’s go closer,” Sandy said. “Let’s go right down there.”
All five climbed over the guardrail and plunged down the steep embankment of the elevated road. They moved across the plain—fifty yards, a hundred—carefully avoiding the cold-weather prickly pear which grew in profusion near the foot of the interstate but soon disappeared in favor of sagebrus
“Here,” Ernie said with a shudder, jamming his hands in his pockets and pulling his neck down into the rolled sheepskin collar of his coat.
Sandy smiled and said, “Yes. Here.”
They spread out and moved back and forth across the ground. Here and there, in one shadowed niche or another, meager patches of snow lay hidden from the evaporating effect of the dry wind and from the cold winter sun. Those traces of winter, plus the lack of green grass and scattered late-blooming wild-flowers, were the only things that made the landscape different from the way it had looked two summers ago. After a minute or two, Ned announced that he did, indeed, feel an inexplicable connection with the place, though it did not bring him peace as it did his wife. His fear became so acute that, expressing surprise and embarrassment at his reaction, he turned and walked away. As Sandy hurried after Ned, Dom Corvaisis admitted that he was strangely affected by the place, too. However, he was not merely frightened, like Ned; Dom’s fear, like Ernie’s, was spiced by an unexplained awe and a sense of impending epiphany. Only Faye remained unaffected, unmoved.
Standing in the middle of the area in question, Dom turned slowly in a circle. “What was it? What the hell happened here?”
The sky had turned to gray slate.
The blunt wind became sharp. Faye shivered.
She remained unable to feel what Ernie and the others felt, and that inability increased her sense of violation. She hoped she would one day meet the people who had messed with her mind. She wanted to look in their eyes and ask them how they could have so little respect for the personal integrity of another human being. Now that she knew she had been manipulated, she would never again feel entirely secure.
Stirred by the wind, the dry sagebrush made a scraping-rustling noise. Ice-crusted twigs clicked against one another with a sound that, fancifully, made Faye think of small, scurrying skeletons of little animals long-dead but somehow reanimated.
Back at the motel, in the Blocks’ apartment, Ernie and Sandy and Ned sat at the kitchen table, while Faye made coffee and hot chocolate.
Dom perched on a stool by the wall phone. On the counter in front of him lay the Tranquility Motel’s registration book that had been in use the year before last. Referring to the page for Friday, July 6, he began to call those who must have shared the unremembered but important experiences of that faraway summer night.
In addition to his own name and that of Ginger Weiss, there were eight on the list. One of them, Gerald Salcoe of Monterey, California, had rented two rooms for himself, his wife, and two daughters. He had entered an address but no telephone. When Dom tried to get it from the Area Code 408 Information Operator, he was told the number was unlisted.
Disappointed, he moved on to Cal Sharkle, the long-haul trucker, a repeat customer known to Faye and Ernie. Sharkle lived in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He had included his telephone number in the motel registry. Dom dialed it but discovered that the telephone had been disconnected and that no new number was listed.
“We can check his more recent entries on the current registry,” Ernie said. “Maybe he’s moved to another town. Maybe we have his new address somewhere.”
Faye put a cup of coffee on the counter where Dom could reach it, then joined the others at the table.
Dom had better luck on his third attempt, when he dialed Alan Rykoff in Las Vegas. A woman answered, and he said, “Mrs. Rykoff?”
She hesitated. “I was Mrs. Rykoff. My name’s Monatella now, since the divorce.”
“Oh. I see. Well, my name’s Dominick Corvaisis. I’m calling from the Tranquility Motel up here in Elko County. You, your former husband, and your daughter stayed here for a few days in July, two summers ago?”
“Uh ... yes, we did.”
“Miss Monatella, are either you or your daughter or your ex-husband having ... difficulties—frightening and extraordinary problems?”
This time her hesitation was pregnant with meaning. “Is this some sick joke? Obviously, you know what happened to Alan.”
“Please, Miss Monatella, believe me: I don’t know what happened to your ex-husband. But I do know there’s a good chance that you or him or your daughter—or all of you—are suffering from inexplicable psychological problems, that you’re having frightening and repetitive nightmares you can’t remember, and that some of these nightmares involve the moon.”
She gasped twice in surprise as Dom was speaking, and when she tried to respond she had difficulty talking.
When he realized she was on the verge of tears, he interrupted. “Miss Monatella, I don’t know what’s happened to you and your family, but the worst is past. The worst is past. Because whatever might still be to come ... at least you’re not alone any more.”
Over twenty-four hundred miles east of Elko County, in Manhattan, Jack Twist spent Sunday afternoon giving away more money.
On returning from the Guardmaster heist in Connecticut the previous night, he had driven through the city, looking for those who were both in need and deserving, and he had not rid himself of all the cash until five o’clock in the morning. On the edge of physical and emotional collapse, he’d returned to his Fifth Avenue apartment, gone immediately to bed and instantly to sleep.
He dreamed again of the deserted highway in an empty moon-washed landscape, and of the stranger in the dark-visored helmet who pursued him on foot. As the moonlight suddenly turned blood-red, he woke from the dream in panic at one o’clock Sunday afternoon, flailing at his pillow. A blood-red moon? He wondered what that meant, if anything.
He showered, shaved, dressed, and took time for only a quick breakfast consisting of an orange and a half-stale croissant.
In the large walk-in closet that served the master bedroom, he removed the cleverly concealed false panel and inventoried the contents of the three-foot-deep secret storage space. The jewelry from the job in October was finally gone, successfully fenced, and most of the money from the fratellanza warehouse in early December had been converted to scores of cashiers’ checks and mailed to Jack’s accounts at three Swiss banks. Only a hundred twenty-five thousand remained, his emergency getaway fund.
He transferred most of the cash to a briefcase: nine banded packets of hundred-dollar bills, a hundred bills in each, and five packets of twenty-dollar bills, a hundred in each. That left twenty-five thousand still in his cache, which seemed more than enough now that he was no longer involved in criminal activity and would not be putting himself in situations that might necessitate a swift exit from the state or country.
Although Jack intended to dispose of a considerable portion of his ill-gotten wealth, he certainly did not plan to give away all of it and leave himself penniless. That might be good for his soul, but it would be bad for his future and undeniably foolish. However, he had eleven safe-deposit boxes in eleven of the city’s banks—additional emergency caches in case he needed to escape but could not reach the money behind the false partition in his bedroom closet—and those caches contained more than another quarter of a million. His Swiss accounts were worth in excess of four million. It was far more than he needed. He was looking forward to shedding half of that fortune during the next couple of weeks, at which point he would pause to decide what he wanted to do with his future. Eventually, he might give away even more.
At three-thirty Sunday afternoon, he carried his money-filled briefcase out into the city. All the strangers’ faces, which for eight years had seemed fiercely hostile, every one, now seemed like animated portraits of promise and dazzling possibilities, every one.
<
While the others sat at the table, listening, Dom continued to call the people who had registered at the motel on that special Friday night.
He reached Jim Gestron, who turned out to be a photographer from L.A. Gestron had driven throughout the West that summer, shooting on assignment for Sunset and other magazines. Initially, he was friendly, but as he heard more of Dom’s story, he cooled off. If Gestron had been brainwashed, the mind-control experts had been as successful with him as with Faye Block. The photographer was having no dreams, no problems. Dom’s tale of brainwashing, somnambulism, nyctophobia, obsessions with the moon, suicides, and paranormal experiences struck Gestron as the babbling of a seriously disturbed person. He said as much and hung up in the middle of the conversation.
Next, Dom called Harriet Bellot in Sacramento, who was no more troubled than Gestron. She was, she said, a fifty-year-old unmarried schoolteacher who had developed an interest in the Old West when, as a young WAC, she was stationed in Arizona. Every summer, she traveled old wagon-train routes and visited the sites of the forts and Indian settlements of another age, usually sleeping in her little camper but sometimes splurging on a motel room. She sounded like one of those likable, dedicated, but stem teachers who brooked no nonsense from her pupils, and she brooked none from Dom. When he started talking about fanciful stuff like poltergeist phenomena, she hung up, too.
“Does that make you feel better, Faye?” Ernie asked. “You’re not the only one whose memories were so thoroughly scrubbed away.”
“Doesn’t make me feel one damn bit better,” Faye said. “I’d rather be suffering problems like you or Dom than feel nothing. I feel as if a piece of me was cut out and thrown away.”
Perhaps she’s right, Dom thought. Perhaps nightmares, phobias, and terrors of one kind or another are better than having a little pocket of absolute emptiness inside, cold and dark, which would be like carrying a fragment of death around within her for the rest of her life.
When Dominick Corvaisis telephoned St. Bernadette’s rectory at 4:26 Sunday afternoon, seeking Brendan Cronin, Father Wycazik was in the study with officers of the Knights of Columbus, concluding the first of many planning sessions for the annual St. Bernadette’s Spring Carnival.
At four-thirty, Father Michael Gerrano interrupted with the news that the call he had just taken on the kitchen phone was from Father Wycazik’s “cousin” in Elko, Nevada. Only a few hours ago, one day ahead of schedule, Brendan Cronin had boarded a United flight to Reno, taking advantage of cancellations that had opened up some seats, and intending to use a small commuter airline from Reno to Elko on Monday. At the moment, Brendan was still in the air with United, not yet even as far as Reno and in no position to be calling anyone, so Michael’s message intrigued Father Wycazik and instantly pried him loose of the planning session without alerting the visitors that something extraordinary was happening in the lives of their parish clergy.
Leaving the young priest to conclude matters with the Knights, the rector hurried to the kitchen phone and took the call meant for Brendan. Dominick Corvaisis, with a writer’s appreciation for the fantastic, and Stefan, with a priest’s appreciation for mystery and mysticism, became increasingly excited and voluble as they spoke to each other. Stefan swapped his knowledge of Brendan’s problems and adventures—lost faith, miraculous cures, strange dreams—for Corvaisis’ stories of poltergeist phenomena, somnambulism, nyctophobia, lunar obsessions, and suicides.
Finally, Stefan could not resist asking, “Mr. Corvaisis, do you see any reason for an old unregenerate religious like me to hold out the hope that what is happening to Brendan is somehow divine in nature?”
“Quite frankly, Father, in spite of the miraculous cures of that police officer and the little girl you mentioned, I don’t see the hand of God in this. There are too many indications of human connivery in this to support the interpretation you’d like to put on it.”
Stefan sighed. “I suppose that’s true. But I’ll still cling to the hope that what Brendan’s being called to witness there in Nevada is something meant to bring him back into the hands of Christ. I won’t give up on the possibility.”
The writer laughed softly. “Father, just from what I’ve learned of you during this conversation, I suspect you’d never give up on the possibility of redeeming any soul, anywhere, any time. I’d guess you don’t save souls quite the way other priests do—by finesse, by gentle and genteel encouragement. You strike me more as ... well, as a blacksmith of the soul, hammering out the salvation of others by the sweat of your brow and the application of plenty of muscle. Please understand: I mean this as a compliment.”
Stefan laughed, too. “How else could I possibly take it? I firmly believe that nothing easy is worth doing. A blacksmith bent over a glowing forge? Yes, I do rather like the image.”
“I’ll look forward to Father Cronin’s arrival here tomorrow. If he’s anything like you, Father, we’ll be glad to have him on our side.”
“I’m on your side as well,” Father Wycazik said, “and if there’s anything I can do to help with your investigation, please call on me. If there’s the slightest chance these strange events involve the manifest presence of God, then I do not intend to sit on the sidelines and miss all the action.”
The next entry on the guest list was for Bruce and Janet Cable of Philadelphia. Neither of them was having trouble of the sort that plagued Dom, Ernie, and the others. However, they were more willing to hear Dom out than Jim Gestron and Harriet Bellot had been, but in the end they were no more swayed by his story.
The final name on the list was Thornton Wainwright, who had given a New York City address and telephone number. When Dom dialed it, he reached a Mrs. Neil Karpoly, who said the number had been hers for more than fourteen years and that she had never heard of Wainwright. When Dom read the Lexington Avenue address from the registry and inquired if that was where Mrs. Karpoly lived, she asked him to repeat it, then laughed. “No, sir, that’s not where I live. And your Mr. Wainwright’s not a trustworthy sort if he told you that’s his address. Nobody lives there, although I’m sure there are thousands who might enjoy it. I know I enjoyed working there. That’s the address of Bloomingdale’s.”
Sandy was astonished when Dom reported this news: “Phony name and address? What’s that mean? Was he really a guest that night? Or did someone add the name to the registry just to confuse us? Or ... what?”
Jack Twist possessed complete sets of sophisticated false IDs—driver’s licenses, birth certificates, Social Security cards, credit cards, passports, even library cards—in eight names, including “Thornton Bains Wainwright,” and he always employed an alias when planning and executing a heist. But he worked anonymously that Sunday afternoon, portioning out another hundred thousand dollars to startled recipients all over Manhattan. The largest gift was fifteen thousand to a young sailor and his bride of one day, whose battered old Plymouth had broken down on Central Park South, near the statue of Simon Bolivar. “Get a new car,” Jack told them as he stuffed money into their hands and playfully stuck a wad of bills under the sailor’s hat. “And if you’re wise, you won’t tell anyone