Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  “Yes. But depending on how you come along, I don’t see why you can’t help me out at the office.”

  “And what if I ... threw one of these fits?”

  “I’d be there to keep you from hurting yourself until it passed.”

  “But what would your patients think? Wouldn’t exactly help your practice any, would it? To have an assistant who suddenly turns into a meshuggene and runs shrieking through the office?”

  He smiled. “Let me worry about what my patients think. Anyway, that’s for the future. Right now, at least for a week or two, you’ve got to take it easy. No work at all. Relax. Rest. These last few days have been emotionally and physically exhausting.”

  “I’ve been in bed. Exhausting? Don’t knock a teapot.”

  He blinked, confused. “Don’t what?”

  “Oh,” she said, surprised to have heard those four words pop out of her, “it’s something my father used to say. It’s a Yiddish expression. Hok nit kain tchynik: don’t knock a teapot. It means, don’t talk nonsense. But don’t ask me why it means that. It’s just something I used to hear all the time when I was a kid.”

  “Well, I’m not knocking a teapot,” he said. “You may have been in bed all week, but it’s been an exhausting experience nonetheless, and you need to take it easy for a while. I want you to move in with Rita and me for the next few weeks.”

  “What? Oh, I couldn’t impose on you—”

  “It’s no imposition. We have a live-in maid, so you won’t even have to make your bed in the morning. From the guestroom window, you’ll have a nice view of the bay. Living around water is calming. In fact, it’s quite literally what the doctor ordered.”

  “No. Really. Thank you, but I couldn’t.”

  He frowned. “You don’t understand. I’m not just your boss but your doctor, and I’m telling you this is what you’re going to do.”

  “I’ll be perfectly fine at the apartment—”

  “No,” he said firmly. “Think about it. Suppose one of these seizures struck while you were making dinner. Suppose you knocked over a pot on the stove. It could start a fire, and you might not even be aware of it until you came out of the fugue, by which time the whole apartment could be ablaze and you could be trapped. That’s only one way you might hurt yourself. I can think of a hundred. So I have to insist that ... for a while you must not live alone. If you don’t want to stay with me and Rita, do you have relatives who’d take you in for a while?”

  “Not in Boston. In New York, I’ve got aunts, uncles....”

  But Ginger could not stay with any of her relatives. They would be happy to have her, of course—especially Aunt Francine or Aunt Rachel. However, she did not want them to see her in her current condition, and the thought of pitching a fit in front of them was intolerable. She could almost see Francine and Rachel huddling over a kitchen table, speaking in low voices, clucking their tongues: “Where did Jacob and Anna go wrong? Did they push her too hard? Anna always pushed her too hard. And after Anna died, Jacob relied on the girl too much. She had to take over the house at twelve It was too much for her. Too much pressure too young.” Ginger would receive considerable compassion, understanding, and love from them, but at the risk of sullying the memory of her parents, a memory she was determined to honor, always.

  To George, who still sat upon the edge of the bed and awaited her response with an obvious concern that touched her deeply, she said, “I’ll take the guest room with the view of the bay.”

  “Splendid!”

  “Though I think it’s a horrible imposition. And I warn you, if I really like it there, you might never get rid of me. You’ll know you’re in trouble if you come home some day, and I’ve hired people to repaint the walls and hang new drapes.”

  He grinned. “At the first mention of painters or draperies, we’ll throw your butt out in the street.” He kissed her lightly on the cheek, got up from the edge of the bed, and walked to the door. “I’m going to start the release procedures now, so you should be out of here in two hours. I’ll call Rita and have her come pick you up. I’m sure you can beat this thing, Ginger, but you’ve got to keep thinking positive.”

  When he left the room and his footsteps faded down the hall, she stopped struggling to maintain her smile, and it collapsed instantly. She leaned back against her pillows and stared morosely at the age-yellowed acoustic tile on the ceiling.

  After a while she got out of bed and went into the adjoining bathroom, where she approached the sink with trepidation. After a brief hesitation, she turned on the water and watched it whirling around and around and into the drain. On Monday, at the surgical scrub sink, after successfully performing the aortal graft on Viola Fletcher, Ginger had been panicked by the sight of water swirling into a drain, but she could not imagine why.

  Damn it, why? She desperately wanted to understand.

  Papa, she thought, I wish you were alive, here to listen, to help.

  Life’s nasty surprises had been the subject of one of Papa’s little sayings that Ginger had once found amusing. When anyone fretted about the future, Jacob would shake his head and wink and say, “Why worry about tomorrow? Who knows what’ll hit you today?”

  How true. And how utterly unamusing now.

  She felt like an invalid. She felt lost.

  It was Friday, December 6.

  5. Laguna Beach, California

  When Dom went to the doctor’s office on Monday morning, December 2, in the company of Parker Faine, Dr. Cobletz did not recommend immediate diagnostic procedures, for he had only recently given Dom a thorough examination and had seen no signs of physical disorder. He assured them there were other treatments to be tried before jumping to the conclusion that it was a brain disorder that sent the writer scurrying upon errands of fortification and self-defense in his sleep.

  After Dom’s previous visit, on November 23, the physician had, he said, become curious about somnambulism and had done some reading on the subject. With most adults the affliction was short-lived; however, in a few cases, there was a danger of it becoming habitual, and in its most serious forms it resembled the inflexible routines and pattern-obsessed behavior of worst-case neurotics. Once habitual, somnambulism was much harder to cure, and it could become the dominant factor in the patient’s life, generating a fear of night and sleep, producing profound feelings of helplessness culminating in more serious emotional disorders.

  Dom felt he was already in that danger zone. He thought of the barricade he had built across his bedroom door. The arsenal on the bed.

  Cobletz, intrigued and concerned but not worried, had assured Dominick—and Parker—that in most instances of persistent somnambulism, the pattern of nocturnal rambling could be broken by the administration of a sedative before bed. Once a few untroubled nights had passed, the patient was usually cured. In chronic cases, the nightly sedative was augmented with a diazenam compound during the day when the patient was plagued by anxiety. Because the tasks that Dominick performed in his sleep were unnaturally strenuous for a somnambulist, Dr. Cobletz had prescribed both Valium during the day and a 15 mg. tablet of Dalmane, just before slipping under the covers each night.

  On the drive back to Laguna Beach from Dr. Cobletz’s offices in Newport, with the sea on the right and hills on the left, Parker Faine argued that, until the sleepwalking stopped, it was not wise for Dom to continue living alone. Hunched over the steering wheel of his Volvo, the bearded and shaggy-haired artist drove fast, aggressively but not recklessly. He seldom glanced away from the Pacific Coast Highway, yet he gave the impression, through the sheer force of his personality, that his eyes and attention were fixed constantly and entirely upon Dom.

  “There’s plenty of room at my place. I can keep an eye on you. I won’t hover, mind you. I won’t be a mother hen. But at least I’ll be there. And we would have plenty of opportunity to talk about this, really get into it, just you and me, and try to figure how this sleepwalking is related to the changes you went through the summer before
last, when you threw away that job at Mountainview College. I’m definitely the guy to help you. I swear, if I hadn’t become a goddamned painter, I’d have become a goddamned psychiatrist. I have a knack for getting people to talk about themselves. How about it? Come stay with me for a while and let me play therapist.”

  Dom had refused. He wanted to stay at his own house, alone, for to do otherwise seemed to he a retreat into the same rabbit hole in which he had hidden from life for so many years. The change he had undergone during his trip to Mountainview, Utah, the summer before last, had been dramatic, inexplicable, but for the better. At thirty-three, he had finally seized the reins of life, had mounted it with a flourish, and had ridden into new territory. He liked the man he had become, and he feared nothing more than slipping back into his dreary former existence.

  Perhaps his somnambulism was mysteriously related to the previous changes of attitude that he had undergone, as Parker insisted, but Dom had his doubts that the relationship was either mysterious or complex. More likely, the connection between the two personality crises was simple: The sleepwalking was an excuse to retreat from the challenges, excitement and stress of his new life. Which could not be allowed Therefore, Dom would stay in his own house, alone, take the Valium and Dalmane as Dr. Cobletz had prescribed them, and tough this thing out.

  That was what he had decided in the Volvo, on Monday morning, and by Saturday, the seventh of December, it seemed that he had made the correct decision. Some days he needed a Valium and some days he did not. Every evening he took a Dalmane tablet with milk or hot chocolate. Somnambulism disturbed his nights less frequently. Before beginning drug therapy, he walked in his sleep every night, but in the past five nights he journeyed just twice, leaving his bed only in the predawn hours of Wednesday and Friday mornings.

  Furthermore, his activities in his sleep were far less bizarre and less disturbing than they had been. He no longer gathered up weapons, built barricades, or tried to nail the windows shut. On both occasions, he merely left his Beautyrest for a makeshift bed in the back of the closet, where he woke stiff and sore and frightened by some unknown and nameless threat that had pursued him in dreams he could not recall.

  Thank God, the worst seemed past.

  By Thursday he had begun to write again. He worked on the new novel, picking up where he left off weeks ago.

  On Friday, Tabitha Wycombe, his editor in New York, called with good news. Two prepublication reviews of Twilight in Babylon had just come in, and both were excellent. She read them to him, then revealed even better news: Book-seller excitement, aroused by industry publicity and by the distribution of several hundred advance reading copies, continued to grow, and the first printing, which had already been raised once, was now being raised again. They talked for almost half an hour, and when Dom hung up, he felt that his life was back on the rails.

  But Saturday night brought a new development, which might have been either a turn for the better or the worse. Every night that he had gone walking in his sleep, he had been unable to recall even the smallest detail of the nightmares that drove him from his bed. Then, Saturday, he was plagued by an uncannily vivid, terrifying dream that sent him fleeing through the house in somnambulistic panic, but this time he remembered part of it when he woke, not most of it, but at least the end.

  In the last minute or two of the dream, he was standing in a half-glimpsed bathroom, everything blurred. An unseen man shoved him against a sink, and Dom bent over it, his face thrust down into the porcelain bowl. Someone had an arm around him and was holding him on his feet, for he was too weak to stand on his own. He felt rag-limp, and his knees were quivering, and his stomach was twisting and rolling. A second unseen person had two hands on his head, forcing his head into the sink. He could not speak. He could not draw breath. He knew he was dying. He had to get away from these people, out of this room, but he did not have the physical resources to take flight. Though his vision remained bleary, he could see the smooth porcelain and the chrome-plated rim of the drain in detail, for his face was only inches from the bottom of the sink. It was an old-fashioned drain without a mechanically operated stopper. The rubber plug had been removed and set aside, somewhere out of sight. The water was running, spewing out of a faucet, past his face, splattering against the bottom of the basin, whirling around and around, down into the drain, around and down. The two people forcing him into the sink were shouting, though he could not understand them. Around and down ... around.... Staring hypnotically into the miniature whirlpool, he grew terrified of the gaping drain, which was like a sucking orifice intent upon drawing him into its reeking depths. Suddenly he was aware they wanted to stuff him down into the drain, dispose of him. Might be a garbage disposal in there, something that would chop him to pieces and flush him away—

  He woke, screaming. He was in his bathroom. He had walked in his sleep. He was at the sink, bent over, screaming into the drain. He leapt back from that gaping hole, stumbled, nearly fell over the edge of the bathtub. He grabbed a towel rack to steady himself.

  Gasping for breath, shaking, he finally got up enough nerve to return to the sink and look into it. Glossy white porcelain. A brass drain rim and a dome-shaped brass stopper. Nothing else, nothing worse.

  The room in his nightmare had not been this room.

  Dominick washed his face and returned to the bedroom.

  According to the clock on the nightstand, it was only two-twenty-five A.M.

  Though it made no sense at all and seemed to have no symbolic or real connection with his life, the nightmare was profoundly disturbing. However, he had not nailed windows shut or gathered up weapons in his sleep, so it seemed that this was only a minor setback.

  In fact, it might be a sign of improvement. If he remembered his dreams, not just pieces but all of them from beginning to end, he might discover the source of the anxiety that had made a night rambler of him. Then he would be better able to deal with it.

  Nevertheless, he did not want to go back to bed and risk returning to that strange place in his dream. The bottle of Dalmane was in the top drawer of the nightstand. He was not supposed to take more than one tablet each evening, but surely one indulgence couldn’t hurt.

  He went out to the bar cabinet in the living room, poured some Chivas Regal. With a shaky hand, he popped the pill in his mouth, drank the Chivas, and returned to bed.

  He was improving. Soon, the sleepwalking would stop. A week from now, he’d be back to normal. In a month, this would seem like a curious aberration, and he’d wonder how he’d allowed it to get the better of him.

  Precariously prone upon the trembling wire of consciousness above the gulf of sleep, he began to lose his balance. It was a pleasant feeling, a soft slipping away. But as he floated down into sleep, he heard himself murmuring in the darkness of the bedroom, and what he heard himself saying was so strange it startled him and piqued his interest even as the Dalmane and whiskey inexorably had their way with him.

  “The moon,” he whispered thickly. “The moon, the moon.” He wondered what he could possibly mean by that, and he tried to push sleep away at least long enough to ponder his own words. The moon? “The moon,” he whispered again, and then he was gone.

  It was three-eleven A.M., Sunday, December 8.

  6. New York, New York

  Five days after stealing more than three million dollars from the fratellanza, Jack Twist went to see a dead woman who still breathed.

  At one o’clock Sunday afternoon, in a respectable neighborhood on the East Side, he parked his Camaro in the underground garage beneath the private sanitarium and took the elevator up to the lobby. He signed in with the receptionist and was given a visitor’s pass.

  One would not think the place was a hospital. The public area was tastefully decorated in Art Deco style suited to the building’s period. There were two small Erté originals, sofas, one armchair, tables with neatly arranged magazines, and all the furniture had a 1920s’ look.

  It was too damn luxurious
. The Ertés were unnecessary. A hundred other economies were obvious. But the management felt that image was important in order to continue to attract upper-crust clientele and keep the annual profit around the hundred percent mark. The patients were of all types—middle-aged catatonic schizophrenics, autistic children, the long-term comatose both young and old—but they all had two things in common: Their conditions were all chronic rather than acute, and they were from well-to-do families who could afford the best care.

  Thinking about the situation, Jack invariably became angry that no place in the city provided fine custodial care for the catastrophically brain-injured or mentally ill at a reasonable price. In spite of huge expenditures of tax money, New York’s institutions, like public institutions everywhere, were a grim joke that the average citizen had to accept for a lack of alternatives.

  If he had not been a skilled and highly successful thief, he would not have been able to pay the sanitarium’s exorbitant monthly charges. Fortunately, he had a talent for larceny.

  Carrying his visitor’s pass, he went to another elevator and rode up to the fourth of six floors. The hallways in the upper levels were more reminiscent of a hospital than the lobby had been. Fluorescent lights. White walls. The clean, crisp, minty smell of disinfectant.

  At the far end of the fourth-floor hall, in the last room on the right, lived the dead woman who still breathed. Jack hesitated with his hand on the push-plate of the heavy swinging door, swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and finally went inside.

  The room was not as sumptuous as the lobby, and it was not Art Deco, either, but it was very nice, resembling a medium-priced room at the Plaza: a high ceiling and white molding; a fireplace with a white mantel; a deep hunter-green carpet; pale green drapes; a green leaf-patterned sofa and a pair of chairs. The theory was that a patient would be happier in a room like this than in a clinical room. Although many patients were oblivious of their surroundings, the cozier atmosphere at least made visiting friends and relatives feel less bleak.

  The hospital bed was the only concession to utilitarian design, a dramatic contrast to everything else. But even that was dressed up with green-patterned designer sheets.

  Only the patient spoiled the lovely mood of the chamber.

  Jack lowered the safety railing on the bed, leaned over, and kissed his wife’s cheek. She did not stir. He took one of her hands and held it in both of his. Her hand did not grip him in return, did not flex, remained slack, limp, senseless, but at least it was warm.

  “Jenny? It’s me, Jenny. How are you feeling today? Hmmmmm? You look good. You look lovely. You always look lovely.”

  In fact, for someone who had spent eight years in a coma, for someone who had not taken a single step and had not felt sunshine or fresh air upon her face in all that time, she looked quite good indeed. Perhaps only Jack could say that she was still lovely—and mean it. She was not the beauty she had once been, but she certainly did not look as if she had spent almost a decade in solemn flirtation with death.

  Her hair was not glossy any more, though still thick and the same rich chestnut shade as when he had first seen her at her job, behind the men’s cologne counter in Blooming-dale’s, fourteen years ago. The attendants washed her hair twice a week here and brushed it every day.

  He could have moved his hand under her hair, along the left side of her skull, to the unnatural depression, the sickening concavity. He could have touched it without disturbing her, for nothing disturbed her any more, but he did not. Because touching it would have disturbed him.

  Her brow was uncreased, her face unlined even at the corners of her eyes, which were closed. She was gaunt though not shockingly so. Motionless upon those green designer sheets, she seemed ageless, as if she were an enchanted princess awaiting the kiss that would wake her from a century of slumber.

  The only signs of life were the vague, rhythmic rise and fall of her breast as she breathed, and the soft movement of her throat as she occasionally swallowed saliva. The swallowing was an automatic, involuntary action and not a sign of awareness on any level whatsoever.

  The brain damage was extensive and irreparable. The movements she made here and now were virtually the only movements she would ever make until, at last, she gave a dying shudder. There was no hope. He knew there was no hope, and he accepted the permanence of her condition.

  She would have looked much worse if she had not received such conscientious care. A team of physical therapists came to her room every day and put her through passive exercise routines. Her muscle tone was not the best, but at least she had muscle tone.

  Jack held her hand and stared down at her for a long time. For seven years, he had been coming to see her two nights a week and for five or six hours every Sunday afternoon, sometimes on other afternoons as well. But in spite of the frequency of his visits and in spite of her unchanging condition, he never tired of looking at her.

  He pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed, still holding her hand, staring at her face, and for more than an hour he talked to her. He told her about a movie that he had seen since his previous visit, about two books he had read. He spoke of the weather, described the force and bite of the winter wind. He painted colorful word pictures of the prettiest Christmas displays he had seen in shop windows.

  She did not reward him with even a sigh or a twitch. She lay as always, unmoving and unmoved.

  Nevertheless, he talked to her, for he worried that a fragment of awareness might survive, a gleam of comprehension down in the black well of the coma. Maybe she could hear and understand, in which case the worst thing for her was being trapped in an unresponsive body, desperate even for one-way communication, but receiving none because they thought she could not hear. The doctors assured him that these worries were groundless; she heard nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing, they said, except what images and fantasies might sputter across short-circuiting synapses of her shattered brain. But if they were wrong—if there was only one chance in a million that they were wrong—he could not leave her in that perfect and terrible isolation. So he talked to her as the winter day beyond the window changed from one shade of gray to another.

  At five-fifteen, he went into the adjoining bathroom and washed his face. He dried off and blinked at his reflection in the mirror. As on countless other occasions, he wondered what Jenny had ever seen in him.

  Not one feature or aspect of his face could be called handsome. His forehead was too broad, ears too big. Although he had 20-20 vision, his left eye had a leftward cast, and most people could not talk to him without nervously shifting their attention from one eye to the other, wondering which was looking at them when, in fact, both were. When he smiled he looked clownish, and when he frowned he looked sufficiently threatening to send Jack the Ripper scurrying for home and hearth.

  But Jenny had seen something in him. She had wanted, needed, and loved him. In spite of her own good looks, she had not cared about appearances. That was one of the reasons he had loved her so much. One of the reasons he missed her so much. One of a thousand reasons.

  He looked away from the mirror. If it was possible to be lonelier than he was now, he hoped to God that he never slipped down that far.