Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  He returned to the other room, said goodbye to his unheeding wife, kissed her, smelled her hair once more, and got out of there at five-thirty.

  In the street, behind the wheel of his Camaro, Jack looked at passing pedestrians and other motorists with loathing. His fellow men. The good, kind, gentle, righteous people of the straight world would regard him with disdain and possibly even disgust if they knew he was a professional thief, though it was what they had done to him and to Jenny that had driven him to crime.

  He knew anger and bitterness solved nothing, changed nothing, and hurt no one but himself. Bitterness was corrosive. He did not want to be bitter, but there were times when he could not help it.

  Later, after dinner alone at a Chinese restaurant, he returned to his apartment. He had a spacious one-bedroom co-op in a first-class building on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. Officially, it was owned by a Liechtenstein-based corporation, which had purchased it with a check written on a Swiss bank account, and each month the utilities and the association fees were paid by the Bank of America out of a trust account. Jack Twist lived there under the name “Philippe Delon.” To the doormen and other building employees, to the few neighbors with whom he spoke, he was known as the odd and slightly disreputable scion of a wealthy French family who had sent him to America ostensibly to scout investments but actually just to get him out of their hair. He spoke French fluently and could speak English with a convincing French accent for hours without slipping up and revealing his deception. Of course, there was no French family, and both the corporation in Liechtenstein and the Swiss bank account were his, and the only wealth he had to invest was that which he had stolen from others. He was not an ordinary thief.

  In his apartment, he went directly to the walk-in closet in the bedroom and removed the false partition at the rear of it. He pulled two bags from the secret, three-foot-deep storage space and took them into the dark living room, not bothering to turn on lights. He piled the bags beside his favorite armchair, which stood by a large window.

  He got a bottle of Becks from the refrigerator, opened it, and returned to the living room. He sat in the darkness for a while, by the window, looking down on the park, where lights reflected off the snow-covered ground and made strange shadows in the bare-limbed trees.

  He was stalling, and he knew it. Finally he switched on the reading lamp beside the chair. He pulled the smallest of the two bags in front of him, opened it, and began to scoop out the contents.

  Jewels. Diamond pendants, diamond necklaces, glittering diamond chokers. A diamond and emerald bracelet. Three diamond and sapphire bracelets. Rings, brooches, barrettes, stickpins, jeweled hat pins.

  These were the proceeds of a heist that he had pulled off single-handedly six weeks ago. It should have been a two-man job, but with extensive and imaginative planning, he had found a way to handle it himself, and it had gone smoothly.

  The only problem was that he had gotten no kick whatsoever from that heist. When a job had been successfully concluded, Jack was usually in a grand mood for days after. From his point of view, these were not simply crimes but also acts of retribution against the straight world, payment for what it had done to him and to Jenny. Until the age of twenty-nine, he had given much to society, to his country, but as a reward he had wound up in a Central American hellhole, in a dictator’s prison, where he had been left to rot. And Jenny ... He could not bear to think about the condition in which he had found her when, at last, he had escaped and come home. Now, he no longer gave to society but took from it, and with intense pleasure. His greatest satisfaction was breaking the rules, taking what he wanted, getting away with it—until the jewelry heist six weeks ago. At the end of that operation, he had felt no triumph, no sense of retribution. That lack of excitement scared him. It was, after all, what he lived for.

  Sitting in the armchair by the window, he piled the jewelry in his lap, held selected pieces up to the light, and tried once more to gain a feeling of accomplishment and revenge.

  He should have disposed of the jewelry in the days immediately following the burglary. But he was reluctant to part with it until he had squeezed at least a small measure of satisfaction from it.

  Troubled by his continued lack of feeling, he put the jewels back into the sack from which he had taken them.

  The other sack contained his share of the proceeds from the robbery at the fratellanza warehouse five days ago. They had been able to open only one of the two safes, but that had contained over $3,100,000—more than a million apiece, in untraceable twenties, fifties, and hundreds.

  By now he should have begun to convert the cash into cashier’s checks and other negotiable instruments for deposit, by mail, in his Swiss accounts. However, he held on to it because, as with the jewelry, the possession of it had not yet given him a sense of triumph.

  He removed thick stacks of tightly banded currency from the bag and held them, turned them over in his hands. He brought them to his face and smelled them. That singular scent of money was usually exciting in itself—but not this time. But he did not feel triumphant, clever, lawless, or in any way superior to the obedient mice who scurried through society’s maze exactly as they were taught. He just felt empty.

  If this change in him had occurred with the warehouse job, he would have attributed it to having stolen from other thieves, rather than from the straight world. But his reaction subsequent to the jewelry heist had been the same, and that victim had been a legitimate business. It was his ennui following the jewelry store action that caused him to move on to another job sooner than he should have. Usually he pulled off one job every three or four months, but only five weeks had elapsed between his most recent operations.

  All right, so maybe the usual thrill eluded him on both these recent jobs because the money was no longer important to him. He had set aside enough to support himself in style for as long as he lived and to take care of Jenny even if she endured a normal lifespan in her coma, which was unlikely. Perhaps, all along, the most important thing about his work had not been the rebellion and defiance of it, as he had thought; perhaps, instead, he had done it all just for the money, and the rest of it had been merely cheap rationalization and self-delusion.

  But he could not believe that. He knew what he had felt, and he knew how much he missed those feelings now.

  Something was happening to him, an inner shifting, a sea-change. He felt empty, adrift, without purpose. He dared not lose his love of larceny. It was the only reason he had for living.

  He put the money back into the bag. He turned out the light and sat in the darkness, sipping Beck’s and staring down at Central Park.

  In addition to his recent inability to find joy in his work, he had been plagued by a recurring nightmare more intense than any dream he had ever known. It had begun six weeks ago, before the jewelry store job, and he’d had it eight or ten times since. In the dream, he was fleeing from a man in a motorcycle helmet with a darkly tinted visor. At least he thought it was a motorcycle helmet, although he could not see many details of it or anything else of the man who wore it. The faceless stranger pursued him on foot through unknown rooms and along amorphous corridors and, most vividly, along a deserted highway that cut through an empty moon-washed landscape. On every occasion, Jack’s panic built like steam pressure in a boiler, until it exploded and blew him awake.

  The obvious interpretation was that the dream was a warning, that the man in the helmet was a cop, that Jack was going to get caught. But that was not the way the nightmare felt. In the dream, he never had the impression that the guy in the helmet was a cop. Something else.

  He hoped to God he would not have the dream tonight. The day had been bad enough without that midnight terror.

  He got another beer, returned to the chair by the window, and sat down in the darkness once more.

  It was December 8, and Jack Twist—former officer in the elite United States Army Rangers, former POW in an undeclared war, a man who had helped save the lives
of over a thousand Indians in Central America, a man who functioned under a burden of grief that might have broken some people, a daring thief whose reservoir of courage had always been bottomless—wondered if he had run out of the simple courage to go on living. If he could not regain the sense of purpose he had found in larceny, he needed to find a new purpose. Desperately.

  7. Elko County, Nevada

  Ernie Block broke all the speed limits on the drive back from Elko to the Tranquility Motel.

  The last time he had driven so fast and recklessly had been on a gloomy Monday morning during his hitch with Marine Intelligence in Vietnam. He had been behind the wheel of a Jeep, passing through what should have been friendly territory, and had unexpectedly come under enemy fire. The incoming shells had spewed up geysers of dirt and chunks of macadam only feet away from his front and rear bumpers. By the time he had broken out of the fire zone, he had escaped more than twenty near-misses, had been hit by three small but painfully jagged pieces of mortar, had been rendered temporarily deaf from the thunderous explosions, and had found himself struggling to control a Jeep that was running on its wheel rims with four flat tires. Having survived, he figured he had known fear as profound as it could ever be.

  But coming back from Elko, his fear was building toward a new peak. Nightfall was approaching. He had driven to the Elko freight office in the Dodge van to take delivery of a shipment of lighting fixtures for the motel. He had set out shortly after noon, leaving Faye in charge of the front desk, giving himself plenty of time to make the round-trip before twilight. But he had a flat tire and lost time changing it. Then, once he reached Elko, he wasted almost an hour having the tire repaired because he had not wanted to start home without a spare. With one thing or another, he had left Elko almost two hours later than expected, and the sun had westered to the far edge of the Great Basin.

  He kept the accelerator most of the way to the floor, whipping around other traffic on the superhighway. He did not think he would be able to finish the drive home if he had to do it in full darkness. In the morning they would find him behind the wheel of the van, still parked along the roadside, stark raving mad from having spent long hours in horrified contemplation of the perfectly black landscape.

  In the two and a half weeks since Thanksgiving, he had continued to conceal his irrational fear of darkness from Faye. After she returned from her visit to Wisconsin, Ernie found it more difficult to sleep without a lamp burning, having indulged himself with a night light while she was gone. Every morning he used Murine to clear his bloodshot eyes. Fortunately, she had not suggested going into Elko at night for a movie, so Ernie had not been required to make excuses. A few times, after sunset, he’d had to go from the office to the Tranquility Grille next door, and even though the walk was well-lighted by the motel’s outdoor lamps and signs, he had been nearly overwhelmed by a sense of fragility, vulnerability. But he had kept his secret.

  All his life, in the Marine Corps and out of it, to the best of his ability, Ernie Block had done what was required of him, all that could be expected. And now, by God, he was not going to fail his own wife.

  Behind the wheel of the Dodge van, racing westward toward the Tranquility Motel under a smeary orange-purple sky, Ernie Block wondered if his problem was premature senility, Alzheimer’s disease. Even though he was only fifty-two, it almost had to be something like Alzheimer’s. Although it frightened him, at least he could understand it.

  Understand it, yes, but he could not accept it. Faye depended on him. He could not become a mental invalid, a burden on her. The men in the Block family never let their womenfolk down. Never. Unthinkable.

  The highway rounded a small hillock, and a mile ahead, north of the Interstate, lay the motel, the only building in that vast panorama. Its blue and green neon sign was already switched on, shining fiercely bright against the twilight sky. He’d never seen a more welcome sight.

  Complete darkness was still ten minutes away, and he decided it was foolish to risk being stopped by a cop when he was this close to sanctuary. He eased up on the accelerator, and the speedometer needle swiftly dropped: ninety... eighty-five ... seventy-five... sixty ...

  He was three-quarters of a mile from home when a curious thing happened: He glanced southward, away from the road, and his breath caught. He did not know what startled him. Something about the landscape. Something about the way the light and shadow played across those down-sloping fields. He was suddenly gripped by the odd idea that a particular piece of ground—a half-mile ahead, on the opposite side of the highway—was of supreme importance in understanding the bizarre changes that had been taking place in him during the past few months.

  ... fifty... forty-five... forty ...

  He could see nothing to make that piece of land different from the tens of thousands of acres around it. Besides, he had seen it countless times before and had been unimpressed by it. Nevertheless, in the slope of the terrain, in the gently folded contours of the earth, in the bisecting wound of an arroyo, in the configuration of sagebrush and grass, and in the scattered gnarled outcroppings of rock, something seemed to cry out for investigation.

  He felt as if the land itself were saying, “Here, here, here is part of the answer to your problem, part of the explanation for your fear of the night. Here. Here ...” But that was ridiculous.

  To his surprise, he found himself pulling to the shoulder of the highway, stopping a quarter-mile from home, not far from the exit ramp to the county road that led past the motel. He squinted south across the highway, at the place that had mysteriously captured his attention.

  He was gripped by the most amazing sense of impending epiphany, an overwhelming feeling that something of monumental importance was about to happen to him. The skin prickled along the back of his neck.

  He got out of the van, leaving it idling behind him. In a state of tremulous expectation that he could not understand, he headed toward the far side of the interstate, where he could have a better look at the plot of ground that fascinated him. He traversed two lanes of blacktop, clambered into the twenty-foot-wide gulley that divided the halves of the interstate, and scrambled up the far slope. He waited for three huge trucks to roar past, then crossed the eastbound lanes in the windy wake of those rigs. His heart was pounding with an inexplicable excitement, and for the moment he had forgotten the advent of night.

  He stopped on the far berm, at the crest of the highway’s elevated bed, looking south and slightly west. He wore a bulky suede jacket with sheepskin lining, but his brush-cut gray hair provided little protection from the chilly wind, which scrubbed its cold knuckles across his skull.

  He began to lose the feeling that something of immense importance was about to happen. Instead, he was seized by the even creepier notion that something had already happened to him on that patch of shadow-banded ground out there, something that accounted for his recent fear of the dark. Something he had assiduously banned from his memory.

  But that made no sense. If important events had transpired here, they simply would not have slipped his mind. He was not forgetful. And he was not the kind of person who repressed unpleasant memories.

  Still, the back of his neck continued to tingle. Out there, not far into those trackless Nevada plains, something had happened to him that he had forgotten but that now pricked him from his subconscious, where it was deeply embedded, much the way a needle, accidentally left in a quilt, might jab and startle a sleeper out of a dream.

  With his legs spread wide and his feet planted firmly in the berm, with his blocky head hunched down on his blocky shoulders, Ernie seemed to be challenging the landscape to speak more clearly to him. He strained to resurrect the dead memory of this place—if, indeed, there was one—but the harder he tried to grasp the elusive revelation, the faster it receded from him. Then it was gone altogether.

  The déjà vu deserted him as completely as the sense of impending epiphany had evaporated before it. The tingle left his scalp and neck. His frantically pounding hea
rt settled slowly into a more normal pace.

  Bewildered and somewhat dizzy, he studied the fast-fading scene before him—the angled land, the spines and teeth of rock, the brush and grass, the weathered convexities and concavities of the ancient earth—and now he could not imagine why it had seemed special to him. It was just a portion of the high plains virtually indistinguishable from a thousand other spots from here to Elko or from here to Battle Mountain.

  Disoriented by the suddenness of his plunge from the brink of transcendent awareness, he looked back toward the van, which waited on the north side of the interstate. He felt conspicuous and foolish when he thought of the way he had dashed from there to here in the grip of a strange excitement. He hoped Faye had not seen him. If by chance she had been looking out a window in this direction, she could not have missed his performance, for the motel was only a quarter of a mile away, and the flashing emergency blinkers on the truck made it by far the most noticeable thing in the swiftly descending darkness.

  Darkness.

  Abruptly, the nearness of nightfall hit Ernie Block hard. For a while, the mysterious magnetism that had drawn him to this place had been stronger than his fear of the dark. But that changed in an instant when he realized that the eastern half of the sky was purple-black and that only minutes of vague light remained in the western realm.

  With a cry of panic, he bolted across the eastbound lanes, in front of a motor home, oblivious of the danger. A horn blared at him. He did not care, did not pause, just ran pellmell because he could feel the darkness clutching at him and pressing down on him. He reached the shallow gully that served as a lane divider, fell as he started down into it, rolled back onto his feet, terrified of the blackness that was welling up out of each depression in the land and from under every rock. He flung himself up the other side of the gully, fled into the westbound lanes. Fortunately there was no oncoming traffic, for he did not look to see if the way was clear. At the van, he fumbled with the door handle, acutely conscious of the perfect blackness under the truck. It was grappling at his feet. It wanted to pull him under the Dodge and devour him. He yanked the door open. Tore his feet loose of the hands of darkness. Clambered into the cab. Slammed the door. Locked it.

  He felt better but far from safe, and if he had not been so close to home he would have frozen stiff. But he only had a quarter of a mile to go, and when he switched on his headlights, the gloom fell back, which encouraged him. He was shaking so violently that he did not trust himself to pull back into traffic, so he drove along the shoulder of the interstate until he came to the exit ramp. There were sodium-arc lamps along the ramp and at the base of it, and he was tempted to stop there at the bottom, in the yellow glare, but he gritted his teeth and turned onto the county road, out of the light. After driving only two hundred yards, Ernie reached the entrance to the Tranquility Motel. He swung through the parking area, slid the van into a slot in front of the office, switched off the headlights, and cut the engine.

  Beyond the big windows of the office, he could see Faye at the front desk. He hurried inside, closing the door behind himself with too much force. He smiled at Faye when she glanced up, and he hoped the smile looked more convincing than it felt.

  “I was beginning to worry, dear,” she said, returning his smile.

  “Had a flat tire,” Ernie said, unzipping his jacket.

  He felt somewhat relieved. Nightfall was easier to accept when he was not alone; Faye gave him strength, but he was still uneasy.

  She said, “I missed you.”

  “I was only gone the afternoon.”

  “I guess I’m hooked, then. Seemed longer. Guess I’ve got to have my Ernie fix every couple of hours or go through withdrawal symptoms.”

  He leaned across the counter, and she leaned from her side, and they kissed, There was nothing half-hearted about their kiss. She put one hand to his head to hold him close. Most long-married couples, even if they remained in love, were perfunctory in their displays of affection, but that was not the case with Ernie and Faye Block. After thirty-one years of marriage, she could still make him feel young.

  She said, “Where are the new lighting fixtures? They did come in, didn’t they? The freight office didn’t make a mistake?”

  That question jolted him back to an acute awareness of the night outside. He glanced at the windows, then quickly away. “Uh, no. I’m tired. I don’t really feel up to hauling them in here tonight.”

  “Just four crates—”

  “Really, I’d rather do it in the morning,” he said, striving to keep a tremor out of his voice. “The stuff will be all right in the truck. Nobody’ll touch it. Hey, you put up the Christmas decorations!”

  “You mean you just noticed?”

  A huge wreath of pine cones and nuts hung on the wall above the sofa. A life-sized cardboard figure of Santa Claus stood in the comer beside the rack of postcards, and a small ceramic sleigh with ceramic reindeer was displayed at one end of the long counter. Red and gold Christmas-tree balls hung from the ceiling light fixture on lengths of transparent fishing line.

  “You had to get up on a ladder for some of this,” he said.

  “Just the stepladder.”

  “But what if you’d fallen? You should’ve left this for me to do.”

  Faye shook her head. “Honey, I swear to God I’m not the fragile type. Now, hush up. You ex-Marines carry macho too far sometimes.”

  “Is that so?”

  The outer door opened, and a trucker came in, asking about a room.

  Ernie held his breath until the door closed.

  The trucker was a lanky man in a cowboy hat, denim jacket, cowboy shirt, and jeans. Faye complimented him on the hat, which had an elaborately sculpted leather band brightened with chips of turquoise. In that easy way of hers, she made the stranger feel like an old friend as she shepherded him through the check-in process.

  Leaving her to it, trying to forget his curious experience on the interstate, trying not to dwell on the night that had come, Ernie moved behind the counter, hung his coat on the brass rack in the corner by the file cabinets, and went to the oak desk, where mail was stacked on the blotter. Bills, of course. Advertisements. A charity solicitation. The first Christmas cards of the year. His military pension check.

  Finally, there was a white envelope without a return address, which contained only a Polaroid color photograph that had been taken in front of the motel, beside the door to Room 9. It was of three people—man, woman, child. The man was in his late twenties, darkly tanned and good-looking. The woman was a couple of years younger, a pretty brunette. The little girl, five or six, was very cute. All three were smiling at the camera. Judging from their clothes—shorts and T-shirts—and the quality of sunlight in the picture, Ernie assumed that the snapshot had been taken in the middle of summer.

  Puzzled, he turned the photo over, looking for a scribbled note of explanation. The back was blank. He checked the envelope again, but it was empty: no letter, no card, not even a business card to identify the sender. The postmark was Elko, December 7, last Saturday.

  He looked again at the people in the picture, and although he did not remember them, he felt his skin prickle, just as it had done when he had been drawn to that place along the highway. His pulse accelerated. He quickly put the picture aside and looked away from it.

  Faye was still chatting with the cowboy-trucker as she took a room key off the pegboard and passed it across the counter.

  Ernie kept his eyes on her. She was a calming influence. She had been a lovely farmgirl when he’d met her, and had grown into a lovelier woman. Her blond hair might have begun to turn white, but it was hard to tell. Her blue eyes were clear and quick. Hers was an open, friendly Iowa face, slightly saucy but always wholesome, even beatific.

  By the time the cowboy-trucker left, Ernie had stopped shaking. He took the Polaroid snapshot to Faye. “What do you make of this?”