Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  “That’s our Room Nine,” she said. “They must’ve stayed with us.” She frowned at the young couple and little girl in the photograph. “Can’t say I remember them, though. Strangers to me.”

  “So why would they send us a photo without a note?”

  “Well, obviously, they thought we would remember them.”

  “But the only reason they’d think that was if maybe they stayed for a few days and we got to know them. And I don’t know them at all. I think I’d remember the tyke,” Ernie said. He liked children, and they usually liked him. “She’s cute enough to be in movies.”

  “I’d think you’d remember the mother. She’s gorgeous.”

  “Postmarked Elko,” Ernie said. “Why would anybody who lives in Elko come out here to stay?”

  “Maybe they don’t live in Elko. Maybe they were here last summer and always meant to send us a photo, and maybe they recently passed through and meant to stop and leave this off but didn’t have time. So they mailed it from Elko.”

  “Without a note.”

  “It is odd,” Faye agreed.

  He took the picture from her. “Besides, this is a Polaroid. Developed a minute after it was taken. If they wanted us to have it, why didn’t they leave it with us when they stayed here?”

  The door opened, and a curly-haired guy with a bushy mustache came into the office, shivering. “Got any rooms left?” he asked.

  While Faye dealt with the guest, Ernie took the Polaroid back to the oak desk. He meant to gather up the mail and go upstairs, but he stood by the desk, studying the faces of the people in the snapshot.

  It was Tuesday evening, December 10.

  8. Chicago, Illinois

  When Brendan Cronin went to work as an orderly at St. Joseph’s Hospital for Children, only Dr. Jim McMurtry knew that he was really a priest. Father Wycazik had obtained a guarantee of secrecy from the physician, as well as the solemn assurance that Brendan would be assigned as much work—and as much unpleasant work—as any orderly. Therefore, during his first day on the job, he emptied bedpans, changed urine-soaked bed linens, assisted a therapist with passive exercises for bed-ridden patients, spoon-fed an eight-year-old boy who was partially paralyzed, pushed wheelchairs, encouraged despondent patients, cleaned up the vomit of two young cancer victims nauseous from chemotherapy. No one pampered him, and no one called him “Father.” The nurses, doctors, orderlies, candy-stripers, and patients called him Brendan, and he felt uncomfortable, like an impostor engaged in a masquerade.

  That first day, overcome with pity and grief for St. Joseph’s children, he twice slipped away to the staff men’s room and locked himself in a stall, where he sat and wept. The twisted legs and swollen joints of those who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, that mangler of the innocent young, was a sight almost too terrible to be borne. The wasted flesh of the muscular dystrophy victims, the suppurating wounds of the burn victims, the battered bodies of those whose parents had abused them: He wept for all of them.

  He could not imagine why Father Wycazik thought this duty would help him regain his lost faith. If anything, the existence of so many pain-racked children only reinforced his doubt. If the merciful God of Catholicism really existed, if there was a Jesus, why would He allow the innocent to endure such atrocities? Of course, Brendan knew all the standard theological arguments on that point. Mankind had brought all forms of evil upon itself by choice, the Church said, by turning away from the grace of God. But theological arguments were inadequate when he came face to face with these smallest victims of fate.

  By the second day, the staff was still calling him Brendan, but the children were calling him Pudge, a long-unused nickname which he divulged to them in the course of telling a funny story. They liked his stories, jokes, rhymes, and silly puns, and he found he could nearly always get a laugh or at least a smile out of them. That day, he went to the men’s room and wept only once.

  By the third day, both the children and staff called him Pudge. If he had another metier besides the priesthood, he had found it at St. Joseph’s. In addition to performing the usual tasks expected of an orderly, he entertained the patients with comic patter, teased them, drew them out. Wherever he went, he was greeted with cries of “Pudge!” that were a better reward than money. And he did not cry until he was back in the hotel room that he had taken for the duration of Father Wycazik’s unconventional therapy.

  By Wednesday afternoon, the seventh day, he knew why Father Wycazik sent him to St. Joseph’s. Understanding came while he was brushing the hair of a ten-year-old girl who’d been crippled by a rare bone disease.

  Her name was Emmeline, and she was rightfully proud of her hair. It was thick, glossy, raven-black, and its healthy luster seemed to be a defiant response to the sickness that had wasted her body. She liked to brush her hair a hundred strokes every day, but often her knuckles and wrist-joints were so inflamed that she could not hold the brush.

  On Wednesday, Brendan put her in a wheelchair and took her to the X ray department, where they were monitoring a new drug’s effects on her bone marrow, and when he brought her back to her room an hour later, he brushed her hair for her. Emmeline sat in the wheelchair, looking out a window, while Brendan pulled the soft bristles through her silken tresses, and she became enchanted with the winterscape beyond the glass.

  With a gnarled hand more suited to the body of an eighty-year-old woman, she pointed down to the roof of another, lower wing of the hospital. “See that patch of snow, Pudge?” Rising heat within the building had caused most of the snow to loosen and slide off the pitched roof. But a large patch remained, outlined by dark slate shingles. “It looks like a ship,” Emmy said. “The shape. You see? A beautiful old ship with three white sails, gliding across a slate-colored sea.”

  For a while Brendan could not see what she saw. But she continued to describe the imaginary vessel, and the fourth time that he looked up from her hair, he suddenly was able to see that the patch of snow did, indeed, bear a remarkable and delightful resemblance to a sailing ship.

  To Brendan, the long icicles that hung in front of Emmy’s window were transparent bars, the hospital a prison from which she might never be released. But to Emmy, those frozen stalactites were wondrous Christmas decorations that, she said, put her in the holiday mood.

  “God likes winter as much as He likes spring,” Emmy said. “The gift of the seasons is one of His ways of keeping us from getting bored with the world. That’s what Sister Katherine told us, and right away I could see it must be true. When the sun hits those icicles just right, they cast rainbows across my bed. Ever-so-pretty rainbows, Pudge. The ice and snow are like ... like jewels ... and ermine cloaks that God uses to dress up the world in winter to make us ooh and ah. That’s why He never makes two snowflakes alike: it’s a way of reminding us that the world He made for us is a wonderful, wonderful world.”

  As if on cue, snowflakes spiraled down from the gray December sky.

  In spite of her nearly useless legs and twisted hands, in spite of the pain she had endured, Emmy believed in God’s goodness, and in the inspiring rightness of the world that He had created.

  Strong faith was, in fact, a trait of nearly all the children in St. Joseph’s Hospital. They remained convinced that a caring Father watched over them from His kingdom in the sky, and they were encouraged.

  In his mind he could hear Father Wycazik saying: If these innocents can suffer so much and not lose their faith, what sorry excuse do you have, Brendan? Perhaps, in their very innocence and naiveti, they know something that you have forgotten while chasing your sophisticated education in Rome. Perhaps there is something to be learned from this, Brendan. Do you think so? Just maybe? Something to be learned?

  But the lesson was not powerful enough to restore Brendan’s faith. He continued to be deeply moved, not by the possibility that a caring and compassionate God might actually exist, but by the children’s amazing courage in the face of such adversity.

  He gave Emmy’s hair
a hundred strokes, then ten more, which pleased her, and then he lifted her from the wheelchair and put her into bed. As he pulled the covers over her pathetic bent-stick legs, he felt a surge of that same rage that had filled him during Mass at St. Bette’s two Sundays ago, and if a sacred chalice had been close at hand, he would not have hesitated to hurl it at the wall once more.

  Emmy gasped, and Brendan had the odd notion that she had read his blasphemous thoughts. But she said, “Oh, Pudge, did you hurt yourself?”

  He blinked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Did you burn yourself? Your hands. When’d you hurt your hands?”

  Bewildered by her question, he looked down at the backs of his hands, turned them over, and was surprised by the marks on his palms. In the center of each palm was a red ring of inflamed and swollen flesh. Each ring was two inches in diameter and sharply defined along all its edges. The circular band of irritated tissue which formed the ring was no more than half an inch wide, inscribing a perfect circle; the skin around and within the circle was quite normal. It almost looked as if the marks had been painted on his hands, but when he touched one of the rings with a fingertip, he could feel the bump it made in his palm.

  “That’s strange,” he said.

  Dr. Stan Heeton was the resident physician on duty in St. Joseph’s emergency room. Standing at the examining table on which Brendan sat, peering with interest at the odd rings on Brendan’s hands, he said, “Do they hurt?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Itching? A burning sensation?”

  “No. Neither.”

  “Do they at least tingle? No? You’ve never had these before?”

  “Never.”

  “Do you have any allergies that you’re aware of? No? Hmmmm. At first glance, it looks like a mild burn, but you’d have remembered leaning against something hot enough to cause this. There’d be pain. So we can rule that out. Same for acid contact. Did you say you’d taken a little girl to radiology?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t stay in the room while the X rays were taken.”

  “Doesn’t really look like a radiation burn. Maybe dermatomycosis, a fungal infection, perhaps in the ringworm family, though the symptoms aren’t sufficiently indicative of ringworm. No scaling, no itching. And the ring is much too clearly defined, not like the inflammation patterns you get with a Microsporum or Trichophyton infection.”

  “So what does all this boil down to?”

  Heeton hesitated, then said, “I don’t think it’s anything serious. The best guess is a rash related to an unidentified allergy. If the problem persists, you’ll have to take the standard patch tests and find the source of your problem.” He let go of Brendan’s hands, went to a chair at a corner desk, and began to fill out a prescription form.

  Puzzled, Brendan stared at his hands a moment longer, then folded them in his lap.

  At the comer desk, still writing, Heeton said, “I’ll start with the simplest treatment, a cortisone lotion. If the rash doesn’t disappear in a couple of days, come see me again.” He returned to the examining table, holding out the prescription form.

  Brendan took the paper from him. “Listen, is there any chance I might pass on an infection to the kids or anything like that?”

  “Oh, no. If I thought there was the slightest chance, I’d have told you,” Heeton said. “Now, let me have one last look.”

  Brendan turned his hands palms-up for examination.

  “What the devil?” Dr. Heeton said, surprised.

  The rings were gone.

  That night, in his room at the Holiday Inn, Brendan again endured the by-now familiar nightmare about which he had spoken with Father Wycazik. It had disturbed his sleep twice before in the past week.

  He dreamed he was lying in a strange place, with his arms and legs restrained by straps or braces. From out of a haze, a pair of hands reached for him. Hands encased in shiny black gloves.

  He woke in knots of sweat-soaked sheets, sat up in bed, and leaned back against the headboard, letting the dream evaporate as sweat dried on his forehead. In the dark he brought his hands to his face to blot it—and went rigid when his palms touched his cheeks. He switched on the lamp. The swollen, inflamed rings had returned to his palms. But as he watched, they faded.

  It was Thursday, December 12.

  9. Laguna Beach, California

  Dom Corvaisis thought he had slept Wednesday night straight through in peace. He woke in bed, in precisely the same position in which he had gone to sleep, as if he had not moved an inch during the night.

  But when he went to work at his Displaywriter, he was dismayed to find proof of his somnambulistic wandering on the current work diskette. As on a few other occasions, he apparently had gone to the Displaywriter in his night trance and had repeatedly typed two words. Previously, he had typed, “I’m scared,” but this time there were two different words:

  The moon. The moon. The moon. The moon.

  The moon. The moon. The moon. The moon.

  There were hundreds of repetitions of those seven letters, and he was at once reminded that he had heard himself murmuring the same words in a state of drowsy disorientation, just as he had fallen asleep last Sunday. Dominick stared at the screen for a long time, chilled, but he had no idea what special meaning “the moon” held for him, if any.

  The Valium and Dalmane therapy was working well. Until now, there had been no new episodes of sleepwalking and no dreams since last weekend, when he’d had that nasty nightmare about being forced face-down into a sink. He had seen Dr. Cobletz again, and the physician had been pleased by his swift progress.

  Cobletz had said, “I’m going to extend your prescriptions, but be sure not to take the Valium more than once—or at most, twice—a day.”

  “I never do,” Dom had lied.

  “And only one Dalmane a night. I don’t want you becoming drug-dependent. I’m sure we’ll beat this thing by the first of the year.”

  Dom believed Cobletz was correct, which was why he did not want to worry the doctor by confessing that there were days when he only made it through with the aid of Valium and nights when he took two or even three Dalmane tablets, washing some of them down with beer or Scotch. But in a couple of weeks he could stop taking them without fear that the somnambulism would get a new grip on him. The treatment was working. That was the important thing. The treatment was, thank God, working.

  Until now.

  The moon.

  Frustrated and angry, he deleted the words from the diskette, a hundred lines of them, four repetitions to the line.

  He stared at the screen a long time, growing increasingly nervous.

  Finally he took a Valium.

  That morning Dom got no work done, and at eleven-thirty he and Parker Faine picked up Denny Ulmes and Nyugen Kao Tran, the two boys assigned to them by the Orange County chapter of Big Brothers of America. They had planned a lazy afternoon at the beach, dinner at Hamburger Hamlet, and a movie, and Dominick had been looking forward to the outing.

  He had become involved in the Big Brothers program years earlier in Portland, Oregon. It had been his only community involvement, the only thing that had been able to bring him out of his rabbit hole.

  He had spent his own childhood in a series of foster homes, lonely and increasingly withdrawn. Some day, when he finally got married, he hoped to adopt kids. In the meantime, when he spent time with these kids, he was not only helping them but was also comforting the lonely child within himself.

  Nyugen Kao Tran preferred to be called “Duke,” in imitation of John Wayne, whose movies he loved. Duke was thirteen, the youngest son of boat people who had fled the horrors of “peacetime” Vietnam. He was bright, quick-witted, as startlingly agile as he was thin. His father—after surviving a brutal war, a concentration camp, and two weeks in a flimsy boat on the open sea—had been killed three years ago in a holdup while working at his second job as a night-shift clerk at a Seven-Eleven store in sunny southern California.

&nbs
p; Denny Ulmes, the twelve-year-old who was Parker’s little brother, lost his father to cancer. He was more reticent than Duke, but the two got along famously, so Dom and Parker frequently combined their outings.

  Parker became a Big Brother at Dom’s insistence, with curmudgeonly reluctance. “Me? Me? I’m not father material—or surrogate father material,” Parker had said. “Never was and never will be. I drink too much, womanize too much. It’d be downright criminal for any kid to turn to me for advice. I’m a procrastinator, a dreamer, and a self-centered egomaniac. And I like me that way! What in God’s name would I have to offer a kid? I don’t even like dogs. Kids like dogs, but I hate ’em. Damn dirty flea-bitten things. Me, a Big Brother? Friend, you have lost your marbles for sure.”

  But Thursday afternoon at the beach, when the water proved too cold for swimming, Parker organized a volleyball game and surfside races. He got Dom and the boys involved in a complicated game of his own devising, involving two frisbees, a beach ball, and an empty soda can. Under his direction they also built a sandcastle complete with a menacing dragon.

  Later, during an early dinner at Hamburger Hamlet in Costa Mesa, while the kids were in the bathroom, Parker said, “Dom, good buddy, this Big Brother thing was sure one of the best ideas I’ve ever had.”

  “Your idea?” Dominick said, shaking his head. “I had to drag you into it kicking and screaming.”

  “Nonsense,” Parker said. “I’ve always had a way with kids. Every artist is a bit of a kid at heart. We have to stay young to create. I find kids invigorate me, keep my mind fresh.”

  “Next, you’ll be getting a dog,” Dom said.

  Parker laughed. He finished his beer, leaned forward. “You okay? At times today, you seemed ... distracted. A little out of it.”

  “Lot on my mind,” Dom said. “But I’m fine. The sleepwalking’s pretty much stopped. And the dreams. Cobletz knows what he’s doing.”

  “Is the new book going well? Don’t shit me, now.”

  “It’s going well,” Dom lied.

  “At times you have that look,” Parker said, watching him intently. “That ... doped up. Following the prescribed dosage, I assume?”

  The painter’s perspicacity disconcerted Dom. “I’d have to be an idiot to snack on Valium as if it was candy. Of course, I follow the prescribed dosage.”

  Parker stared hard at him, then apparently decided not to push it.

  The movie was good, but during the first thirty minutes Dom grew nervous without reason. When he felt the nervousness building toward an anxiety attack, he slipped out to the men’s room. He’d brought another Valium for just such an emergency.

  The important thing was that he was winning. He was getting well. The somnambulism was losing its grip on him. It really was.

  Beneath a strong pine-scented disinfectant, there was an acrid stench from the urinals. Dom felt slightly nauseous. He swallowed the Valium without water.

  That night, in spite of the pills, he had the dream again, and he remembered more of it than just the part where people were forcing his head into a sink.

  In the nightmare, he was in a bed in an unknown room, where there seemed to be an oily saffron mist in the air. Or perhaps the amber fog was only in his eyes, for he could not see anything clearly. Furniture loomed beyond the bed, and at least two people were present. But those shapes rippled and writhed as if this were purely a realm of smoke and fluid, where nothing had a fixed appearance.

  He almost felt as if he were underwater, very deep underneath the surface of some mysterious cold sea. The atmosphere in the dream-place had more weight than mere air. He could barely draw breath. Each inhalation and exhalation was agony. He sensed that he was dying.

  The two blurred figures came close. They seemed concerned about his condition. They spoke urgently to each other. Although he knew they were speaking English, he could not understand them. A cold hand touched him. He heard the clink of glass. Somewhere a door shut.

  With the flash-cut suddenness of a scene transition in a film, the dream shifted to a bathroom or kitchen. Someone was forcing his face down into the sink. Breathing became even more difficult. The air was like mud: with each inhalation it clogged his nostrils. He choked and gasped and tried to blow out the mud-thick air, and the two people with him were shouting at him, and as before he could not understand what they were saying, and they pressed his face down into the sink—

  Dom woke and was still in bed. Last weekend he had been flung free of the dream only to discover that he had walked in his sleep and had been acting out the nightmare at his own bathroom sink. This time, he was relieved to find himself beneath the sheets.

  I am getting better, he thought.

  Trembling, he sat up and switched on the light.