Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  transpired after he’d begun drug therapy and after the drugs seemed to be working, and he had not wanted to appear to be slipping backward. Besides, although those two words filled him with dread, he did not understand their significance. He did not know why they had the power to raise gooseflesh, and he instinctively felt that it was unwise to mention this development to anyone until he had gotten a better handle on it. He had been afraid Cobletz would conclude that the drugs were not helping him and would discontinue them in favor of psychotherapy—and Dom had needed the drugs.

  The moon.

  No one knew, damn it. No one but ... Dom himself.

  In the streetlamp’s dim glow, he had not checked for a postmark. Now, he saw that its point of origin was not a mystery, as was the case with the letter that had come this morning. It was clearly stamped NEW YORK, N.Y., and dated December 18. Wednesday of last week.

  He almost laughed out loud. He was not insane, after all. He was not sending these cryptic messages to himself—could not possibly be sending them—because he had been in Laguna last week. Three thousand miles separated him from the mailbox in which this—and undoubtedly the other—strange message had first been deposited.

  But who had sent him the notes—and why? Who in New York could know that he was sleepwalking ... or that he had repeatedly typed “the moon” on his word processor? A thousand questions crowded Dom Corvaisis’ mind, and he had no answers to any of them. Worse, at the moment, he could see no way even to seek answers. The situation was so bizarre that there was no logical direction for his inquiries to take.

  For two months, he had thought that his sleepwalking was the strangest and most frightening thing that had ever happened—or ever would happen—to him. But whatever lay behind the somnambulism must be even stranger and more frightening than the nightwalking itself.

  He recalled the first message he had left for himself on the word processor: I’m afraid. What had he been hiding from in closets? When he had started to nail the windows shut while sound asleep, what had he hoped to keep out of his house?

  Dom saw now that his sleepwalking had not been caused by stress. He was not suffering anxiety attacks because he feared the success or failure of his first novel. It was nothing as mundane as that.

  Something else. Something very strange and terrible.

  What did he know in his sleep that he did not know when awake?

  6. New Haven County, Connecticut

  The sky had cleared before nightfall, but the moon had not yet risen. The stars shed little light upon the cold earth.

  With his back against a boulder, Jack Twist sat in the snow atop a knoll, at the edge of pines, waiting for the Guardmaster armored truck to appear. Only three weeks after personally netting more than a million dollars from the mafia warehouse job, he was already setting up another heist. He was wearing boots, gloves, and a white ski suit, with the hood over his head and tied securely under his chin. Three hundred yards behind him and to the southwest, beyond the small woods, the darkness was relieved by the light of a housing development ; however, Jack waited in utter blackness, his breath steaming.

  In front of him, two miles of night-clad fields lay northeast, barren but for a few widely spaced trees and some winter-stripped brush. In the distance beyond the emptiness, there were electronics plants, then shopping centers, then residential neighborhoods, none of which was visible from Jack’s position, though their existence was indicated by the glow of electric lights on the horizon.

  At the far edge of the fields, headlights appeared over a low rise. Raising a pair of night binoculars, Jack focused on the approaching vehicle, which was following the two-lane county road that bisected the fields. In spite of the leftward cast of his left eye, Jack had superb vision, and with the help of the night binoculars, he ascertained that the vehicle was not the Guardmaster truck, therefore of no consequence to him. He lowered the glasses.

  In his solitude upon the snowy knoll, he thought back to another time and a warmer place, to a humid night in a Central American jungle, when he had studied a nocturnal landscape with binoculars just like these. Then, he had been searching anxiously for hostile troops that had been stalking and encircling him and his buddies....

  His platoon—twenty highly trained Rangers under the leadership of Lieutenant Rafe Eikhorn, with Jack as second in command—had crossed the border illegally and gone fifteen miles inside the enemy state without being detected. Their presence could have been construed as an act of war; therefore, they wore camouflage suits stripped of rank and service markings, and they carried no identification.

  Their target was a nasty little “re-education” camp, cynically named the Institute of Brotherhood, where a thousand Miskito Indians were imprisoned by the People’s Army. Two weeks earlier, courageous Catholic priests had led another fifteen hundred Indians through the jungles and out of the country before they could be imprisoned, too. Those clergymen had brought word that the Indians at the Institute would be murdered and buried in mass graves if not rescued within the month.

  The Miskitos were a fiercely proud breed with a rich culture that they refused to forsake for the anti-ethnic, collectivist philosophy of the country’s latest leaders. The Indians’ continued loyalty to their own traditions would ensure their extermination, for the ruling council did not hesitate to call up the firing squads to solidify its power.

  Nevertheless, twenty Rangers in mufti would not have been committed to such a dangerous raid merely to save Miskitos. Both left- and right-wing dictatorial regimes routinely slaughtered their citizenry in every corner of the world, and the United States did not—could not—prevent those state-sanctioned murders. But in addition to the Indians at the Institute, there were eleven others whose rescue, along with the Indians, made the risky operation worthwhile.

  Those eleven were former revolutionaries who had fought the just war against the now-deposed right-wing dictator, but who had refused to remain silent when their revolution had been betrayed by totalitarians of the left. Undoubtedly, those eleven possessed valuable information. The opportunity to debrief them was more important than saving the lives of a thousand Indians—at least as far as Washington was concerned.

  Undetected, Jack’s platoon reached the Institute of Brotherhood in a farming district at the edge of the jungle. It was a concentration camp in all but name, a place of barbed-wire fences and guard towers. Two buildings stood outside the fenced perimeter of the camp: a two-story concrete-block structure from which the government administered the district, and a dilapidated wooden barracks housing sixty troops.

  Shortly after midnight, the platoon of Rangers stealthily took up positions and launched a rocket attack on the barracks and the concrete building. The initial artillery barrages were followed by hand-to-hand combat. Half an hour after the last shot was fired, the Indians and other prisoners—as jubilant a group as Jack had ever seen—were formed into a column and moved out toward the border, fifteen miles away.

  Two Rangers had been killed. Three were wounded.

  As first in command of the platoon, Rafe Eikhorn led the exodus and oversaw security along the column’s flanks, while Jack stayed behind with three men to be sure the last of the prisoners got out of the camp in orderly fashion. It was also his responsibility to gather up files relating to the interrogation, torture, and murder of Indians and district peasants. By the time he and his four men left the Institute of Brotherhood, they were two miles behind the last of the Miskitos.

  Though Jack and his men made good time, they never caught up with their platoon and were still miles from the Honduran border when, at dawn, hostile army helicopters, like giant black wasps, came in low over the trees and began off-loading enemy troops wherever a clearing could be found. The other Rangers and all the Indians reached freedom, but Jack and his three men were captured and transported to a facility similar to the Institute of Brotherhood. However, the place was so much worse than the concentration camp that it had no official existence. The rulin
g council did not admit that such a hellhole existed in the new workers’ paradise—or that monstrous inquisitions were conducted within its walls. In true Orwellian tradition, because the four-story complex of cells and torture chambers had no name, it did not exist.

  Within those nameless walls, in cells without numbers, Jack Twist and the three other Rangers were subjected to psychological and physical torture, relentless humiliation and degradation, controlled starvation, and constant threats of death. One of the four died. One went mad. Only Jack and his closest friend, Oscar Weston, held on to both life and sanity during the eleven and a half months of their incarceration....

  Now, eight years later, leaning against a boulder atop a knoll in Connecticut, waiting for the Guardmaster truck, Jack heard sounds and detected odors which were not of this wind-swept winter night. The hard footfalls of jackboots on concrete corridors. The stench from the overflowing slops bucket, which was the cell’s only toilet. The pathetic cry of some poor bastard being taken from his cell to another session with interrogators.

  Jack took deep breaths of the clean, cold Connecticut air. He was seldom troubled by bad memories of that time and nameless place. He was more often haunted by what had happened to him after his escape—and by what had happened to his Jenny in his absence. It was not his suffering in Central America that turned him against society; rather, subsequent events were what had soured him.

  He saw other headlights out on the black fields and raised his night binoculars. It was the Guardmaster armored transport.

  He looked at his watch. Nine-thirty-eight. It was right on schedule, as it had been every night for a week. Even with the holiday tomorrow, the truck kept to its route. Guardmaster Security was nothing if not reliable.

  On the ground beside Jack was an attaché case. He lifted the lid. The blue numerals of a digital scanner were locked on the Guardmaster’s open radio link to the company dispatcher. Even with his state-of-the-art equipment, he had needed three nights to discover the truck’s frequency. He turned the volume dial on his own receiver. Static crackled, hissed. Then he was rewarded by a routine exchange between the driver and the distant dispatcher.

  “Three-oh-one,” the dispatcher said.

  “Reindeer,” the driver said.

  “Rudolph,” the dispatcher said.

  “Rooftop,” the driver said.

  The hiss and crackle of static settled in once more.

  The dispatcher had opened the exchange with the truck’s number, and the rest of it had been the day’s code which served as confirmation that 301 was on schedule and in no trouble of any kind.

  Jack switched off his receiver. The lighted dials went dark.

  The armored transport passed less than two hundred feet from his position on the knoll, and he turned to watch its dwindling taillights.

  He was confident of Guardmaster 301’s schedule now, and he would not be returning to these fields until the night of the stickup, which was tentatively scheduled for Saturday, January 11. Meanwhile, there was a great deal more planning to be done.

  Ordinarily, planning a job was nearly as exciting and satisfying as the actual commission of the crime. But as he left the knoll and headed toward the houses to the southwest, where he had parked his car on a quiet street, he felt no elation, no thrill. He was losing the ability to take delight in even the contemplation of a crime.

  He was changing. And he did not know why.

  As he drew near the first houses to the southwest of the knoll, he became aware that the night had grown brighter. He looked up. The moon swelled fat on the horizon, so huge it seemed to be crashing to earth, an illusion of enormousness created by the odd perspective of the early stages of the satellite’s ascension. He stopped abruptly and stood with his head tilted back, staring up at the luminous lunar surface. A chill seized him, an inner iciness unrelated to the winter cold.

  “The moon,” he said softly.

  Hearing himself speak those words aloud, Jack shuddered violently. Inexplicable fear welled in him. He was gripped by an irrational urge to run and hide from the moon, as if its luminescence were corrosive and would, like an acid, dissolve him as he stood bathed in it.

  The compulsion to flee passed in a minute. He could not understand why the moon had so suddenly terrified him. It was only the ancient and familiar moon of love songs and romantic poetry. Strange.

  He headed toward the car again. The looming lunar face still made him uneasy, and several times he glanced up at it, perplexed.

  However, by the time he got in the car, drove into New Haven, and picked up Interstate 95, that curious incident had faded from his mind. He was once more preoccupied with thoughts of Jenny, his comatose wife, whose condition haunted him more than usual at Christmastime.

  Later, in his apartment, as he stood by a big window, staring out at the great city, a bottle of Becks in one hand, he was sure that from 261st Street to Park Row, from Bensonhurst to Little Neck, there could be no one in the Metropolis whose Christmas Eve was lonelier than his.

  7. Christmas Day

  Elko County, Nevada.

  Sandy Sarver woke soon after dawn came to the high plains. The early sun glimmered vaguely at the bedroom windows of the house trailer. The world was so still that it seemed time must have stopped.

  She could turn over and go back to sleep if she so desired, for she had eight more days of vacation ahead of her. Ernie and Faye Block had closed the Tranquility Motel and had gone to visit their grandchildren in Milwaukee. The adjacent Tranquility Grille, which Sandy operated with her husband, Ned, was also closed over the holidays.

  But Sandy knew she could not get back to sleep, for she was wide awake—and horny. She stretched like a cat beneath the blankets. She wanted to wake Ned, smother him with kisses, and pull him atop her.

  Ned was merely a shadowy form in the dark bedroom, breathing deeply, sound asleep. Although she wanted him badly, she did not wake him. There would be plenty of time for lovemaking later in the day.

  She slipped quietly out of bed, into the bathroom, and showered. She made the end of it a cold shower.

  For years she had been uninterested in sex, frigid. Not long ago, the sight of her own nude body had embarrassed her and filled her with shame. Although she did not know the reason for the new feelings that had risen in her lately, she definitely had changed. It had started the summer before last, when sex had suddenly seemed ... well, appealing. That sounded silly now. Of course sex was appealing. But prior to that summer, lovemaking had always been a chore to be endured. Her late erotic blossoming was a delightful surprise and an inexplicable mystery.

  Nude, she returned to the shadowy bedroom. She took a sweater and a pair of jeans from the closet, and dressed.

  In the small kitchen, she started to pour orange juice but stopped when stricken by the urge to go for a drive. She left a note for Ned, put on a sheepskin-lined jacket, and went outside to the Ford pickup.

  Sex and driving were the two new passions in her life, and the latter was almost as important to her as the former. That was another funny thing: until the summer before last, she hated going anywhere in the pickup except to work and back, and she seldom drove. She’d not only disliked highway travel but had dreaded it the way some people were afraid of airplanes. But now, other than sex, there was nothing she liked better than to get behind the wheel of the truck and take off, journeying on a whim, without a destination, speeding.

  She had always understood why sex repelled her—that had been no mystery. She could blame her father, Horton Purney, for her frigidity. Though she had never known her mother, who had died giving birth, Sandy had known her father far too well. They had lived in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of Barstow, on the edge of the lonely California desert, just the two of them, and Sandy’s earliest memories were of sexual abuse. Horton Purney had been a moody, brooding, mean, and dangerous man. Until Sandy escaped from home at fourteen, her father had used her as if she had been an erotic toy.

  Only recent
ly had she realized that her strong dislike for highway travel was also related to something else that her father had done to her. Horton Purney had run a motorcycle repair shop out of a sagging, sun-scorched, unpainted barn on the same property as his house, but he had never made much money from it. Therefore, twice a year, he put Sandy in the car and made the two-and-a-half-hour drive across the desert to Las Vegas, where he knew an enterprising pimp, Samson Cherrik. Cherrik had a list of perverts with a special interest in children, and he was always happy to see Sandy. After a few weeks in Vegas, Sandy’s father packed, put Sandy in the car, and drove back to Barstow, his pockets bulging with cash. For Sandy, the long drive to Vegas was a nightmare journey, for she knew what awaited her at their destination. The trip back to Barstow was worse, for it was not an escape from Vegas but a return to the grim life in that ramshackle house and the dark, urgent, insatiable lust of Horton Purney. In either direction, the road had led to hell, and she had learned to loathe the rumble of the car’s engine, the hum of tires on the pavement, and the unspooling highway ahead.

  Therefore, the pleasure she now took from driving and sex seemed miraculous. She could not understand where she’d found the strength and will to overcome her horrible past. Since the summer before last, she simply ... changed, was still changing. And, oh, it was glorious to feel the chains of self-loathing and the bonds of fear breaking apart, to feel self-respect for the first time in her life, to feel free.

  Now, she got into the Ford pickup and started the engine. Their house trailer was set on an unlandscaped half-acre lot at the southern edge of the tiny—almost nonexistent—town of Beowawe, along Route 21, a two-lane blacktop. As Sandy drove away from the trailer, there seemed to be nothing but empty plains, rolling hills,. scattered buttes, rocky outcroppings, grass, brush, and waterless arroyos for a thousand miles in every direction. The intensely blue morning sky was immense, and as she got the Ford up to speed, Sandy felt as if she might take flight.

  If she headed north on 21, she would pass through Beowawe and soon come to Interstate 80, which led east toward Elko or west toward Battle Mountain. Instead, she went south, into a beautifully barren landscape. With skill and ease, she guided the four-wheel-drive pickup over the badly weathered county road at seventy miles an hour.

  In fifteen minutes, Route 21 petered out into a gravel roadbed that led south through another eighty-three miles of uninhabited and desolate territory. She did not follow it, choosing instead to turn east on a one-lane dirt track flanked by wild grass and scrub.

  Some snow lay on the ground this Christmas morning, though not much. In the distance, the mountains were white, but down here, the annual precipitation was less than fifteen inches a year, little of it in the form of snow. Here was an inch-deep skin of snow, there a small hillock against which a shallow drift had formed, and here a sparkling bush on which wind-driven snow had hardened into a lacy garment of ice, but by far the largest portion of the land was bare and dry and brown.

  Sandy drove fast on the dirt, too, and behind her a cloud of dust plumed up. In time she left the track, headed overland—north, then west, coming at last to a familiar place, though she had not set out with this destination in mind. For reasons she did not understand, her subconscious often guided her to this spot during her solitary drives, seldom in a direct line but by wandering routes, so her arrival was usually a surprise to her. She stopped, set the brake. With the engine idling, she stared for a while through the dusty windshield.

  She came here because it made her feel better, though she did not know why. The slopes, the spines and teeth of rock, the grass and brush, formed a pleasing picture, though the scene was no prettier and no different from thousands of other places nearby. Yet here she felt a sublime peacefulness that could not be attained anywhere else.

  She switched off the engine and got out of the pickup, and for a while she strolled back and forth, hands jammed into the pockets of her sheepskin-lined jacket, oblivious of the stingingly cold air. Her drive through the wildlands had brought her back toward civilization, and Interstate 80 lay only a couple of hundred yards to the north. The occasional roar of a passing truck echoed like a distant dragon’s growl, but the holiday traffic was light. Beyond the highway, on the uplands to the northwest, lay the Tranquility Motel and Grille, but Sandy glanced just once in that direction. She was more interested in the immediate terrain, which exerted a mysterious and powerful attraction for her, and which seemed to radiate peace the way a rock, in evening, radiated the heat of the sun that it had absorbed during the day.

  She wasn’t trying to analyze her affinity for this patch of ground. Evidently, there was some subtle harmony in the contours of the land, an interplay of line, form, and shadow that defied definition. Any attempt to decode its attraction would be as foolish as trying to analyze the beauty of a sunset or the appeal of a favorite flower.

  That Christmas morning, Sandy did not yet know that Ernie Block had been drawn, as if possessed, to the same patch of ground on December 10, when he had been on his way home from the freight office in Elko. She did not know that it aroused in Ernie an electrifying sense of pending epiphany and more than a little fear—emotions quite unlike those that it stirred in her. Weeks would pass before she learned that her special retreat had a strong attraction for others besides herself—both friends and strangers.

  Chicago, Illinois.

  For Father Stefan Wycazik—that stocky Polish dynamo, rector of St. Bernadette’s, rescuer of troubled priests—it was the busiest Christmas morning he had ever known. And as the day wore on, it swiftly became the most meaningful Christmas of his life.

  He celebrated the second Mass at St. Bernadette’s, spent an hour greeting parishioners who stopped by the rectory with fruit baskets and boxes of homemade cookies and other gifts, then drove to University Hospital to pay a visit to Winton Tolk, the policeman who had been shot in an uptown sandwich shop yesterday afternoon. Following emergency surgery, Tolk had been in the intensive care unit yesterday afternoon and all through the night. Christmas morning he had been moved to a semiprivate room adjacent to the ICU, for although he was no longer in critical condition, he still needed to be monitored constantly.

  When Father Wycazik arrived, Raynella Tolk, Winton’s wife, was at her husband’s bedside. She was quite attractive, with chocolate-brown skin and stylish close-cropped hair. “Mrs. Tolk? I’m Stefan Wycazik.”

  “But—”

  He smiled. “Relax. I’m not here to give anyone the last rites.”