Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  circumstances, though she could not remember where or when. His brief biography on the jacket flap informed her that he had lived in Portland, Oregon, and now resided in Laguna Beach, California. As she had never been in either of those places, she could not imagine when their paths might have crossed. Dominick Corvaisis, about thirty-five, was a striking man who reminded Ginger of Anthony Perkins when that actor had been younger. His looks were compelling enough that she could not imagine having forgotten where she had met him.

  Her instant reaction to the photo was strange, and some might have dismissed it as a meaningless fillip of an overwrought mind. But during the past two months she had learned to respect strange developments and to look for meaning in them, no matter how meaningless they seemed.

  She stared at Corvaisis’ photograph, hoping to nudge her memory. Finally, with an almost clairvoyant sense that Twilight in Babylon would somehow change her life, she opened it and began to read.

  Chicago, Illinois.

  From University Hospital, Father Stefan Wycazik drove across town to the laboratory operated by the Scientific Investigation Division of the Chicago Police Department. Though it was Christmas Day, municipal workers were still cleaning last night’s snowfall from the streets.

  Only a couple of men were on duty at the police lab, which was located in an aging government building, and the old rooms had the deserted feeling of an elaborate Egyptian tomb buried far beneath desert sands. Footsteps echoed resoundingly back and forth between the tile floors and the high ceilings.

  Ordinarily, the lab did not share its information with anyone from outside the police and judicial systems. But half the police officers in Chicago were Catholics, which meant that Father Wycazik had more than a few friends on the force. Stefan had importuned some of those friends to make petitions in his name and to pave the way for him at the SID.

  He was greeted by Dr. Murphy Aimes, a paunchy man with a perfectly bald head and walrus mustache. They’d spoken on the telephone earlier, before Stefan left the rectory for University Hospital, and now Murphy Aimes was ready for him. They settled on two stools at a laboratory bench. A tall opaque window loomed in front of them, decorated with dark streaks of pigeon dung. On the marble top of the bench, Aimes had laid out a file folder and several other items.

  “I must say, Father, I’d never compromise case information like this if there were any possibility of a trial arising from the shootout at that sandwich shop. But I suppose, as both perpetrators are dead, there’s no one to be put on trial.”

  “I appreciate that, Dr. Aimes. I really do. And I’m grateful for the time and energy you’ve expended on my behalf.”

  Curiosity ruled Murphy Aimes’s face. He said, “I don’t really understand the reason for your interest in the case.”

  “I’m not entirely sure of it myself,” Stefan said cryptically.

  He had not revealed his purpose to the higher authorities who had made him welcome at the lab, and he did not intend to enlighten Aimes, either. For one thing, if he told them what was on his mind, they would think he was dotty and would be less inclined to cooperate with him.

  “Well,” Aimes said, miffed at not being taken into Stefan’s confidence, “you asked about the bullets.” He opened a manila envelope of the type that ties shut with a string, and he emptied its contents into his palm: two gray lumps of lead. “The surgeon removed these from Winton Tolk. You said you were particularly interested in them.”

  “I certainly am,” Stefan said, taking them in his own hand when Aimes offered them. “You’ve weighed these, I suppose. I understand that’s standard procedure. And they weigh what .38 slugs should?”

  “If you mean, did they fragment on impact—they did not. They’re so misshapen they must’ve impacted bone, so it’s surprising they didn’t fragment a little—or a lot—but in fact they’re both intact.”

  “Actually,” Father Wycazik said, staring at the slugs in his hand, “I meant were they underweight for .38s? Malformed ammunition, factory mistakes? Or were they the right size?”

  “Oh, the right size. No doubt of that.”

  “Big enough to do plenty of damage, terrible damage,” Father Wycazik said thoughtfully. “The gun?”

  From a larger envelope, Aimes produced the revolver with which Winton Tolk was shot. “A snubnose Smith and Wesson .38 Chiefs Special.”

  “You’ve examined it, test-fired it?”

  “Yes. Standard procedure.”

  “No indication that anything’s wrong with it? Specifically, is the bore poorly machined or is there some other anomaly that’d result in the bullet leaving the muzzle at a much slower velocity than it should?”

  “That’s a peculiar question, Father. The answer is no. It’s a fine Chiefs Special, up to the usual high standards of Smith and Wesson.”

  Putting the two expended bullets back into the small envelope from which he had seen Aimes take them, Father Wycazik said, “What about the cartridges these bullets came from? Is there any chance they were filled with too little powder, that they carried an inadequate charge?”

  The SID man blinked. “I gather one thing you’re trying to find out is why two .38s in the chest didn’t do more damage.”

  Stefan Wycazik nodded but offered no elaboration. “Were there any unexpended cartridges in the revolver?”

  “A couple. Plus spare ammunition in one of the gunman’s jacket pockets—another dozen.”

  “Did you cut open any of the unexpended shells to see if maybe they carried an inadequate charge?”

  “No reason to,” Murphy Aimes said.

  “Would it be possible for you to check one of them now?”

  “Possible. But why? Father, what in the world is this all about?”

  Stefan sighed. “I know this is an imposition, Dr. Aimes, and it behooves me to repay your kindness with an explanation. But I can’t. Not yet. Priests, like physicians and attorneys, must sometimes respect confidences, keep secrets. But if I’m ever at liberty to reveal what lies behind my curiosity, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Aimes stared and Stefan met his eyes forthrightly. Finally the SID man opened another envelope. This contained the unexpended cartridges from the dead gunman’s .38 Chiefs Special. “Wait here.”

  In twenty minutes, Aimes returned with a white enamel lab tray in which were two dissected .38 Special cartridges. Using a pencil as a pointer, he commented on the disassembled elements. “This is the case head in which the primer assembly is seated. The firing pin strikes here. This opening on the other side of the case head is the flashhole that leads from the primer packet to the powder compartment. There’s no problem with this, no manufacturing errors. At the other end of the cartridge, you’ve got a lead semiwadcutter bullet with a copper gascheck crimped onto its base to retard bore leading. The tiny cannelures around the bullet are packed with grease to ease its passage through the barrel. Nothing out of order here, either. And in between the case head and the bullet is the powder compartment—or it’s sometimes called the combustion chamber—out of which I’ve taken this small pile of gray, flaky material. This is nitrocellulose, a highly combustible material; it’s ignited by the spark that comes through the flashhole from the primer; it explodes, ejecting the bullet from the cartridge. As you can see, there’s enough nitrocellulose to fill the powder chamber. Just to be sure, I opened another round.” Aimes pointed the pencil at the second disassembled cartridge. “There was nothing wrong with this, either. The gunman was using well-made, reliable, Remington ammunition. Officer Tolk was just a lucky man, Father, a very lucky man.”

  New York, New York.

  Jack Twist spent Christmas in the sanitarium room with Jenny, his wife of thirteen years. Being with her on holidays was especially grim. But being anywhere else, leaving her alone, would have been grimmer.

  Although Jenny had spent almost two-thirds of their marriage in a coma, the years of lost communion had not diminished Jack’s love for her. More than eight years had passed since she
had smiled at him or spoken his name or been able to return his kisses, but in his heart, at least, time was stopped, and she was still the beautiful Jenny Mae Alexander, a fresh-faced young bride.

  Incarcerated in that Central American prison, he had been sustained by the knowledge that Jenny waited at home for him, missed him, worried about him, and prayed each night for his safe return. Throughout his ordeal of torture and periodic starvation, he had clung to the hope that he would one day feel Jenny’s arms around him and hear her marvelous laugh. That hope had kept him alive and sane.

  Of the four captured Rangers, only Jack and his buddy Oscar Weston survived and came home, though their escape was a near thing. They had waited almost a year to be rescued, confident that their country would not leave them to rot. Sometimes they debated whether they would be freed by commandos or through diplomatic channels. After eleven months, they still believed their countrymen would bail them out, but they no longer dared to wait. They had lost weight and were dangerously thin, undernourished. They had also suffered unknown tropical fevers without treatment, which had further debilitated them.

  Their only opportunity for escape was during one of their regular visits to the People’s Center for Justice. Every four weeks, Jack and Oscar had been taken from their cells and driven to the People’s Center—a clean, well-lighted, un-walled, unbarred institution in the heart of the capita!—a model prison meant to impress foreign journalists with the current regime’s humanitarianism. There, they were given showers, deloused, put in clean clothes, handcuffed to prevent gesturing, and seated before videotape cameras to be politely questioned. Usually, they answered questions with obscenities or wisecracks. Their answers did not matter because the tape was edited, and answers they had never made were dubbed in by linguists who could speak unaccented English.

  Once the propaganda film had been made, they were interviewed over closed-circuit television by foreign reporters gathered in another room. The camera never provided close-ups of them, and their answers were not heard by those who asked the questions; instead, once again, unseen intelligence men, stationed at another microphone outside the camera’s range, answered for them.

  At the start of their eleventh month in captivity, Jack and Oscar began making plans to escape the next time they were transported to that far less secure, less heavily guarded propaganda facility.

  The once-formidable strength of their young bodies had been leached away, and their only weapons were shivs and needles made of rat bones, which they had painstakingly shaped and sharpened by rubbing them against the stone walls of the cells. Wickedly sharp, those instruments nevertheless made pathetic weapons; yet Jack and Oscar hoped to triumph over gun-toting guards.

  Surprisingly, they did triumph. Once inside the People’s Center, they were remanded into the custody of a single guard who escorted them to the showers on the second floor. The guard kept his gun holstered, probably because the facility was a detention center inside the larger detention center of the capital city itself. The guard was certain Jack and Oscar were demoralized, weak, and unarmed, so he was surprised when they suddenly turned on him and, with shocking savagery, stabbed him with the bone shivs they had concealed in their clothes. Pierced twice in the throat, his right eye skewered, he succumbed without producing a scream that might have drawn other police or soldiers.

  Before their break was discovered, Jack and Oscar confiscated the dead guard’s handgun and ammunition, then made bold use of the hallways, risking notice, alarm, and capture. But it was, after all, a minimum security “reeducation” center, and they were able to make their way to a stairwell and down to a dimly lighted basement, where they progressed swiftly and stealthily through a series of musty storage rooms. At the end of the building, they found the loading docks and a way out.

  Seven or eight large boxes had just been off-loaded from a delivery truck, which was backed up to the nearest of the two big bays, and the driver was engaged in an argument with another man; both of them were shaking clipboards at each other. Those two were the only men in sight, and as they turned and headed toward a glass-enclosed office; Jack and Oscar raced silently to the recently unloaded boxes and from there into the back of the delivery truck, where they made a nest for themselves behind the as-yet-undelivered packages. In a few minutes the driver returned, cursing, slammed the truck’s cargo-bay door, and drove away into the city before the alarm sounded.

  Ten minutes and many blocks from the People’s Center, the truck stopped. The driver unbolted the rear doors, took out a single package without realizing Jack and Oscar were inches from him behind a wall of boxes, and went into the building before which he’d parked. Extricating themselves from their burrow, Jack and Oscar fled.

  Within a few blocks they found themselves in a district of muddy streets and dilapidated shanties, where the poverty-stricken residents were no fonder of the new tyrants than they had been of the old and were willing to hide two Yankees on the lam. After nightfall, supplied with what little food the slum-dwellers could spare, they departed for the outskirts. When they came to open farmland, they broke into a barn and stole a sharp sickle, several withered apples, a leather blacksmith’s apron and some burlap bags which could be used to fashion makeshift shoes when their shabby prison-issue eventually fell apart—and a horse. Before dawn, they had reached the edge of the true jungle, where they abandoned the horse and set out on foot once more.

  Weak, poorly provisioned, armed only with the sickle—and the gun they had taken off the guard—without a compass and therefore required to plot a course by the sun and the stars, they headed north through the tropical forests toward the border, eighty miles away. Throughout that nightmare journey, Jack had one vital aid to survival: Jenny. He thought of her, dreamed of her, longed for her, and seven days later, when he and Oscar reached friendly territory, Jack knew that he had made it as much because of Jenny as because of his Ranger training.

  At that point he thought the worst was behind him. He was wrong.

  Now, sitting beside his wife’s bed, with Christmas music on the tape deck, Jack Twist was suddenly overcome with grief. Christmas was a bad time because he could not help but remember how dreams of her had sustained him through his Christmas in prison—when in fact she had already been in a coma and lost to him.

  Happy holidays.

  Chicago, Illinois.

  As Father Stefan Wycazik moved through the halls and wards of St. Joseph’s Hospital for Children, his spirits soared. That was no small thing, for he was already in a buoyant and elevated state.

  The hospital was crowded with visitors, and Christmas music issued from the public address system. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, other relatives, and friends of the young patients were on hand with gifts, goodies, and good wishes, and there was more laughter in that usually grim place than one might ordinarily hear echoing through its chambers in an entire month. Even most of the seriously afflicted patients were smiling broadly and talking animatedly, their suffering forgotten for the time being.

  Nowhere in the hospital was there more hope or laughter than among those people gathered around the bed of ten-year-old Emmeline Halbourg. When Father Wycazik introduced himself, he was greeted warmly by Emmy Halbourg’s parents, two sisters, grandparents, one aunt, and one uncle, who assumed he was one of the hospital’s chaplains.

  Because of what he’d learned from Brendan Cronin yesterday, Stefan expected to find a happily mending little girl; but he was unprepared for Emmy’s condition. She was positively glowing. Only two weeks ago, according to Brendan, she had been crippled and dying. But now her dark eyes were clear, and her former pallor was gone, replaced by a wholesome flush. Her knuckles and wrists were not swollen, and she seemed to be completely free of pain. She looked not like a sick child valiantly fighting her way back to health; rather, she seemed already cured.

  Most startling of all, Emmy was not lying in bed but standing with the aid of crutches, moving among her delighted and admiring relativ
es. Her wheelchair was gone.

  “Well,” Stefan said, after a brief visit, “I must be going, Emmy. I only stopped by to wish you a merry Christmas from a friend of yours. Brendan Cronin.”

  “Pudge!” she said happily. “He’s wonderful, isn’t he? It was awful when he stopped working here. We miss him a lot.”

  Emmy’s mother said, “I never met this Pudge, but from the way the kids talked about him, he must’ve been good medicine for them.”

  “He only worked here one week,” Emmy said. “But he comes back—did you know? Every few days he comes back to visit. I was hoping he’d come today, so I could give him a big Christmas kiss.”

  “He wanted to stop by, but he’s spending Christmas with his folks.”

  “Oh, that’s good! That’s what Christmas is for—isn’t it, Father? Being together with your folks, having fun, and loving each other.”

  “Yes, Emmy,” Stefan Wycazik said, thinking that no theologian or philosopher could have put it better. “That’s what Christmas is for.”

  If Stefan had been alone with the girl, he would have asked her about the afternoon of December 11. That was the day Brendan had been brushing her hair while she sat in her wheelchair before this very window. Stefan wanted to know about the rings on Brendan’s hands, which had appeared for the first time that day, and which Emmeline had noticed before Brendan himself spotted them. He wanted to ask Emmy if she had felt anything unusual when Brendan had touched her. But there were too many adults around, and they would surely ask awkward questions. Stefan was not yet prepared to reveal the reasons for his curiosity.

  Las Vegas, Nevada.

  After getting off to a rocky start, Christmas at the Monatella apartment improved dramatically. Mary and Pete stopped hammering Jorja with their well-meant but unwanted advice and criticism. They loosened up and involved themselves in Marcie’s play the way grandparents should, and Jorja was reminded of just why she loved them so much. The holiday dinner was on the table at twelve-fifty, only twenty minutes late, and it was delicious. By the time Marcie sat down to eat, she had worked off her all-consuming interest in Little Ms. Doctor, and she did not rush through her meal. It was a leisurely dinner with much chit-chat and laughter, the Christmas tree twinkling in the background. Those were golden hours until, during dessert, the trouble started with surprising suddenness. With frightening speed, it escalated to total disaster.

  Teasing Marcie, Pete said, “Where does a little bitty thing like you put so much food? You’ve eaten more than the rest of us combined!”

  “Oh, Grandpa.”

  “It’s true! You’ve been really shoveling it in. One more bite of that pumpkin pie, and you’re going to explode.”

  Marcie lifted another forkful, held it up for all to see, and with great theatricality, she moved it toward her mouth.

  “No, don’t!” Pete said, putting his hands in front of his face as if to protect himself from the blast.

  Marcie popped the morsel into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “See? I didn’t explode.”

  “You will with the next bite,” Pete said. “I was just one bite too soon. You’ll explode ... or else we’ll have to rush you to the hospital.”

  Marcie frowned. “No hospital.”

  “Oh, yes,” Pete said. “You’ll be all swollen up, ready to burst, and we’ll have to rush you to the hospital and have them deflate you.”

  “No hospital,” Marcie repeated adamantly.

  Jorja realized that her daughter’s voice had changed, that the girl was no longer participating in the game but was, instead, genuinely if inexplicably frightened. She was not scared of exploding, of course, but evidently the mere thought of a hospital had caused her to go pale.

  “No hospital,” Marcie repeated, a haunted look in her eyes.

  “Oh, yes,” Pete said, not yet aware of the change in the child.

  Jorja tried to deflect him: “Dad, I think we—”

  But Pete said, “Of course, they won’t take you in an ambulance ’cause you’ll be too big. We’ll have to rent a truck to haul you.”

  The girl shook her head violently. “I won’t go to a h-h-hospital in a million years. I won’t ever let those doctors touch me.”

  “Honey,” Jorja said, “Grandpa’s only teasing. He doesn’t really—”

  Unplacated, the girl said, “Those hospital people will h-hurt me like they hurt me before. I won’t let them hurt me again.”

  Mary looked at Jorja, baffled. “When was she in the hospital?”

  “She wasn’t,” Jorja said. “I don’t know why she—”

  “I was, I was, I was! They t-tied me down in bed, stuck me full of n-needles, and I was scared, and I won’t ever let them touch me again.”

  Remembering the strange tantrum that Kara Persaghian had reported yesterday, Jorja moved swiftly to forestall a similar scene. She put one hand on Marcie’s shoulder and said, “Honey, you were never—”

  “I was!” The girl’s anger and fear burgeoned into rage and terror. She threw her fork, and Pete ducked to avoid being hit by it.

  “Marcie!” Jorja cried.

  The girl slipped off her chair and backed away from the table, white-faced. “I’m going to grow up and be my own doctor, so nobody else’ll stick n-needles in me.” Words gave way to a pitiful moaning.

  Jorja went after Marcie, reaching for her. “Honey, don’t.”

  Marcie held her hands out in front of her, as if warding off an attack, although it was not her mother that she feared. She was looking through Jorja, perhaps seeing some imaginary threat, though her terror was real. She was not merely pale but translucent, as if the very substance of her was evaporating in the tremendous heat of her terror.

  “Marcie, what is it?”

  The girl stumbled backward into a corner, shuddering.

  Jorja gripped her daughter’s defensively raised hands. “Marcie, talk to me.” But even as Jorja spoke, a sudden stench of urine filled the air, and she saw a