Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  Twilight arrived back there in the past.

  When the waitress returned, Ginger ordered a bowl of the homemade vegetable soup and a cheeseburger with all the trimmings.

  Night fell out there in Nevada.

  Abruptly, before her food had been served, Ginger frowned and said, “What’s that?” She looked out the imagined window, scowling.

  “What do you see?” Pablo asked, chained to his inconvenient vantage point in present-day Boston.

  A worried look came over her face, and she stood up. “What the devil is that noise?” She looked toward other people in the restaurant with a puzzled expression, and she spoke to them: “I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.” She suddenly tottered sideways and nearly fell. “Gevalt!” She reached out as if supporting herself against the side of a booth or table. “Shaking. Why’s everything shaking?” She jumped in surprise. “It’s knocked over my beer glass. Is it an earthquake? What’s happening? What is that sound?” She stumbled again. Now she was frightened. “The door!” She started to run across the living room, though in her mind she was heading toward the exit from the restaurant that, in reality, she had long ago departed. “The door,” she cried again, but then she stopped abruptly, swaying, gasping, shuddering.

  When Pablo caught up with her, she dropped to her knees and hung her head. “What’s happening, Ginger?”

  “Nothing.” She had changed in an instant.

  “What’s that noise?”

  “What noise?” The robot voice again.

  “Ginger, damn it, what’s happening in the Tranquility Grille?”

  Horror was on her face, but she merely said, “I’m having dinner.”

  “That’s a false memory.”

  “Having dinner.”

  He tried to make her continue with the crucial memory of the frightening thing that had been about to happen. But at last he had to accept that the Azrael Block, behind which her memories were repressed, took form when she had been running for the restaurant door, and it did not end until the following Tuesday morning, when she drove east toward Salt Lake City. In time, he might be able to chip it down to smaller dimensions, but enough had been accomplished for one day.

  At last they were making real headway. They knew that on the night of Friday, July 6, the year before last, Ginger had seen something she had not been meant to see. Having seen it, she had almost certainly been detained in a room at the Tranquility Motel, where someone had used sophisticated brainwashing techniques to conceal the memory of that event from her and thereby prevent her from carrying word of it to the world. They had worked on her for three days—Saturday, Sunday, and Monday—releasing her, with sanitized recollections, on Tuesday.

  But, in God’s name, who were these omnipotent strangers? And what had she seen?

  2. Portland, Oregon

  Sunday, January 5, Dominick Corvaisis flew to Portland and took a hotel room near the apartment house in which he had once lived. Rain was falling hard, and the air was cold.

  Except for dinner in the hotel restaurant, he spent the remaining hours of Sunday afternoon and evening at a table by the window of his room, alternately staring out at the rain-lashed city and studying the roadmaps. Again and again, he mentally reviewed the trip he had taken the summer before last (and would take again starting tomorrow).

  As he had told Parker Faine on Christmas, he was convinced that he had stumbled into a dangerous situation out there on the road, and that (paranoid as it sounded) the memory of it had been wiped from his mind. The mail from his unknown correspondent pointed to no other conclusion.

  Two days ago, he had received a third envelope without a return address, postmarked New York. Now, when Dom tired of looking at the maps and staring thoughtfully out at the Oregon rain, he picked up that envelope, shook out the contents, and studied them. This time there had been no note, just two Polaroid photographs.

  The first picture had the least effect on him, although it made him tense—unaccountably tense, considering that it was a photograph of someone who, as far as he knew, was a stranger to him. A young, pudgy priest with unruly auburn hair, freckles, and green eyes. He was facing the camera, sitting in a chair near a small writing desk, a suitcase at his side. He was very erect, head up and shoulders squared off, hands limp in his lap, knees together. The picture disturbed Dom because the expression on the priest’s face was only one step removed from the lifeless, sightless stare of a corpse. The man was alive; that much was evident from his rigid posture, yet his eyes were chillingly empty.

  The second photograph hit Dom much harder than the first, and its powerful effect did not diminish with familiarity. A young woman was the subject of this snapshot, and she was no stranger. Although Dom could not recall where they had met, he knew they were acquainted. The sight of her made his heart quicken with a fear similar to that which filled him when he woke from one of his episodes of sleepwalking. She was in her late twenties. Blue eyes. Silver-blond hair. Exquisitely proportioned face. She would have been exceptionally beautiful if her expression had not been precisely that of the priest: slack, dead, empty-eyed. She had been photographed from the waist up, lying in a narrow bed, sheets pulled up chastely to her neck. Restraining straps held her down. One arm was partially bared to allow clearance for an IV needle in her wrist vein. She looked small, helpless, oppressed.

  The photograph instantly brought to mind his own nightmare in which unseen men were shouting at him and forcing his face into a sink. A couple of times, that bad dream had not begun at the sink itself but in a bed in a strange room, where his vision was blurred by a saffron mist. Looking at the young woman, Dom was convinced that somewhere there was a Polaroid shot of him in similar circumstances: strapped to a bed, an IV needle in his arm, his face without expression.

  When he had shown the two photographs to Parker Faine on Friday, the day they came in the mail, the artist jumped to similar conclusions. “If I’m wrong, roast me in hell and make sandwiches for the devil, but I swear this is a snapshot of a woman in a trance or drug-induced stupor, undergoing the brainwashing that you evidently underwent. Christ, this situation gets more bizarre and fascinating day by day! It’s something you ought to be able to go to the cops about—but you can’t, because who’s to say which side they’d be on? It may have been a branch of our own government you ran afoul of out there on the road. Anyway, you weren’t the only one who got in trouble, good buddy. This priest and this woman also stumbled into it. Whoever went to this much trouble is hiding something damned big, a lot bigger than I thought before.”

  Now, sitting at the table by his hotel room window, Dom held one picture in each hand, side by side, and let his gaze travel back and forth from the priest to the woman. “Who are you?” he asked aloud. “What’re your names? What happened to us out there?”

  Outside, lightning cracked whiplike in the night over Portland, as if a cosmic coachman were urging the rain to fall faster. Like the drumming hooves of a thousand harried horses, fat, hard-driven raindrops hammered against the wall of the hotel and galloped down the window.

  Later, Dom fastened himself to the bed with a tether that he had improved considerably since Christmas. First he wrapped a length of surgical gauze around his right wrist and secured it with adhesive tape, a barrier between rope and flesh to prevent abrasion. He was no longer using an ordinary all-purpose line but a hawser-laid nylon rope, only a quarter-inch in diameter but with a breaking strength of twenty-six hundred pounds. It was expressly made for rock- and mountain-climbing.

  He had switched to the sturdier rope because, on the night of December 28, he had slipped his previous tether by chewing all the way through it while asleep. The mountaineering rope was fray-resistant and nearly as impervious to teeth as copper cable would have been.

  That night in Portland, he woke three times, wrestling furiously with the tether, perspiring, panting, his racing heart’s accelerator floored beneath a heavy weight of fear.. “The moon! The moon!”

  3. Las V
egas, Nevada

  The day after Christmas, Jorja Monatella took Marcie to Dr. Louis Besancourt, and the examination turned into an ordeal that frustrated the physician, frightened Jorja, and embarrassed them both. From the moment Jorja took her into the doctor’s waiting room, the girl screamed, screeched, wailed, and wept. “No doctors! They’ll hurt me!”

  On those rare occasions when Marcie misbehaved (and they were rare, indeed), one hard slap on the bottom was usually all that was required to restore her senses and induce contrition. But when Jorja tried that now, it had the opposite effect of what she intended. Marcie screamed louder, wailed more shrilly, and wept more copiously than before.

  The assistance of an understanding nurse was required to convey the shrieking child from the waiting area into an examination room, by which time Jorja was not only mortified but worried sick by Marcie’s complete irrationality. Dr. Besancourt’s good humor and bedside manner were not enough to quiet the girl, and in fact she became more frightened and violent the moment he appeared. Marcie pulled away from him when he tried to touch her, screamed, struck him, kicked him, until it became necessary for Jorja and a nurse to hold her down. When the doctor used an ophthalmoscope to examine her eyes, her terror reached a crescendo indicated by a sudden loosening of her bladder that was dismayingly reminiscent of the fiasco on Christmas Day.

  Her uncontrolled urination marked an abrupt change in her demeanor. She became sullen, silent, just as she had for a while on Christmas. She was shockingly pale, and she shivered constantly. She had that eerie detachment that made Jorja think of autism.

  Lou Besancourt had no simple diagnosis with which to comfort Jorja. He spoke of neurological and brain disorders, and psychological illness. He wanted Marcie to check into Sunrise Hospital for a few days of tests.

  The ugly scene at Besancourt’s office was just a warmup for a series of fits Marcie threw at the hospital. The mere sight of doctors and nurses catapulted her into panic, and invariably the panic became outright hysteria that escalated until, exhausted, the child fell into that semicatatonic trance from which she needed hours to recover.

  Jorja took a week of sick-leave from the casino and virtually lived at Sunrise for four days, sleeping on a rollaway bed in Marcie’s room. She didn’t get much rest. Even in a drugged sleep, Marcie twitched, kicked, whimpered, and cried out in her dreams: “The moon, the moon ...” By the fourth night, Sunday, December 29, worried and weary, Jorja almost needed medical attention for herself.

  Miraculously, on Monday morning, Marcie’s irrational terror simply went away. She still did not like being hospitalized, and she pleaded aggressively to go home. But she no longer appeared to feel that the walls were going to close in and crush her. She remained uneasy in the company of doctors and nurses, but she did not shrink from them in horror or strike them when they touched her. She was still pale, nervous, and watchful. But for the first time in days, her appetite was normal, and she ate everything on her breakfast tray.

  Later in the day, after the final testing had been completed, while Marcie was sitting in bed eating lunch, Dr. Besancourt spoke with Jorja in the hall. He was a hound-faced man with a bulbous nose and moist, kind eyes. “Negative, Jorja. Every test, negative. No brain tumors, no cerebral lesions, no neurological dysfunction.”

  Jorja almost burst into tears. “Thank God.”

  “I’m going to refer Marcie to another doctor,” Besancourt said. “Ted Coverly. He’s a child psychologist, and a good one. I’m sure he’ll ferret out the cause of this. Funny thing is ... I have a hunch we may have cured Marcie without realizing we were doing it.”

  Jorja blinked. “Cured her? What do you mean?”

  “In retrospect I can see that her behavior had all the ear-marks of a phobia. Irrational fear, panic attacks... I suspect she’d begun to develop a severe phobic aversion to all things medical. And there’s a treatment called ‘flooding,’ wherein the phobic patient is purposefully, even ruthlessly exposed to the thing he fears for such a long time—hours and hours—that the power of the phobia is shattered. Which is what we might’ve inadvertently done to Marcie when we forced her into the hospital.”

  “Why would she have developed such a phobia?” Jorja asked. “Where would it’ve come from? She’s never had a bad experience with doctors or hospitals. She’s never been seriously ill.”

  Besancourt shrugged, sidled out of the way of some nurses pushing a patient on a gurney. “We don’t know what causes phobias. You don’t have to crash in a plane in order to be afraid of flying. Phobias just ... spring up. Even if we accidentally cured her, there’ll be a residual apprehension that Ted Coverly can identify. He’ll root out any remaining traces of phobic anxiety. Don’t worry, Jorja.”

  That afternoon, Monday, December 30, Marcie was released from the hospital. In the car on the way home, she was almost her old self, happily pointing out animal shapes in the clouds. At home, she dashed into the living room and settled down immediately among the piles of new Christmas toys which she had not yet had much opportunity to enjoy. She still played with the Little Ms. Doctor kit, though not exclusively or with that disturbing intensity that she had exhibited on Christmas Day.

  Jorja’s parents raced over to the apartment. Jorja had kept them away from the hospital by arguing that they might disturb Marcie’s delicate condition. Marcie remained in a splendid mood at dinner, sweet and amusing, leaving Jorja’s parents disarmed.

  For the next three nights, Marcie slept in Jorja’s bed in case she suffered an anxiety attack, but none materialized. The nightmares came with less frequency and less power than before, and Marcie’s sleeptalk awakened Jorja only twice in three nights. “The moon, moon, the moon!” But now it was a soft and almost forlorn call rather than a shout.

  In the morning, at breakfast, she asked Marcie about the dream, but the girl could not remember it. “The moon?” she said, frowning into her bowl of Trix. “Didn’t dream about the moon. Dreamed about horses. Can I have a horse someday?”

  “Maybe, when we don’t live in an apartment any more.”

  Marcie giggled. “I know that. You can’t keep a horse in an apartment. The neighbors would complain.”

  Thursday, Marcie saw Dr. Coverly for the first time. She liked him. If she still had an abnormal fear of doctors, she hid it well.

  That night Marcie slept in her own bed, with only the company of a teddy bear named Murphy. Jorja got up three times between midnight and dawn to look in on her daughter. Once she heard the now-familiar chant—“moon, moon, moon”—in a whisper that, because it was an eerie blend of fear and delight, made the hair prickle on her scalp.

  And on Friday, with three days of school vacation still ahead for Marcie, Jorja put her in Kara Persaghian’s care once more and returned to work. It was almost a relief to get back to the noise and smoke of the casino. Cigarettes, stale beer, and the occasional blast of halitosis were infinitely more pleasing than the antiseptic stink of the hospital.

  She picked up Marcie at Kara’s place, and on the way home the girl excitedly showed her the product of a day spent drawing on butcher’s paper: scores of pictures of the moon in every imaginable hue.

  On Sunday morning, January 5, when Jorja got out of bed and went to brew coffee, she found Marcie at the dining room table, engaged in a curious task. The girl, still in her pajamas, was taking all the photographs out of their picture album and making neat stacks of them.

  “I’m putting the pictures in a shoebox, because I need the... album,” the girl said, frowning over the hard word. “I need it for my moon collection.” She held up a picture of the moon clipped from a magazine. “I’m going to make a big collection.”

  “Why? Baby, why’re you so interested in the moon?”

  “It’s pretty,” Marcie said. She put the picture on a blank page of the photo album and stared at it. In her fixed gaze, in the intensity of her fascination with the photograph, there was an echo of the single-mindedness with which she had played Little Ms. Doctor.
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  With a quiver of apprehension, Jorja thought, This is how the damn doctor phobia started. Quietly. Innocently. Has Marcie merely traded one phobia for another?

  She had the urge to run to the telephone and somehow get hold of Dr. Coverly, even if it was Sunday and his day off.

  But as she stood by the table, studying her daughter, Jorja decided she was overreacting. Marcie certainly had not traded one phobia for another. After all, the girl wasn’t afraid of the moon. Just... well, strangely fascinated by it. A temporary enthusiasm. Any parent of a bright seven-year-old was accustomed to these short-lived but fiercely burning fascinations and infatuations.

  Nevertheless, Jorja decided she would tell Dr. Coverly about it when she took Marcie to his office for a second session on Tuesday.

  At twelve-twenty A.M. Monday, before she turned in for the night, Jorja looked in on Marcie to see if she was sleeping soundly. The girl was not in bed. In her dark room, she had drawn a chair up to the window and was sitting there, staring out.

  “Honey? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Come see,” Marcie said softly, dreamily.

  Heading toward the girl, Jorja said, “What is it, Peanut?”

  “The moon,” Marcie said, her eyes fixed on the silvery crescent high in the black vault of the sky. “The moon.”

  4. Boston, Massachusetts

  On Monday, January 6, the wind from the Atlantic was bitterly cold and unrelenting, and all of Boston was humbled by it. On the blustery streets, heavily bundled and bescarfed people hurried toward sanctuary with their shoulders drawn up and heads tucked down. In the hard gray winter light, the modern glass office towers appeared to be constructed of ice, while the older buildings of historic Boston huddled together, presenting a drab and miserable face utterly unlike their charm and stateliness in better weather. Last night, sleet had fallen. The barren trees were jacketed in glittering ice, bare black branches poking through the white crust like the marrow core revealed beneath the outer layers of shattered bones.

  Herbert, the efficient major domo who kept the Hannaby household functioning smoothly, drove Ginger Weiss to her seventh post-Christmas meeting with Pablo Jackson. The wind and the previous night’s ice-storm had brought down power lines and disrupted the traffic lights at more than half the intersections. They finally reached Newbury Street at eleven-oh-five A.M., just five minutes past Ginger’s eleven o’clock appointment.

  After the breakthrough during Saturday’s session, Ginger had wanted to contact the people at the Tranquility Motel in Nevada and broach the subject of the unremembered event that had transpired there on the night of July 6, the summer before last. Either the owners of that motel were accomplices of those who had tampered with Ginger’s memory, or they were victims like her. If they had been subjected to brainwashing, perhaps they also were experiencing anxiety attacks of one sort or another.

  Pablo was firmly opposed to immediate confrontation. He felt the risks were too great. If the owners of the motel were not victims but associates of the victimizers, Ginger might be putting herself in grave danger. “You’ve got to be patient. Before approaching them, you must have as much information as you can possibly obtain.”

  She had suggested they go to the police, seeking protection and an investigation, but Pablo had convinced her that the police would not be interested. She had no proof that she had been the victim of a mental mugging. Besides, the local constabulary could not unravel a crime across state lines. She’d have to go to the federal authorities or local Nevada police, and in either case she might be unwittingly seeking help from the very people responsible for what had been done to her.

  Frustrated but unable to find a hole in Pablo’s arguments, Ginger had agreed to continue following his program of treatment. He had wanted Sunday to himself, so he could review the crucial tape of Saturday’s session, and he had said he was not available Monday morning because he intended to see a friend in the hospital. “But you come back at, say, one o‘clock Monday afternoon, and we’ll begin chipping away at the edges of that memory block—en pantoufles, ‘in slippers’ as they say, in a relaxed manner.”

  This morning he had called her from the hospital to say that his friend was being discharged sooner than expected, and that he, Pablo, would be home by eleven o’clock if she would like to come earlier than planned. “You can help me make lunch.”

  Now, disembarking from the elevator and stepping quickly along the short hall to Pablo’s apartment, Ginger decided that she would make every effort to control her natural impatience and to settle for making progress en pantoufles, as the magician was determined they would.

  The front door was ajar. Assuming he had left it open for her, she stepped into the foyer. Closing the door, she said, “Pablo?”

  In another room, someone grunted. Something clattered softly. Something thudded to the floor.

  “Pablo?” He did not answer. Moving into the living room, she called out louder than before. “Pablo?”

  Silence.

  One of the library’s double doors was open, and a light was on. Ginger entered—and saw Pablo lying face-down on the floor near the Sheraton desk. He had evidently just returned from his visit to his hospitalized friend, for he was still wearing galoshes and an overcoat.

  As she rushed to him and knelt at his side, grim possibilities occurred to her—cerebral hemorrhage, thrombosis, or embolism; massive heart attack—but she was not prepared for what she found when she eased him onto his back. Pablo had been shot high in the chest, and bright red arterial blood welled from the bullet hole.

  His eyes fluttered open, and although they looked unfocused, he seemed to know who she was. Blood bubbled over his lower lip. He got out a single word in an urgent whisper: “Run. ”