Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  She was astonished that she had clambered all the way down the ice-sheathed fire escape and had fled, by whatever roundabout route, to this hiding place without breaking her neck. Evidently, in her fugue, reduced to the miserable condition of a frightened and mindless animal, there was at least the compensation of an animal-like fleetness and sure-foot-edness.

  Like a pair of industrious morticians, the wind and cold continued to drain the warmth from her. The narrow, gray concrete stairwell increasingly resembled an unlidded sarcophagus. Ginger decided it was time to go. She rose slowly. The small backyard was deserted, as were the yards of houses on both sides. Ice-crusted snow. A few bare trees. Nothing threatening. Shivering, sniffing, blinking away tears, Ginger climbed the stairs and followed a brick walkway that linked the rear of the house to the gate at the end of the small property.

  She intended to find her way back to Newbury Street, locate a telephone, and call the police, but as she reached the gate, that plan was abruptly forgotten. On each of the two gateposts was a wrought-iron carriage lamp with amber panes of glass. Either they’d been left burning by accident or were activated by a solenoid that had mistaken the dreary winter morning for twilight. They were electric lamps but had those flickering bulbs that imitated gas flames, so the lantern-glass was alive with shimmering, dancing amber light. That throbbing, yellowish luminosity made Ginger’s breath catch, and she was once more pitched into a state of unreasoning panic.

  No! Not again.

  But, yes. Yes. The mist. Nothingness. Gone.

  Colder.

  Her feet and hands were going numb.

  She was apparently on Newbury Street again. She had crawled under a parked truck. Lying in the gloom under the oil pan, she peered out from beneath her sanctuary, getting a wheel-level view of the vehicles parked on the other side of the street.

  Hiding. Every time she recovered from a fugue, she was hiding from something unspeakably terrifying. Today, of course, she was hiding from Pablo’s killer. But what about other days? What had she been hiding from then? Even now, she was hiding not only from the gunman but from something else that hovered tantalizingly at the edge of remembrance. Something she had seen out in Nevada. Something.

  “Miss? Hey, miss?”

  Ginger blinked and turned stiffly toward the voice, which came from the back of the truck. She saw a man on his hands and knees, looking under the tailgate. For a moment she thought it was the gunman.

  “Miss? What’s wrong?”

  Not the gunman. Evidently, he had given up when he couldn’t find her quickly and had fled. This was someone she had never seen before, and this was one occasion when a stranger’s face was welcome.

  He said, “What the hell are you doing under there?”

  Ginger was filled with self-pity. She realized how she had looked, running crazily through the neighborhood like some demented freak. All dignity had been stolen from her.

  She squirmed toward the man who had spoken to her, grasped the gloved hand he offered, and allowed him to help her slide out from beneath the truck, which proved to be a Mayflower Moving Company van. The rear doors were open. She glanced inside and saw boxes, furniture. The guy who had pulled her out was young, brawny, and dressed in quilted thermal coveralls with the Mayflower logo stitched across the chest.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. “Who’re you hiding from, lady?”

  As the Mayflower man spoke, Ginger noticed a policeman standing in the middle of the intersection half a block away, directing traffic, where a signal light had failed. She ran toward him.

  The Mayflower man called after her.

  She was surprised she could run at all. She felt as if she were a creature constructed of nothing but aches and pains and chills. Yet she ran with a dreamy effortlessness into the shrieking wind. The gutters were full of icy slush, but the street itself was relatively dry and calcimine-streaked with deicing compounds. Dodging out of the way of a couple of oncoming cars, she even found the strength to call out to the cop as she drew near him. “There’s been a man killed! Murder! You’ve got to come! Murder!” Then, when he started toward her with a look of concern on his broad Irish face, she saw the shiny brass buttons on his heavy, winter-weight uniform coat, and all was lost again. They were not exactly like the buttons on the leather topcoat the killer had been wearing; they were not decorated with a lion passant, but with some other raised figure. But one glimpse sent her thoughts flashing toward remembrance of buttons she had seen then, during the mysterious events at the Tranquility Motel. Some forbidden recollection began to surface, and that pulled the Azrael Trigger.

  As she lost control and ran off into her private darkness, the last thing she heard was her own pathetic cry of despair.

  Coldest.

  That morning, at least for Ginger Weiss, Boston was the coldest place on earth. Bitter, polar, piercing, marrow-freezing, the January day induced a glaciation of the spirit as well as the flesh. When the fugue receded, she was sitting on the ground in ice and snow. Her hands and feet were numb, stiff. Her lips were chapped and cracked.

  This time she had taken refuge in the narrow space between a row of well-manicured bushes and a brick building, in a shadowy corner where the angled wall of a bay-windowed tower met a flat portion of the main facade. The former Hotel Agassiz. Where Pablo had his apartment. Where he had been killed. She had come nearly full circle.

  She heard someone approaching. Between the hoary branches of the snow-dressed and ice-laced shrubs, she saw someone climbing over the low wrought-iron fence that separated the front lawn from the sidewalk. She did not see the person himself, merely his booted feet, legs clad in blue trousers, and the flaps of a long, heavy, navy-blue coat. But as he came across the narrow strip of lawn toward the shrubbery, she knew who he was: the traffic cop from whom she had turned and run.

  Fearing yet another seizure at the sight of his coat buttons, Ginger closed her eyes.

  Perhaps irreversible psychological damage was a side-effect of the brainwashing she had undergone, an inevitable result of the tremendous and constant stress generated by the artificially repressed memories struggling mightily to make themselves known. Even if she could find another hypnotist to do for her what Pablo had done, perhaps there was no way the block could be broken or the pressure relieved, in which case she was destined to deteriorate further. If she was stricken by three fugues in one morning, what was to prevent three more in the next hour?

  The policeman’s boots crunched noisily through the sleet-skinned snow. He stopped in front of her. She heard him pressing against the low bushes and parting them to look into her hiding place. “Miss? Hey, what’s wrong? What were you shouting about murder? Miss?”

  Maybe she would fall into a fugue and remain there forever.

  “Oh, now, what’re you crying about?” the cop said sympathetically. “Darlin’, I can’t help if you won’t tell me what’s wrong.”

  She would not be the daughter of Jacob Weiss if she failed to respond warmly and eagerly to the slightest sign of kindness in others, and the policeman’s concern finally affected her. She opened her eyes and looked up at the topmost brass button on his coat. The sight of it did not bring the hateful darkness upon her. But that meant nothing, for the ophthalmoscope, black gloves, and other triggering items had not affected her later, when she had forced herself to confront them again.

  In a crackle of ice, the cop pushed between the bushes.

  She said, “They’ve killed Pablo. They murdered Pablo.”

  And as she spoke those words, her distress over her condition was made worse by a rush of guilt. The 6th of January would forever be a black day in her life. Pablo was dead. Because he tried to help her.

  Such a very cold day.

  5. On the Road

  Monday morning, the 6th of January, Dom Corvaisis cruised his old Portland neighborhood in a rented Chevrolet, trying to recapture the mood he had been in when he had left Oregon for Mountainview, Utah, more than eighteen months ago.
The rain, as heavy as any he had ever seen, had stopped near dawn. Now the sky, though still cloudy from horizon to horizon, was a particularly powdery, dry-looking shade of gray, like a burnt field, as if there had been a fire behind the clouds that had forced out all that precipitation. He drove through the university campus, stopping repeatedly to let the familiar scenes stir feelings and attitudes of times past. He parked across the street from the apartment where he’d lived, and as he stared up at the windows, he tried to recall the man he had been then.

  He was surprised at how difficult it was to recollect the timidity with which that other Dom Corvaisis had viewed life. Though he could bring to mind the way he had been, there was no intimacy or poignancy to those memories. He could see those old days again, but he could not feel them, which seemed to indicate that he could never be that old Dom again, regardless of how much he feared the possibility.

  He was convinced that he had seen something terrible on the road the summer before last, and that something monstrous had been done to him. But that conviction generated both a mystery and a contradiction. The mystery was that the event had wrought in him an undeniably positive change. How could an experience fraught with pain and terror effect a beneficial change in his outlook? The contradiction was that, in spite of the beneficial effect on his personality, the event filled his dreams with horror. How could his ordeal have been both terrifying and positive, both horrible and uplifting at the same time?

  The answer, if it could be found, was not here in Portland but out on the highway. He started the engine, put the Chevy in gear, pulled away from his old apartment building, and went looking for trouble.

  The most direct route from Portland to Mountainview began with Interstate 80 north. But as he had done nineteen months ago, Dom took a more roundabout trail, heading south on Interstate 5. That special summer, he had scheduled a layover in Reno for a few days to do some research for a series of short stories about gambling, so the less direct route had been necessary.

  Now in his rented Chevy, he followed the familiar highway, keeping his speed down to fifty, even as low as forty on the steeper hills, for he had been pulling a U-Haul trailer that last day in June, and he had not made good time. And, as before, he stopped for lunch in Eugene.

  Hoping to spot something that would goose his memory and provide a link with the mysterious events of the previous trip, Dom looked over the small towns that he passed. However, he saw nothing that made him uneasy, and nothing bad happened all the way to Grants Pass, where he arrived shortly before six o’clock that evening, right on schedule.

  He stayed in the motel where he had been a guest eighteen months ago. He remembered the number of the room—ten—because it was near the soft drink and ice machines, which had been the source of irritating noises half the night. It was unoccupied, and he took it, vaguely explaining to the clerk that it had sentimental associations for him.

  He ate at the same restaurant, across the road from the motel.

  He was seeking satori, which was a Zen word meaning “sudden enlightenment,” a profound revelation. But enlightenment eluded him.

  All day he had used the rearview mirror, hoping to spot a tail. During dinner, he surreptitiously watched the other customers. But if he was being followed, his tail was masterful, invisible.

  At nine o’clock, rather than use the telephone in his room, he walked to a nearby service station pay phone. With his credit card, he placed a call to the number of another pay phone in Laguna Beach. By prearrangement, Parker Faine was waiting there with a report on the mail that he had collected for Dom earlier in the day. There was little chance that either of their phones was tapped; however, after receiving those two disturbing Polaroid snapshots, Dom had decided (and Parker had agreed) that in this case prudence and paranoia were synonymous.

  “Bills,” Parker said, “advertisements. No more strange messages, and no more Polaroids. How’s it going at your end?”

  “Nothing so far,” Dom said, leaning wearily against the Plexiglas and aluminum wall of the phone booth. “Didn’t sleep well last night.”

  “But you didn’t go for a walk?”

  “Didn’t even get one knot untied. Had a nightmare, though. The moon again. Anybody follow you to that pay phone?”

  “Not unless he was as thin as a dime and a master of camouflage,” Parker said. “So you can call me here again tomorrow night and not have to worry that they’ve tapped the line.”

  “We sound like two madmen,” Dom said.

  “I’m kind of having fun,” Parker said. “Cops and robbers, hide and seek, spies—I was always good at games like that when I was a kid. You just hang in there, my friend. And if you need help, I’ll come fast.”

  “I know,” Dom said.

  He walked back to the motel through a cold damp wind. As in the hotel in Portland, he woke three times before dawn, always surfacing from an unremembered nightmare, always shouting about the moon.

  Tuesday, January 7, Dom rose early and drove to Sacramento, then took Interstate 80 east toward Reno. Rain fell, silvery and cold, for most of the drive, and by the time he reached the foothills of the Sierras, it was snowing. He stopped at an Arco station, bought tire chains, and put them on before heading into the mountains.

  The summer before last, he had taken more than ten hours to get from Grants Pass to Reno, and this time the drive took even longer. When he finally checked in at Harrah’s Hotel where he had stayed before, called Parker Faine from a pay phone, and had a bite of dinner in the coffee shop, he was too tired to do anything but pick up a copy of the Reno newspaper and return to his room. So at eight-thirty that evening, sitting in bed in his underwear, he saw the story about Zebediah Lomack.

  MOON MAN’S ESTATE WORTH HALF A MILLION DOLLARS

  RENO—Zebediah Harold Lomack, 50, whose suicide on Christmas Day led to the discovery of his bizarre obsession with the moon, left an estate valued at more than $500,000. According to documents filed with the probate court by Eleanor Wolsey, sister of the deceased and executrix of Lomack’s will, most of the funds are in accounts at various savings and loan associations and in treasury bills. The modest house in which Lomack lived at 1420 Wass Valley Road, has an appraised value of only $35,000.

  ’ Lomack, a professional gambler, is said to have amassed his wealth primarily from the game of poker. “He was one of the best players I ever knew,” said Sidney “Sierra Sid” Garfork of Reno, another professional gambler and winner of last year’s World Championship of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. “He took to cards when he was just a kid the way some others might have a natural knack for baseball or math or physics.” According to Garfork and other friends of Lomack, the gambler’s estate would have been even larger if he had not had a weakness for dice games. “He lost back more than half his winnings at the craps tables, and the IRS took a big chunk, of course,” Garfork said.

  On Christmas night, responding to a neighbor’s report of shotgun fire, Reno police officers found Lomack’s body in the garbage strewn kitchen of his home. Upon further investigation, they found thousands of photographs of the moon decorating walls, ceilings, and furniture

  There was more to the story, which had apparently been a local sensation for the past two weeks. Dom read with growing fascination and uneasiness. Most likely, Zebediah Lomack’s mad obsession with the moon had nothing to do with Dom’s own problems. Coincidence.Yet ... he felt a stirring of precisely that fear—part terror, part horror, and part awe—that filled him when he woke from his nightmares, that also overwhelmed him when he went sleepwalking and tried to nail windows shut.

  He pored over the article several times, and at nine-fifteen, in spite of his weariness, he decided that he had to get a look in the Lomack house. He dressed, retrieved his rented car from the hotel’s valet parking, and got directions to Wass Valley Road from the attendant. Reno was below the snow-line, so the night was dry and the roads clean. Dom stopped at an all-night Sav-On drugstore to buy a flashlight. He arr
ived at 1420 Wass Valley Road shortly after ten o’clock and parked across the street.

  The house was actually a bungalow with large porches, every bit as modest as the news account had indicated. It sat on a half-acre lot. From previous storms, snow lay in patches on the roof, covered the lawn, weighted the branches of several large pines. The windows were dark.

  According to the article in the Reno newspaper, Eleanor Wolsey, Zebediah Lomack’s sister, had flown in from Florida three days after his death, on December 28. She arranged the funeral services, which had been conducted on the thirtieth, and was staying over until the estate was settled. However, she was at a hotel rather than in her brother’s house, because the bungalow was too depressing.

  Dom was a law-abiding citizen; the prospect of breaking into the house gave him no thrill. But it had to be. done because there was no way he could see it except by forced entry. He saw no point in trying to persuade Eleanor Wolsey to allow a visit tomorrow, for she had been quoted in the newspaper as saying that she was sick and tired of gawkers and that she was repulsed by the perverse curiosity of strangers.

  Five minutes later, on the back porch of the Lomack bungalow, Dom discovered that the door was equipped with a deadbolt in addition to its regular lock. He tried the windows that faced onto the porch. The one above the kitchen sink was unlatched. He slid it open and clambered inside.

  Hooding the flashlight with one hand to avoid drawing the notice of anyone outside, he swept the narrowed beam around the kitchen, which was no longer in the disgusting condition in which Reno policemen had found it on Christmas. According to the newspaper, just two days ago Lomack’s sister began cleaning the house and preparing it for sale. Evidently she had started here. The garbage was gone. The counters were clean, and the floor was spotless. The air was filled with the stink of new paint and Spectracide. A single startled roach scurried along the baseboard and disappeared behind the refrigerator, but there was no longer a gross infestation. And there were no pictures of the moon.

  Dom was suddenly worried that Eleanor Wolsey and her helpers might have made too much progress. Perhaps all traces of Zebediah Lomack’s obsession had been stripped down, scrubbed out, and thrown away.

  But that concern was quickly put to rest when Dom followed the pale probing beam of the flashlight into the living room, where the walls and ceiling and windows were still papered with big posters of the moon. It seemed as if he were hanging in deep space, in some crowded realm where half a hundred cratered worlds orbited impossibly close to one another. The effect was disorienting. He felt dizzy, and his mouth went dry.

  He moved slowly out of the living room into a hallway, where hundreds of pictures of the moon—some color and some black-and-white, some large and some small, some overlapping others—had been fixed to every inch of the walls with glue, Scotch tape, masking tape, and staples. The same decorations had been applied in both bedrooms as well, so the omnipresent moons seemed almost like a fungus that had spored and spread throughout the house, creeping into every corner.

  The newspaper report had said that no one but Lomack had been in the house for more than a year prior to his suicide. Dom believed it, for if visitors had seen the work of this lunatic cut-and-paste Michelangelo, they would have contacted the mental health authorities at once. The neighbors told of the gambler’s rapid metamorphosis from a hail-fellow to a recluse. Apparently his fascination with the moon had begun the summer before last.

  The summer before last ... The timing uncannily paralleled the changes in Dom’s own life.

  Second by second, Dom grew more uneasy. He could not understand the insane behavior that had created this eerie display, could not put himself inside the fevered mind of Lomack, but he could empathize with the gambler’s terror. Just moving through the moon-crowded house, shining his flashlight on the lunar faces, Dom felt a tingling along the back of his neck. The moons did not mesmerize him as they had evidently mesmerized Lomack, but as he stared at them he sensed instinctively that the impulse that had driven Lomack to paper his house with moon images was the same impulse that drove Dom himself to dream of them.

  He and Lomack had shared some experience in which the moon had figured or of which it was an apt and powerful symbol. The summer before last they had been in the same place at the same time. The wrong place at the wrong time.

  Lomack had been driven mad by the stress of repressed memories.

  Will I be driven mad, too? Dom wondered as he stood in the master bedroom, turning slowly in a circle.

  A new and grim thought struck him. Suppose Lomack had not killed himself out of despair over his unshakable obsession but had, instead, been compelled to shove the shotgun barrel into his mouth because he had finally remembered what had happened to him the summer before last. Maybe the memory was far worse than the mystery. Maybe, if the truth were revealed, sleepwalking and nightmares would seem less terrifying than what had happened during that drive from Portland to Mountainview.

  Moons ... The oppressiveness of those pendulant forms drastically increased. The claustrophobic mural made breathing difficult. The moons seemed to portend some unreadable but manifestly evil fate that awaited him, and he stumbled out of the room, suddenly eager to flee from them.

  Among a herd of leaping and prancing shadows whipped up by the hobbling beam of the flashlight, he ran down the short hall, into the living room, tripped over a stack of books, and fell with a jarring crash. For a moment he lay stunned. But his senses swiftly cleared, and he was jolted to find himself staring at the word “Dominick,” which was scrawled in felt-tip pen across the luminous moon-face in one of the dozens of identical big posters. He had not noticed it when he had come through from the kitchen earlier, but now he had fallen so that the flash in his right hand was aimed just right.

  A chill rippled through Dom. He had read nothing about this in the newspaper, but the handwriting surely belonged to Lomack. To the best of his knowledge, he had not known the gambler. Yet to pretend that this was another Dominick would be to embrace an outrageous coincidence.

  He got up from the floor and took a couple of steps toward the poster that