Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  but she made love more like a machine than a woman, with a joyless expertise. He had never known a woman as silent in bed as Sandy had been. He suspected something in her childhood had stunted her, the same thing that had broken her spirit. He tried to get her to talk about it, but she was adamant about letting the past stay buried, and his persistence was the one thing that might have caused her to leave him; so he asked about it no more, though it was difficult to fix something when you could not get at the part of it that was broken.

  Then, in August of the summer before last, she came to the conjugal bed with a noticeably different attitude. Nothing dramatic at first. No sudden release of long-imprisoned passions. Initially, the change involved only a subtle new relaxation during the act of love. Sometimes she smiled or murmured his name as he made love to her.

  Slowly, slowly, she blossomed. By that Christmas, four months after the change began, she no longer lay upon the bed as if she were made of metal. She strove to find and match his rhythm, searching for the fulfillment that still eluded her.

  Slowly, slowly, she freed the erotic power chained within her. Finally, on April 7, last year, a night Ned would never forget, Sandy had an orgasm for the first time. It was a climax of such power that for a moment it frightened Ned. Afterward, she wept with happiness and clung to him with such gratitude, love, and trust that he wept as well.

  He thought her orgasmic breakthrough would finally enable her to speak of the source of her long-hidden pain. But when he cautiously inquired, she rebuffed him: “The past is past, Ned. Won’t help to dwell on it. If I talk about it ... that might just give it a new hold on me.”

  Through last spring, summer, and early autumn, Sandy gradually achieved satisfaction more often until, by September, their love-making nearly always brought her fulfillment. And by Christmas Day, less than three weeks ago, it was clear that her sexual maturation was not the only change in her but was accompanied by a new pride and self-respect.

  Concomitant with her sexual development, Sandy learned to enjoy driving, an activity she had once found even less pleasurable than sex. Initially, she expressed the modest intention of driving to work from their trailer out near Beowawe. Before long she was lighting out in the truck on solo spins. Sometimes Ned stood at a window and watched his uncaged bird soar off, and he viewed each flight with delight but also with an uneasiness he could not explain.

  By New Year’s Day, just past, the uneasiness became dread and was with him twenty-four hours a day, and by then he understood it. He was afraid Sandy would fly away from him.

  Maybe with the stranger who’d come in with Ernie and Faye.

  I’m probably overreacting, Ned thought as he put three hamburger patties on the griddle. Fact is, I know damn well I’m overreacting.

  But he worried.

  By the time Ned prepared cheeseburgers with all the fixings for the Blocks and their friend, the other customers were gone. As Sandy served the loaded plates, Faye locked the door and switched on the CLOSED sign that was visible from 1-80, though it was shy of ten o’clock.

  Ned joined them for a closer look at the stranger, and to insinuate himself between the guy and Sandy. When he got to their table, he was surprised to see that Sandy had a bottle of beer and had opened one for him, too. He did not drink much; Sandy drank less.

  “You’ll need it when you hear what they have to tell us,” Sandy said. “In fact, you might even need a couple more bottles.”

  The guy’s name was Dominick Corvaisis, and he had an amazing tale that drove all worries of infidelity from Ned’s mind. When Corvaisis was finished, Ernie and Faye had an incredible story of their own, and that was when Ned first learned about the ex-Marine’s fear of the dark.

  “But I remember we were evacuated,” Ned said. “We couldn’t have been here at the motel those three days, ‘cause I remember we had a sort of mini-vacation at home—watching TV, reading Louis L’Amour.”

  “I believe that’s what you were told to remember,” Corvaisis said. “Did anyone visit you at the trailer during that time? Any neighbors drop by? Anyone who could confirm that you were actually there?”

  “We’re outside Beowawe, where we don’t really have neighbors. Far as I remember, we didn’t see anybody who could swear we was there.”

  Sandy said, “Ned, they wondered if anything strange has been happening to either of us.”

  Ned met his wife’s eyes. Without words, he let her know it was up to her whether she told them about the changes she had been undergoing.

  Corvaisis said, “The two of you were here the night it happened. Whatever it was, it started while I was having dinner. So you must have been a part of it. But the memory was stolen from you.”

  The thought of strangers messing with his mind gave Ned the creeps. Uneasy, he studied the five Polaroid snapshots that Faye had fanned out on the table, especially the picture of Corvaisis staring empty-eyed.

  To Sandy, Faye said, “Honey, Ernie and I would have to’ve been blind not to’ve noticed the changes in you recently. I don’t mean to embarrass you, and I don’t want to pry, but if those changes might be related to whatever happened to us, then we ought to know about it.”

  Sandy reached for Ned’s hand, held it. Her love for him was so evident that he was ashamed of himself for the ridiculous thoughts of betrayal that had preoccupied him earlier.

  Staring intently at her beer, she said, “Most all my life, I’ve had the lowest opinion of myself. I’ll tell you why, because you’ve got to know how bad it was for me when I was a kid if you want to understand how miraculous it is that I ever found any self-respect. It was Ned who first lifted me up, believed in me, gave me a chance to be somebody.” Her hand tightened on his. “Almost nine years ago, he started courting me, and he was the first person ever treated me like a lady. He married me knowing that inside I was tied up in tangled knots, and he’s spent eight years doing his best to untie and untangle them. He thinks I don’t know how hard he’s tried to help me, but I know all right.”

  Her voice cracked with emotion. She paused for a swallow of beer.

  Ned was unable to speak.

  Sandy said, “The thing is ... I want everyone to know that maybe what happened the summer before last, the thing none of us remembers ... maybe it did have a powerful effect on me. But if Ned hadn’t taken me under his wing all those years ago, I never would’ve had a chance.”

  Love enwrapped Ned as if it were bands of iron, closing his throat, constricting his chest, applying a pleasant pressure to his heart.

  She glanced at him, returned her gaze to the bottle of beer, and recounted a childhood in hell. She did not describe her father’s violations of her in explicit detail, and she spoke demurely—almost primly—of her periodic exploitation as a child prostitute under the management of a Vegas pimp. Her account of this monstrous abuse was all the more shocking and moving because she related it without drama. Everyone at the table listened in a silence resulting not merely from shock but from respect for her suffering and from a certain reverence for her ultimate triumph.

  When Sandy finished, Ned embraced her, held her close. He was amazed by her strength. He had always known she was special, and the things she told them tonight only strengthened his love and admiration.

  Though he was deeply saddened by what had been done to Sandy, he was delighted that she was at last able to talk about it. Surely this meant that the past had lost its hold on her.

  Faye and Ernie commiserated with her in the awkward manner of friends who want to help but who know they can offer only words.

  Everyone needed another beer. Ned got five bottles of Dos Equis out of the cooler and brought them to the table.

  Corvaisis, who no longer seemed like the enemy to Ned, shook his head and blinked as if Sandy’s story had left him in a daze of horror. “This turns things upside down. I mean, if our unremembered experience had one basic effect on the rest of us, it was terror. Oh, I benefited because I was brought out of my shell; I share that wi
th Sandy. But Ernie, Dr. Weiss, Lomack, and me ... we were for the most part left with a residue of fear. Now Sandy tells us the effect on her was strictly beneficial, not frightening in the least. How could it affect us so differently? You really have no fear, Sandy?”

  “None,” Sandy said.

  Ever since Ernie pulled a chair up to the table, he’d been sitting with his shoulders hunched and his head lowered, as if protecting his neck from attack. Now, with one hand clamped around a bottle of Dos Equis, he leaned back and relaxed, though not much. “Yeah, fear’s the core of it. But you remember that place along the interstate I told you about, little more than a quarter-mile from here? I’m sure something weird happened there, something that relates to the brainwashing. But when I’m standing at that place, I feel more than just fear. My heart starts to race ... and I get excited ... but it’s not entirely a bad excitement. Fear’s a part of it, yeah, maybe the biggest part of it, but there’s a stew of other emotions, as well.”

  Sandy said, “I think the place Ernie’s talking about is where I often wind up when I take the truck out for a ride. I’m ... drawn there.”

  Ernie leaned forward, excited. “I knew it! Coming back from the airport this morning, as we were passing that place, you let the truck slow way down. And I said to myself, ‘Sandy feels it, too.’ ”

  Faye said, “Sandy, what exactly do you feel when you’re drawn to that piece of ground?”

  With a smile so warm that Ned could almost feel the heat of it, Sandy said, “Peace. I feel at peace there. It’s hard to explain ... but it’s as if the rocks, dirt, and trees all radiate harmony, tranquility.”

  “I don’t feel peaceful there,” Ernie said. “Fear, yes. A queer excitement. An eerie sense that something ... shattering will happen. Something that I’m eager for, even though it scares the hell out of me.”

  “And I feel none of what you feel,” Sandy said.

  “We ought to go there,” Ned suggested. “See if the place affects the rest of us.”

  “In the morning,” Corvaisis said. “When it’s light.”

  Faye said, “I can see this might’ve had a different effect on each of us. But why has it changed Dom’s and Sandy’s and Ernie’s lives—and the lives of that Mr. Lomack in Reno and Dr. Weiss in Boston—yet done nothing to Ned and me. Why aren’t we having problems, too?”

  Dom said, “Maybe the brainwashers did a better job on you and Ned.”

  That thought gave Ned the heebie-jeebies again.

  For a while they discussed their situation, and then Ned suggested that Corvaisis try to re-create his actions on that Friday night, July 6, up to the point where his memories were erased. “You recollect the early part of the evening better than we do. And when you came in the first time tonight, you were close to remembering something important.”

  “Close,” Corvaisis agreed, “but at the last moment, when I felt the memory within grasp, it scared the crap out of me ... and the next thing I knew, I was running for the door. Made quite a spectacle of myself. I was totally freaked out. It was such a visceral thing, instinctual, so utterly uncontrollable, that I think it would probably happen again if I made a second attempt to force the memories.”

  “Still, it’s worth a try,” Ned said.

  “And you’ve got us for moral support this time,” Faye said.

  Corvaisis needed coaxing, which Ned interpreted as meaning that the experience earlier this evening had been considerably more unnerving than words could express. But at last the writer got up and, carrying his glass of beer, went to the front door of the diner. He stood with his back to the exit, chugged a long swallow of Dos Equis. He looked around the room, trying hard to see the people of that other time.

  He said, “There were three or four men sitting at the counter. Maybe a dozen customers altogether. I can’t remember their faces.” Moving away from the door, he walked past Ned and the others, to the next table, where he pulled out a chair and sat with his back turned partly toward them. “This is where I sat. Sandy waited on me. I took a bottle of Coors while I looked at the menu. Ordered the ham-and-egg sandwich. French fries, coleslaw. As I was salting the fries, the shaker slipped out of my hand. Salt spilled on the table. I threw a pinch over my shoulder. Silly gesture. Threw it too hard. Dr. Weiss! Ginger Weiss was the woman I threw the salt on. I didn’t remember that before, but I can see her clearly now. The blond in the photo.”

  Faye tapped the Polaroid snapshot of Dr. Weiss that was on the table in front of Ned.

  Still sitting alone at the other table, Corvaisis said, “Quite a beautiful woman. Pixie-cute yet also sophisticated-looking, a really interesting mix. Could hardly take my eyes off her.”

  Ned looked more closely at the photo of Ginger Weiss. He supposed she might, indeed, be unusually attractive when her face was not so pale and slack, when her eyes were not so cold, empty, dead.

  In a voice that had grown odd, as if he were actually speaking to them from out of the past, Corvaisis said, “She sits in the corner booth by the window, facing this way. Sunset is near. The sun’s out there on the horizon, balanced like a big red ball, and the diner’s filled with orange light slanting in through the windows. Almost like firelight. Ginger Weiss looks especially lovely in that light. I can hardly keep from staring openly at her.... Twilight now. I’ve got a second beer.” He sipped some Dos Equis. When he continued, his voice was softer: “The plains are all purple ... then black ... night ...”

  Like Ernie and Faye and Sandy, Ned was spellbound by the writer’s struggle to remember, for it stirred in him, at last, faint and shapeless—but compelling—memories of his own. He began to recall that particular evening out of the many he’d spent in the Tranquility Grille. The young priest had been here, the one in the Polaroid snapshot now lying on the table. And the young couple with their little girl.

  “Not long after nightfall ... nursing my second beer mainly so I can stare at Ginger Weiss a little longer.” Corvaisis looked left, right, raised his right hand to his ear. “An unusual sound of some kind. I remember that much. A distant rumble ... getting louder.” He was silent for awhile. “Can’t remember what happened next. Something ... something ... but it just won’t come.”

  As the writer spoke of the rumbling, Ned Sarver experienced the vaguest possible memory of that frightening, swelling sound, but he could not clearly call it to mind. He felt as if Corvaisis had brought him to the edge of a dark chasm into which he was desperately afraid to look but into which he must look, and now they were turning away without shining a light down in those black depths. Heart racing, he said, “Concentrate on remembering the sound, the exact sound, and maybe that’ll bring the rest of it back to you.”

  Corvaisis pushed his chair back from the table, got up. “Rumbling ... like thunder, very distant thunder ... but growing closer.” He stood beside the table, seeking the direction from which the sound had come, looking left, right, up, down at the floor.

  Suddenly Ned heard the noise, not in memory but in reality, not back there in the past but now. The hollow roll of faraway thunder. But it came in one endless peal, not a series of rising and falling crashes, and it was growing louder, louder....

  Ned looked at the others. They heard it, too.

  Louder. Louder. Now he could feel the vibrations in his bones.

  He could not remember what had happened that night, but he knew the astonishing events they had endured had started with this sound.

  He pushed back his chair and got up. He was awash in a rising tide of fear, and he had to fight against the urge to run.

  Sandy stood, and there was fear in her face, as well. Though the unknown events seemed to have had an entirely positive effect on her, she was frightened now. She put one hand on Ned’s arm for reassurance.

  Ernie and Faye were frowning, looking around for the source of the noise, but they did not yet appear frightened. Their memory of the sound was apparently more thoroughly scrubbed away, so they could not as easily connect it with the events of tha
t Friday night in July.

  Another sound arose, underlying the thunderlike rumble: a queer, ululating whistle. That, too, was unpleasantly familiar to Ned.

  It was happening again. Whatever had taken place that night more than eighteen months ago was somehow being repeated. Jesus, happening all over again, and Ned heard himself saying, “No, no. No!”

  Corvaisis backed a couple of steps away from his table, cast a glance at Ned and the others. He was white-faced.

  The growing roar began to resonate in the window glass, behind the closed blinds. A loose pane, unseen, started rattling in its frame.

  The Levolor blinds were vibrating now, adding a jangly chorus.

  Sandy’s hold on Ned became a panicky clutch.

  Ernie and Faye were on their feet, and they were no longer merely bewildered but as afraid as everyone else.

  The ululant whistle had grown in volume with the thunder. Now it became piercingly shrill, an oscillating electronic shriek.

  “What is it?” Sandy cried, and the continuous fulminations attained such volume and power that the walls of the Tranquility Grille shook.

  On the table at which Corvaisis had been sitting, the beer glass fell on its side, cracking, spilling what Dos Equis remained in it.

  Ned looked at the table beside him and saw the objects on it—ketchup bottle, mustard dispenser, salt and pepper shakers, ashtray, glasses, plates, and silverware—bouncing, clinking against one another, moving back and forth across the surface. A beer glass toppled, and another, and the ketchup bottle.

  Wide-eyed, Ned and the others turned this way and that, as if in anticipation of the imminent materialization of a demonic entity.

  Throughout the room, objects fell off tables. The clock with the Coors logo leapt from the hook on which it hung, crashed to the floor.

  This very thing had happened that night in July—Ned remembered as much. But he could not remember what had come next.

  “Stop it!” Ernie shouted with the conviction and authority of a Marine officer accustomed to obedience—but without effect.

  Earthquake? Ned wondered. A quake did not explain the electronic shriek that accompanied the thunder.

  The chairs jittered across the floor, bumping against one another. One of them slid into Corvaisis, and the writer jumped in surprise.

  Ned could feel the floor shaking.

  The thunderlike rumble and the accompanying oscillatory shriek rose to an ear-splitting peak, and with the hard flat crash of a bomb blast, the big front windows imploded. Faye screamed and threw her arms up in front of her face, and Ernie stumbled backward and nearly fell over a chair. Sandy buried her face against Ned’s chest.

  They might have been badly cut by flying glass if the closed blinds had not imposed a barrier between them and the shattering panes. Even so, the force of the implosion flung the blinds up as a strong wind might blow curtains at an open window, and some glittering shards fell onto the booths, rained over Ned, and smashed on the floor around him.

  Silence. The implosion of the windows was followed by a profound silence disturbed only by a few last, loose, little pieces of glass falling out of window frames, one at a time.

  On that Friday night in July, the summer before last, much more than this had happened, though Ned could not remember what. Tonight, however, the mysterious drama apparently was not going to progress as far as it had gone then. For now, it was over.

  Dom Corvaisis was bleeding lightly from a nick in his cheek, hardly worse than a shaving cut. Ernie’s forehead and the back of his right hand had been slightly scratched by splinters of glass.

  When he had determined that Sandy was unhurt, Ned reluctantly left her and rushed to the front door. He went out into the night in search of the cause of the weird noise and destruction, but he found only the deep, dark, solemn silence of the plains. No smoke or blackened rubble marked the source of an explosion. At the bottom of the hill on which the Tranquility Motel and Grille stood, widely separated cars and trucks moved on the interstate. Over at the motel, drawn by the commotion, a few guests had come outside in their nightclothes. The sky above was full of stars. The air was numbingly cold, but there was no wind, only a soft breeze, like the frigid sigh of Death. Nothing in sight could have caused the thunder, shaking, or implosion of the windows.

  Dom Corvaisis came out of the Grille, bewildered. “What the hell?”

  “I was hoping you’d know,” Ned responded.

  “It’s what happened the summer before last.”

  “I know.”

  “But just the start of it. Damn it, I can’t remember what happened that night after the windows blew in.”

  “Me neither,” Ned replied.

  Corvaisis turned his hands palms-up, held them out for inspection. In the blue neon light from the sign on the diner’s roof, Ned saw rings of swollen flesh in the writer’s palms. Because the light was blue, he could not ascertain the true color of the marks. But from what Corvaisis had told them earlier, Ned knew the rings were an angry red.

  “What the hell?” Corvaisis said again.

  Sandy was standing in the open door of the diner, backlit by the fluorescent glow from inside, and Ned went to her, embraced her. He felt one shudder after another passing through her. But he did not realize how badly he was trembling until she said, “You’re shaking like a leaf.”

  Ned Sarver was scared sick. With an almost clairvoyant vividness, he sensed that they were involved in something of monumental importance, something unimaginably dangerous, and that it was likely to end in death for some or all of them. He was a natural-born fixer of both inanimate objects and people, a damned good repairman. But this time he was up against a force with which he did not know how to tinker. What if Sandy were killed? He took pride in his talents, but even the best fixer in the whole damned world could not undo the wreckage wrought by Death.

  For the first time since meeting her in Tucson, Ned felt powerless to protect his wife.

  At the horizon, the moon had begun to rise.

  FIVE

  January 12-January 14