Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  Ginger saw Sandy reach into the glowing air with one hand, as if to grasp a fistful of the miraculous light. A tentative smile pulled at Ned’s mouth. Faye smiled, too, and Ernie’s expression of childlike wonder was almost laughably out of place on his ruggedly hewn face.

  “The moon,” Ernie said.

  “The moon,” Dom echoed, the stigmata still blazing on his hands.

  For one thrilling moment, Ginger Weiss was poised on the brink of complete understanding. The black, blank membrane of her memory block trembled; revelation pressed strenuously against the far side, and that membrane seemed certain to split and spill forth everything that had been dammed beyond it.

  Then the light changed from moon-white to blood-red, and with it the mood changed from wonder and growing delight to fear. She no longer sought revelation but dreaded it, no longer welcomed understanding but withdrew from it in terror and revulsion.

  Ginger stumbled back through the bloody glow, bumped against the front door. Across the room, beyond Dom and Brendan, Sandy Sarver had ceased reaching up to seize a handful of light; she was holding tightly to Ned, whose smile had become a rictus of repulsion. Faye and Ernie were pressing back against the check-in counter.

  As scarlet incandescence welled like fluid into the room and filled it from corner to corner, the stunning visual phenomena were augmented by sound. Ginger jumped in surprise as a loud three-part crash shook the sanguineous air, jumped once more as it repeated, then flinched but did not jump when it came again. It had a cardiac quality, like the thunderous beating of a great heart, though it featured one more stroke than a usual heartbeat: LUB-DUB-dub, LUB-DUB-DUB, LUB-DUB-dub.... She knew at once that it was the apparitional noise of which Father Wycazik had spoken in his telephone conversation with Dom, the noise that had arisen in Brendan Cronin’s bedroom and had shaken St. Bernadette’s.

  But she also knew that she had heard this very thing before. This entire display—the moonlike light, the blood-red radiance, the noise—was part of something that had happened the summer before last.

  LUB-DUB-dub ... LUB-DUB-dub ...

  The window frames rattled. The walls shook. The bloody light and the lamplight began to pulse in time with the pounding.

  LUB-DUB-dub ... LUB-DUB-dub ...

  Again, Ginger was approaching a shocking recollection. With each crash of sound and throb of light, long-buried memories surged nearer.

  However, her inhibiting fear grew; a towering black wave of terror bore down on her. The Azrael Block was doing what it was designed to do; rather than let remembrance have its way with her, she would plunge into a fugue state, as she had not done since the day Pablo Jackson had been killed, one week ago. The familiar signs of oncoming blackout were present: She was having difficulty breathing; she trembled with a sense of mortal danger so strong it was palpable; the world around her began to fade; an oily darkness seeped in at the edges of her vision.

  Run or die.

  Ginger turned her back on the phenomenal events transpiring in the office. With both hands, she gripped the frame of the front door, as if to anchor herself to consciousness and thwart the black wave that sought to sweep her away. In desperation, she looked through the glass at the vast Nevada landscape, at the somber winter sky, trying to block out the stimuli—the impossible light and sound—that pushed her toward a dark fugue. Terror and mindless panic grew so unbearable that escape into a hateful fugue seemed almost preferable, yet she somehow held fast to the doorframe, held tight, held on, shaking and gasping, held on, terrified not so much by the strange events occurring behind her but by the unremembered events of that summer of which these phenomena were only dim echoes, and still she held on, held on ... until the three-stroke thunder faded, until the red light paled, until the room was silent, and until the only light was that coming through the windows or from ordinary lighting fixtures.

  She was all right now. She was not going to black out.

  For the first time, she had successfully resisted a seizure. Maybe her ordeal of the past few months had toughened her. Maybe just being here, within reach of all the answers to the mystery, had given her the heart to resist. Or maybe she had drawn strength from her new “family.” Whatever the reason, she was confident that, having once fended off a fugue, she would find it easier to deal with future attacks. Her memory blocks were crumbling. And her fear of facing up to what had happened that July 6 was now far outweighed by the fear of never knowing.

  Shaky, Ginger turned toward the others again.

  Brendan Cronin tottered to the sofa and sat, trembling visibly. The rings were no longer visible in either his hands or Dom’s.

  To the priest, Ernie said, “Did I understand you? That same light sometimes fills your room at night?”

  “Yes,” Brendan acknowledged. “Twice before.”

  “But you told us it was a lovely light,” Faye said.

  “Yeah,” Ned agreed. “You made it sound ... wonderful.”

  “It is,” Brendan said. “Partly, it is. But when it turns red... well, then it scares the hell out of me. But when it first starts ... oh, it uplifts me and fills me with the strangest joy.”

  The ominous scarlet light and the frightening three-part hammering had generated such terror in Ginger that she had temporarily forgotten the exhilarating moon-white glow that had preceded it and that had filled her with wonder.

  Wiping his palms on his shirt, as if the vanished rings had left an unwanted residue upon his hands, Dom said, “There was both a good and evil aspect to the events of that night. We long to relive a part of what happened to us, yet at the same time it scares us ... scares us ...”

  “Scares us shitless,” Ernie said.

  Ginger noticed that even Sandy Sarver, who heretofore had perceived only a benign shape to the mystery, was frowning.

  When Jorja Monatella buried her ex-husband, Alan Rykoff, at eleven o’clock Monday morning, the Las Vegas sun beamed down between scattered iron-gray clouds. A hundred shafts of golden sunshine, some half a mile across, some only a few yards wide, like cosmic spotlights, left many buildings in winter shadows while highlighting others. Several shafts of sunshine moved across the cemetery, harried by the rushing clouds, sweeping eastward across the barren floor of the desert. As the portly funeral director concluded a nondenominational prayer, as the casket was lowered into the waiting grave, a particularly bright beam illuminated the scene, and color burst from the flowers.

  In addition to Jorja and Paul Rykoff—Alan’s father, who had flown in from Florida—only five people had shown up. Even Jorja’s parents had not come. By his selfishness, Alan had assured an exit from life accompanied by a minimum of grieving. Paul Rykoff, too like his son in some respects, blamed Jorja for everything. He had been barely civil since his arrival yesterday. Now that his only child was in the ground, he turned from Jorja, stone-faced, and she knew she would meet him again only if his stubbornness and anger eventually were outweighed by a desire to see his grandchild.

  She drove only a mile before she pulled to the side of the road, stopped, and finally wept. She wept neither for Alan’s suffering nor for the loss of him, but for the final destruction of all the hope with which their relationship had begun, the burnt-out hopes for love, family, friendship, mutual goals, and shared lives. She had not wished Alan dead. But now that he was dead, she knew it would be easier to make the new beginning toward which she had been planning and working, and that realization made her feel neither guilty nor cruel; it was just sad.

  Last night, Jorja told Marcie her father was dead, though not that he’d committed suicide. Initially, Jorja had not intended to tell her until this afternoon, in the presence of Dr. Coverly, the psychologist. But the appointment with Coverly had to be canceled because, later today, Jorja and Marcie were flying to Elko to join Dominick Corvaisis, Ginger Weiss, and the others. Marcie took the news of Alan’s death surprisingly well. She cried, but not hard or long. At seven, she was old enough to understand death, but still too young to grasp
the cruel finality of it. Besides, by his abandonment of Marcie, Alan unwittingly had done the girl a favor; in a sense, for her, he had died more than a year ago, and her mourning had already been done.

  One other thing had helped Marcie overcome her grief: her obsession with the collection of moon pictures. Only an hour after she learned of her father’s death, the child was sitting at the dining room table, eyes dry, small pink tongue poked between her teeth in total concentration, a crayon stub in one hand. She’d begun the moon-coloring project on Friday evening and pursued it through the weekend. By breakfast this morning, every one of the photographs and all but fifty of the hundreds of hand-drawn moons had been transformed into fiery globes.

  Marcie’s obsession would have disturbed Jorja even if she had not known others shared it and that two had killed themselves. The moon was not yet the focus of the girl’s every waking hour. However, Jorja required little imagination to see that, if the obsession progressed, Marcie might travel irretrievably into the land of madness.

  Her anxiety about Marcie was so acute that she quickly overcame the tears that had forced her to pull to the side of the road. She put the Chevette in gear and drove to her parents’ house, where Marcie waited.

  The girl was at the kitchen table with the ubiquitous album of moons, applying a scarlet crayon. She glanced up when Jorja arrived, smiled weakly, and returned at once to the task before her.

  Pete, Jorja’s father, was also at the table, frowning at Marcie. Occasionally, he thought of a stratagem to interest her in some activity less bizarre and more wholesome than the endless coloring of moons, but all his attempts to lure her away from the album failed.

  In her parents’ bedroom, Jorja changed from her dress into jeans and a sweater for the trip north, while Mary Monatella badgered her. “When will you take that book away from Marcie? Or let me take it away?”

  “Mother, I told you before: Dr. Coverly believes taking the book from her right now would only reinforce her obsession.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense to me,” Jorja’s mother said.

  “Dr. Coverly says if we make an issue of the moon collection at this early stage, we’ll be emphasizing its importance and—”

  “Nonsense. Does this Coverly have kids of his own?”

  “I don’t know, Mom.”

  “I’ll bet he doesn’t have kids of his own. If he did, he wouldn’t be giving you such dumb advice.”

  Having put her dress on a hanger, having stripped down to bra and panties, Jorja felt naked and vulnerable, for this situation reminded her of when her mother used to watch her dress for dates with boys who did not meet approval. No boy ever met Mary’s approval. In fact, Jorja married Alan in part because Mary disapproved of him. Matrimony as rebellion. Stupid, but she had done it and paid dearly. Mary had driven her to it—Mary’s suffocating and authoritarian brand of love. Now, Jorja grabbed the jeans that were laid out on the bed and slipped into them, dressing fast.

  Mary said, “She won’t even say why she’s collecting those things.”

  “Because she doesn’t know why. It’s a compulsion. An irrational obsession, and if there’s a reason for it, the reason is buried down in her subconscious, where even she can’t get a look at it.”

  Mary said, “That book should be taken away from her.”

  “Eventually,” Jorja said. “One step at a time, Mom.”

  “If it was up to me, I’d do it right now.”

  Jorja had packed two big suitcases and had left them here earlier. Now, when it was time to go to the airport, Pete drove, and Mary went along for the opportunity to engage in more nagging.

  Jorja and Marcie shared the back seat. On the way to the airport, the girl paged continuously, silently back and forth through her album.

  Between Jorja and Mary, the subject of conversation had changed from the best way to deal with Marcie’s obsession to the imminent trip to Elko. Mary had doubts about this expedition and did not hesitate to express them. Was the plane just a twelve-seater? Wasn’t it dangerous to go up in a bucket of bolts owned by a small-time outfit that was probably short of cash and skimped on maintenance? What was the purpose of going, anyway? Even if some people in Elko were having problems like Marcie’s, how could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that they’d all stayed at the same motel?

  “This Corvaisis guy bothers me,” Pete said as he braked for a red traffic light. “I don’t like you getting involved with his kind.”

  “What do you mean? You don’t even know him.”

  “I know enough,” Pete said. “He’s a writer, and you know what they’re like. I read once that Norman Mailer hung his wife out a high window by her heels. And isn’t it Hemingway who’s always getting into fist-fights?”

  Jorja said, “Daddy, Hemingway’s dead.”

  “See? Always getting in fights, drunk, using drugs. Writers are a flaky bunch. I don’t like you being involved with writers.”

  “This trip is a big mistake,” Mary said flatly.

  It never ended.

  At the airport, when she kissed them goodbye, they told her they loved her, and she told them the same, and the strange thing was that they were all telling the truth. Though they continuously sniped at her and though she had been deeply wounded by their sniping, they loved one another. Without love, they would have stopped speaking long ago. The parent-child relationship was sometimes even more perplexing than the mystery of what had happened at the Tranquility Motel two summers ago.

  The feeder line’s bucket of bolts was more comfortable than Mary would have believed, with six well-padded seats on each side of a narrow aisle, free headphones providing bland but mellowing Muzak tapes, and a pilot who handled his craft as gently as a new mother carried her baby.

  Thirty minutes out of Las Vegas, Marcie closed the album and, in spite of the daylight streaming through the portholes, she drifted off to sleep, lulled by the loud but hypnotic droning of the engines.

  During the flight, Jorja thought about her future: the business degree toward which she was working, her hope of owning a dress shop, the hard work ahead—and loneliness, which was already a problem for her. She wanted a man. Not sexually. Although that would be welcome too! She had dated a few times since the divorce but had been to bed with no one. She was no female eunuch. Sex was important to her, and she missed it. But sex was not the main reason she wanted a man, one special man, a mate. She needed someone to share her dreams, triumphs, and failures. She had Marcie, but that was not the same. The human species seemed genetically compelled to make life’s journey two-by-two, and the need was particularly strong in Jorja.

  As the plane droned north-northeast, Jorja listened to Mantovani on the headphones and indulged in a bit of uncharacteristic, girlish fantasizing. At the Tranquility Motel, perhaps she would meet a special man with whom she could share this new beginning. She recalled Dominick Corvaisis’ gentle but confident voice, and included him in her fantasy. If Corvaisis was the one for her, imagine what her father would say when he learned she was marrying one of those flaky, drunken writers who held their wives by the heels and dangled them out high windows!

  She scrapped that particular fantasy soon after the plane landed, for she quickly perceived that Corvaisis’ heart was already claimed.

  At four-thirty in Elko, half an hour before sunset, the sky was plated with dark clouds, and the Ruby Mountains were purple-black on the horizon. A penetratingly cold wind, sweeping in from the west, was ample proof that they had come four hundred miles north from Las Vegas.

  Corvaisis and Dr. Ginger Weiss were waiting on the tarmac beside the small terminal, and the moment that Jorja saw them, she had the odd but reassuring feeling that she was among family. That sensation was something of which Corvaisis had spoken on the phone, but Jorja had not understood what he meant until she experienced it. And it was quite separate from the feelings she had for Ginger as her roadside savior.

  Even Marcie—bundled in coat and scarf, her eyes still puffy f
rom the nap on the plane, the album clutched to her chest—was stirred from her moody trancelike state by the sight of the writer and the physician. She smiled and answered their questions with more enthusiasm than had marked her speech in days. She offered to show them her album, and she submitted with a giggle when Corvaisis scooped her up in his arms to carry her to the parking lot.

  We were right to come, Jorja thought. Thank God we did. Carrying Marcie, Corvaisis led the way to the car, while Jorja and Ginger followed with the suitcases. As they walked, Jorja said, “Maybe you don’t remember, but you provided emergency treatment for Marcie that Friday evening in July, even before we checked into the Tranquility.”

  The physician blinked. “In fact, I hadn’t remembered. Was that you and your late husband? Was that Marcie? But of course it was!”

  “We had parked along 1-80, five miles west of the motel,” Jorja recalled. “The view to the south was so spectacular, such a wonderful panorama, that we wanted to use it as a backdrop for some snapshots.”

  Ginger nodded. “And I was driving east in your wake. I saw you up ahead, parked along the shoulder. You were focusing the camera. Your husband and Marcie had stepped over the guardrail and were standing a few feet farther out, posing at the edge of the highway embankment.”

  “I didn’t want them standing so close to the brink. But Alan insisted it was the best position for the best picture, and when Alan insisted on something, there was no use arguing with him.”

  However, before Jorja had been able to click the shutter, Marcie had slipped and fallen backward, over the edge, tumbling down the thirty- or forty-foot embankment. Jorja screamed—“Marcie!”—flung the camera aside, vaulted the guardrail, and started down toward her daughter. Fast as she was, however, Jorja had just reached Marcie when she heard someone shouting: “Don’t move her! I’m a doctor!” That had been Ginger Weiss, and she had descended the slope so rapidly that she had arrived at Marcie’s side simultaneously with Alan, who had started down before her. Marcie was still and silent but not unconscious, only stunned, and Ginger quickly determined that the girl had not sustained a head injury. Marcie began to cry, and because her left leg was tucked under her at a somewhat odd angle, Jorja was certain it was broken. Ginger was able to allay that fear, too. In the end, because the slope was rock-free and cushioned by bunch-grass, Marcie came through with only minor injuries—a few scrapes and bruises.

  “I was so impressed by you,” Jorja said.

  “Me?” Ginger looked surprised. She waited for an incoming single-engine plane to pass overhead. Then: “I did nothing special, you know. I only examined Marcie. She didn’t need heroic care, just Band-Aids.”

  As they put the suitcases in the trunk of Dom’s car, Jorja said, “Well, I was impressed. You were young, pretty, feminine, yet you were a doctor—efficient, quick-thinking. I’d always thought of myself as a born cocktail waitress, nothing more, but that encounter with you started a fire in me. Later, when Alan walked out on us, I didn’t fall apart. I remembered you, and I decided to make more of myself than I’d ever thought I could. In a way, you changed my life.”

  Closing the trunk lid, locking it, handing the keys to Dom (who had already put Marcie in the car), Ginger said, “Jorja, I’m flattered. But you’re giving me much too much credit. You changed your own life.”

  “It wasn’t what you did that day,” Jorja said. “It’s what you were. You were exactly the role model I needed.”

  Embarrassed, the physician said, “Good God! No one’s ever called me a role model before! Oh, honey, you’re definitely unbalanced!”

  “Ignore her,” Dom told Jorja. “She’s the best role model I’ve ever seen. Her humble mutterings are pure shmontses.”

  Ginger Weiss whirled on him, laughing. “Shmontses?”

  Dom grinned. “I’m a writer, so it’s my job to listen and absorb. I hear a good expression, I use it. Can’t fault me for doing my job.”

  “Shmontses, huh?” Ginger Weiss said, pretending anger.

  Still grinning, the writer said, “If the Yiddish fits, wear it.”

  That was the moment when Jorja knew Dominick Corvaisis’ heart was already claimed and that she would have to exclude him from any romantic fantasies she might cook up in the future. The spark of desire and glimmer of deep affection shone brightly in his eyes when he looked at Ginger Weiss. The same heat warmed the physician’s gaze. The funny thing was, neither Dom nor Ginger appeared quite to realize the true power of their feelings for each other. Not quite yet, but soon.

  They drove out of Elko, toward the Tranquility, thirty miles to the west. As twilight faded toward night in the east, Dom and Ginger told Jorja what had happened prior to her and Marcie’s arrival. Jorja found it increasingly difficult to hold the good mood she’d been in since stepping off the plane. As they sped through the gloom-mantled barrens, with craggy and threatening black mountains thrusting up at the horizon under a blood-dark sky, Jorja wondered if this place was, as she had thought, the threshold of a new beginning ... or a doorway to the grave.

  After the Lear landed in Salt Lake City, Utah, Jack Twist quickly transferred to a chartered Cessna Turbo Skylane RG piloted by a polite but tight-lipped man with a huge handlebar mustache. They arrived in Elko, Nevada, at four-fifty-three, in the last light of day.

  The airport was too small to have Hertz and Avis counters, but a local entrepreneur operated a modest little taxi company. Jack had the cab take him—and his three big suitcases—to a local Jeep dealership, where they were getting ready to close, and where he startled the salesman by paying cash for a four-wheel-drive Cherokee wagon.

  To this point, Jack took no evasive action to shake off a tail or even to determine if he had one. His adversaries clearly possessed great power and resources, and regardless of how frantically he tried to elude them, they would have sufficient manpower to keep tabs on a lone target trying to escape on foot or by taxi in a town as small as Elko.

  Once the Cherokee was his, Jack drove away from the dealership, and for the first time he looked for a tail. He glanced repeatedly at the rearview and side mirrors, but he spotted no suspicious vehicles.

  He went directly to an Arco Mini-Mart that he had noticed during the taxi ride from the airport. He parked at the dark end of the lot, beyond the reach of the arc lamps, got out of the wagon, and surveyed the shadowy street behind for an indication of a pursuer.

  He saw no one.

  That didn’t mean they weren’t out there.

  In the Mini-Mart, the blindingly excessive fluorescent lighting and chrome display fixtures made him long for the good old days of quaint comer groceries operated by immigrant couples who spoke with appealing accents, where the air would have been redolent of Mama’s homemade baked goods and Papa’s made-to-order deli sandwiches. Here, the only aromas were a vague trace of disinfectant and the thin odor of ozone coming off the motors of refrigerated display cases. Squinting in the glare, Jack bought a map of the county, a flashlight, a quart of milk, two packages of dried beef, a little box of small chocolate doughnuts—and, on a morbid impulse, something called a “Hamwich,” which was “a guaranteed delicious one-piece sandwich of pulverized, blended, remolded ham paste, bread, and spices,” and which was claimed to be especially “convenient for hikers, campers, and sportsmen.” Ham paste? At the bottom of the airtight plastic package was this legend: REAL MEAT.