Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  without knowing all the answers.”

  “If we bring everyone at the Tranquility into this, tell them the secret, and then don’t wipe their memories again, the cover-up can’t be maintained.”

  “Possibly not,” Bennell said. “And if that’s the case ... then the public will just have to be told. Damn it, Colonel, because of these recent developments, studying Cronin and Corvaisis takes precedence over everything else, including the cover-up. Not only studying them... but letting them have a chance to develop whatever strange talents they may have. In fact, when will you take them into custody?”

  “This afternoon, at the latest.”

  “Then we can expect you to bring them to us sometime tonight?”

  “Yes.” Leland rose from his chair again. He picked up his coat and walked to the office door, where Lieutenant Horner was waiting. He paused. “Doctor, how will you know if Cronin and Corvaisis are changed or not? You think there’s no real chance of ... possession. But if you’re wrong, if they’re not entirely human any more, and if they don’t want you to know the truth, how would you possibly discover it? Obviously, they could defeat a lie detector or any truth serums we have.”

  “That’s a puzzler, all right.” Miles Bennell stood up, jammed his hands into the pockets of his lab coat, and began to pace energetically. “My God, it’s a real challenge, isn’t it? We’ve been working on the problem ever since we learned about their new powers from you on Sunday. We’ve been through ups and downs, despair, but now we think we can deal with it. We’ve devised medical tests, psychological tests, some tricky damn stuff, and we think that all of it taken together will accurately determine whether or not they’re infected, whether or not they’re... human any more. I think your fears are utterly unfounded. We thought infection... possession was a danger at first, but it’s been more than a year since we learned we were wrong. I think they can be entirely human and still have these powers. Are entirely human.”

  “I don’t agree. My fears are well founded. And if Corvaisis and Cronin and the others have changed, and if you believe you can get the truth out of them, you’re kidding yourself. If they’ve changed, they’re so superior to you that deceiving you would be child’s play.”

  “You haven’t even heard what we’ve—”

  “And something else, Doctor. Something you haven’t thought of but which I must consider. Maybe this will help you appreciate my position, with which you’ve thus far had little sympathy. Don’t you realize I have to be suspicious and scared of more than just the people at the Tranquility? Ever since we’ve learned of these recent developments, these paranormal powers, I’ve been scared of you, as well.”

  Bennell was thunderstruck. “Me?”

  “You’ve been working here with it, Doctor. You’re in that cavern nearly every day, doing lab work every day, probing, testing every damn day for eighteen months, with only three brief vacations. If Corvaisis and Cronin were changed in a few hours of contact, why shouldn’t I suspect you’ve been changed after eighteen months?”

  For a moment Bennell was too shocked to speak. Then he said, “But this isn’t the same at all. My studies here were after the fact. I’m essentially a ... well, a fire marshal, a guy who came in after the blaze to sift through the ashes and figure out what happened. The potential for possession or infection—if it ever existed—was at the beginning, in the first hours, not later.”

  “How can I be sure of that?” Leland asked, staring at him coldly.

  “But under these lab conditions, with safety precautions—”

  “We’re dealing with the unknown, Doctor. We can’t foresee every problem that might arise. That’s the very nature of the unknown. And you can’t take precautions against something you can’t foresee.”

  Bennell shook his head violently in denial of the very possibility. “No, no, no. Oh, no.”

  “If you think I’m exaggerating my concern just to irritate you,” Leland said, “then you might ask yourself why Lieutenant Horner sat in that chair so alertly during our long conversation. After all, as you know, he’s an expert in polygraphs, and he could have gone and repaired yours while you and I talked. But I didn’t want to be in a room with you alone, Doctor Bennell. Not alone. No way.”

  Blinking, Bennell said, “You mean, because I might’ve somehow...”

  Leland nodded. “Because if you have been changed, then you might have been able to change me, too, by some process I can’t even begin to imagine. Alone, you might have used the opportunity to attack me, infect me, arrange for me to be possessed, pour the human spirit out of me and pour something else in.” Leland shuddered. “Hell, I don’t know how to put it best, but we both know what I mean.”

  “We even wondered if two of us were enough to insure our safety,” Lieutenant Homer said, his voice rumbling through the low-ceilinged room and vibrating vaguely in the metal walls. “I kept a close eye on you, Doctor. You didn’t notice my hand was always near my revolver.”

  Bennell was too astonished to speak.

  Leland said, “Doctor, you may think I’m a suspicious bastard who’s too quick on the trigger, an unregenerate xenophobic fascist. But I’ve been put in charge of this not merely to keep the truth from the public but also to protect them, and it’s part of my job to think of the worst and then to act as if it will inevitably happen.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Bennell said. “You’re total, off-the-wall paranoids, both of you!”

  “I’d expect you to react that way,” Leland told him, “whether or not you’re still a full-fledged member of the human race.” To Horner he said, “Let’s go. You have a polygraph to repair.”

  Horner went out into The Hub, and Leland started after him.

  Bennell said, “Wait, wait. Please.”

  Leland looked back at the pale, black-bearded man.

  “All right, Colonel. Okay. Maybe I can see why you’ve got to be suspicious, why it’s just part of your job. It’s crazy nonetheless. There’s no chance that I or any of my people could’ve been... inhabited by something else. No chance. But if you were ready to kill me if I aroused your suspicion, would you also kill everyone working under me if you decided they’d all been taken over?”

  “Without hesitation,” Leland said bluntly.

  “But if I and my people could’ve been changed, if that much was possible—and it isn’t possible—then don’t you realize that the entire staff in Thunder Hill could’ve been changed, too? Not just the people who know what’s in that cavern, but everyone, military as well as civilians, all the way up to and including General Alvarado.”

  “Well, sure,” Leland said. “I realize that.”

  “And you’d be willing to kill everyone in the facility?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus!”

  “If you’ve decided to split,” Leland said, “you can forget about leaving for the duration. Eighteen months ago, looking ahead to this possibility, I secretly had a special program entered into VIGILANT, the security system. At my direction, VIGILANT can institute a new policy that makes it impossible for anyone to leave Thunder Hill without a special code. I’m the only one with the code, of course.”

  Bennell’s posture was the essence of indignation and righteous outrage. “You mean, you’d imprison us out of some misguided...” He fell silent as the truth hit him. Then: “My God, you wouldn’t have told me this if you hadn’t already activated VIGILANT’S new program.”

  “That’s right,” Leland said. “When I came in, I identified myself with my left hand on the ID plate, instead of my right. That was the signal to VIGILANT to institute the new order. No one but Lieutenant Horner and I can get out of Thunder Hill until I decide it’s safe.”

  Leland Falkirk left the office, walked out into The Hub, as pleased with himself as was possible under these disturbing conditions. It had taken eighteen months, but he had at last shattered Miles Bennell’s infuriating composure.

  If he had chosen to make one more revelation, he could hav
e brought the scientist all the way to his knees. But there was one secret the colonel had to keep to himself. He had already devised a plan to kill everyone and everything in Thunder Hill in the event that he decided they were infected and only masquerading as human. He had the means to reduce the installation to molten slag and stop the plague right here. The hitch was that he would have to kill himself along with everyone else. But he was prepared for that sacrifice.

  After sleeping only five and a half hours, Jorja showered, dressed, and went to the Blocks’ apartment, where she found Marcie sitting at the kitchen table with Jack Twist. She stopped at the end of the living room, just outside the kitchen doorway, and watched them for a moment, while they remained unaware they were being observed.

  Last night, at four-forty a.m., after Jorja and Jack and Brendan had rendezvoused at the Mini-Mart with the second team of outriders and had returned from Elko, Jack had slept on the floor in the Blocks’ living room, so Marcie would not be alone in the morning after Faye and Ernie had gone off on their respective tasks. Jorja had wanted to move the girl to their own room, but Jack had insisted that he did not mind doing a little babysitting after Marcie woke. “Look,” he said, “she’s sleeping with Faye and Ernie in their bed. If we try to move her now, we’ll wake all of them, and everyone needs whatever sleep he can get tonight.” Jorja said, “But Marcie’s been sleeping for hours, so she’ll be up and around before you are in the morning. She’ll wake you.” And he said, “Better me than you. Really, I don’t need much sleep. Never have.” And she said, “You’re a nice guy, Jack Twist.” He said self-mockingly, “Oh, I’m a saint!” And she said with great seriousness, “You may be the nicest guy I’ve ever met.”

  She had firmly settled on that opinion during the hours they had cruised through the night-clad streets of Elko in his Cherokee. He was smart, witty, perceptive, gentle, and the best listener she’d ever encountered. At one-thirty in the morning, Brendan pleaded exhaustion and curled up in the back of the Cherokee, instantly falling asleep. Jorja, dismayed that the priest had come with them, had not really understood her dismay until Father Cronin went to sleep; then she realized that her feelings had nothing to do with the priest, but resulted from her desire to have Jack Twist to herself. With Brendan out of the way, she got what she unconsciously wanted, and she fell entirely under Jack’s spell, telling him more about herself than she had told anyone since her all-time closest friend had moved away when they were both sixteen. In almost seven years of marriage, she had never had a conversation with Alan that was half as profound as that she had with Jack Twist, a man she’d known less than twelve hours.

  Now, as she stood just outside the kitchen doorway in the Blocks’ apartment and watched Jack with Marcie, Jorja saw another good side of him. He could talk comfortably with a child, without the slightest note of condescension or boredom, something few adults could manage. He joked with Marcie, questioned her about her favorite songs, foods, and movies, helped her color one of the last untinted moons in her album. But Marcie was in a deeper and even more frightening trance than she had been yesterday. She did not answer Jack; she rewarded his attention with nothing more than an occasional blank or puzzled look, but he was not discouraged. Jorja realized that he had spent eight years talking to a comatose wife who had never responded, so he would not lose patience with Marcie anytime soon. Jorja stood in the shadows just beyond the doorway for several minutes, unannounced, torn between the pleasure of watching Jack be Jack and the agony of watching her daughter descend even farther into a state increasingly similar to some of the behavior of an autistic child.

  “Good morning!” Jack said, looking up from the book of red moons, spotting Jorja. “Sleep well? How long have you been standing there?”

  “Not long,” she said, entering the kitchen.

  “Marcie, say good morning to your mother,” Jack told the girl.

  But Marcie did not look up from the moon that she was coloring.

  Jorja met Jack’s eyes and saw sympathy and concern in them. She said, “Well, it’s not really morning any more. Almost noon.”

  She went to Marcie, put a hand under her chin, lifted her head. The child’s gaze focused on her mother’s eyes, but only for a moment, then turned inward. It was a terrible and empty look. When Jorja let go, Marcie turned immediately to the image of the moon before her and began to scrub hard at the paper with her last red crayon.

  Jack pushed his chair back, got up, and went to the refrigerator. “Hungry, Jorja? I’m starved. Marcie ate earlier, but I’ve been waiting breakfast on you.” He pulled open the refrigerator door. “Eggs and bacon and toast? Or I could whip up an omelet with some cheese, herbs, just a touch of onion, a few slivers of green peppers.”

  “You cook, too,” Jorja said.

  “I’ll never win any prizes,” he said. “But it’s usually edible, and at least half the time you can even tell what it is when I put it on your plate.” He pulled open the freezer door. “They have frozen waffles. I could toast a few of those to go along with the omelet.”

  “Whatever you’re having.” She was unable to look away from Marcie, and as she watched her stricken daughter, her appetite faded.

  Jack loaded his arms with a carton of milk, another of eggs, a package of cheese, a green pepper, and a small onion, and carried the fixings to the cutting board beside the sink.

  When Jack began cracking eggs into a bowl, Jorja joined him at the counter. Although she did not think Marcie would hear her even if she shouted, she spoke sotto voce to Jack: “Did she really eat breakfast?”

  He whispered too: “Sure. Some cereal. A piece of toast with jelly and peanut butter. I had to help her a little, that’s all.”

  Jorja tried not to think about what Dom had told her of Zebediah Lomack, or about how Lomack tied in with what had happened to Alan. But if two grown men had been unable to cope with the sick obsessions that had evolved from what they’d seen on July 6 and from the subsequent brainwashing, what chance did Marcie have of coping, living?

  “Hey, hey,” Jack said softly, “don’t cry, Jorja. Crying won’t help anything.” He took her in his arms. “She’ll be all right. I promise you. Listen, just this morning, the others were saying they had a terrific night last night, no dreams for a change, and Dom didn’t sleepwalk, and Ernie wasn’t half as afraid of the dark as usual. Know why? Because just being here, pulling together like a family—it’s already making the memory blocks crumble, relieving the pressure. All right, yes, Marcie’s a bit worse this morning, but that doesn’t mean it’s all downhill for her. She’ll improve. I know she will.”

  Jorja was not expecting the embrace, but she welcomed it. God, how she welcomed it! She leaned against him and allowed herself to be held, and instead of feeling weak and foolish, she felt a new strength flowing into her. She was tall for a woman, and he was not tall for a man, so they were almost the same height, yet she had the atavistic feeling of being protected, guarded. She was reminded of what she’d been thinking yesterday, on the flight north from Las Vegas: Human beings were not meant for solitude, lonely struggles; the very essence of the species was its need to give and receive friendship, affection, love. Right now, she needed to receive, and Jack needed to give, and the confluence of their needs gave new purpose and determination to both of them.

  “An omelet with cheese, herbs, a little bit of chopped onion, and slivers of green pepper,” he said softly, his lips against her ear, as if sensing that she had regained her footing and was ready to go on. “Does that sound all right?”

  “Sounds delicious,” she said, reluctantly letting go of him.

  “And one other ingredient,” he said. “I warned you I wouldn’t win any cooking prizes. I always get one little chip of eggshell in every omelet, no matter how careful I am.”

  “Oh, that’s the secret of a good omelet,” she said. “One bit of eggshell for texture. The finest restaurants make omelets that way.”

  “Yeah? Do they also leave one bone in every fish?” />
  “And a bit of hoof in every order of beef Bourguignon,” she said.

  “One antler in every chocolate mousse?”

  “And one shoemaker’s nail in every apple cobbler.”

  “One old maid in every apple pandowdy?”

  “Oh, God, I hate puns.”

  “Me too,” he said. “Truce?”

  “Truce. I’ll grate the cheddar for the omelet.”

  Together they made breakfast.

  At the kitchen table, Marcie colored moons. And colored moons. And murmured that one word in monotonous, mesmeric, rhythmic chains.

  In Monterey, California, Parker Faine had almost fallen into the lair of a trap-door spider. He counted himself fortunate to have gotten out alive. A trap-door spider—that was how he thought of the Salcoes’ neighbor, a woman named Essie Craw. The trap-door spider constructed a tubular nest in the ground and fixed a cleverly concealed hinged lid at the top. When other hapless insects, innocent and unsuspecting, crossed the perfectly camouflaged lid, it opened and dropped them down to the rapacious arachnoid beast below. Essie Craw’s tubular nest was a lovely large Spanish home far more suited to the California coast than the Salcoes’ Southern Colonial manse, with graceful arches and leaded-glass windows and flowers blooming in large terra cotta pots on the portico. One look at the place, and Parker was prepared to encounter charming and exquisitely gracious people, but when Essie Craw answered the door he knew he was in deep trouble. When she discovered that he was seeking information about the Salcoes, she virtually seized him by his sleeve and dragged him inside and slammed the lid of her tubular nest behind him, for those who sought information often had information to give in return, and Essie Craw fed on gossip as surely as the trap-door spider fed on careless beetles, centipedes, and pillbugs.

  Essie did not look like a spider but rather like a bird. Not a scrawny, thin-necked, meager-breasted sparrow. More like a well-fed sea gull. She had a quick birdlike walk, and she held her head slightly to the side in the manner of a bird, and she had beady little avian eyes.

  After leading him to a seat in the living room, she offered coffee, but he declined, and she insisted, but he protested that he did not want to be a bother. She brought coffee anyway, plus butter cookies, which she produced with such alacrity that he suspected she was as perpetually prepared for drop-in guests as was the trap-door spider.

  Essie was disappointed to hear that Parker knew nothing about the Salcoe family and had no gossip. But since he was not their friend, either, he offered a fresh pair of ears for her observations, tales, slanders, and mean-spirited suppositions. He did not even have to ask questions in order to learn more than he wanted to know. Donna Salcoe, Gerald’s wife, was (Essie said) a brassy sort, too blond, too flashy, phony-sweet. Donna was so thin she was surely a problem drinker who survived on a liquid diet—or maybe she was anorexic. Gerald was Donna’s second husband, and although they had been married eighteen years, Essie did not think it would last. Essie made the sixteen-year-old twin girls sound so wild, so unrestrained, so nubile and licentious, that Parker pictured packs of young men sniffing around the Salcoe house like dogs seeking bitches in heat. Gerald Salcoe owned three thriving shops—an antiques store, two art galleries—in nearby Carmel, though Essie could not understand how any of these enterprises showed a profit when Salcoe was a hard-drinking libertine and a thick-headed boob with no business sense.

  Parker drank only two sips of his coffee and didn’t even nibble at the butter cookies, because Essie Craw’s enthusiasm for malicious gossip went beyond the limits of ordinary behavior into a realm of weirdness that made him uncomfortable and unwilling to turn his back on her—or consume much of what she provided.

  But he learned a few useful things, as well. The Salcoes had taken an impromptu vacation—one week in the wine country, Napa and Sonoma—and had been so desperate to escape the pressures of their various enterprises that they had not wanted to reveal the name of the hotel where they could be reached, lest it get back to the very business associates from whom they needed a rest.

  “He called me Sunday to tell me they were off and wouldn’t be back until Monday, the twentieth,” Essie said. “Asked me to keep a watch over the place, as usual. They’re terrible gadabouts, and it’s such a bother to be expected to look out for burglars and God knows what. I have my own life to live, which of course concerns them not at all.”

  “You didn’t speak with any of them face to face?”

  “I guess they were in a hurry to be off.”

  “Did you see them leave?”

  “No, though I ... well ... I looked out a couple of times, but I must’ve missed them.”

  “The twins went with them?” Parker asked. “Isn’t school in?”

  “It’s a progressive school—too progressive, I say—and travel is thought to be as broadening as classroom work. Did you ever hear such—”

  “How did Mr. Salcoe sound when you spoke with him on the phone?”

  Impatiently, Essie said, “Well ... he sounded ... like he always sounds. What do you mean?”

  “Not at all strained? Nervous?”

  She pursed her tight little mouth, cocked her head, and her bird-bright eyes glittered at the prospect of potential scandal. “Well, now that you mention it, he was a bit odd. Stumbled over his words a few times, but until now I didn’t realize he’d probably been drinking. Do you think ... oh, that he’s had to go off to some clinic to dry out or—”

  Parker had heard enough. He rose to leave, but Essie got between him and the doorway, trying to delay him by making him feel guilty that he had not finished his coffee or even tasted a cookie. She suggested tea instead of coffee, some strudel, or “perhaps an almond croissant.” By dint of the same indomitable will that had made him a great painter, he managed to get to the front door, through it, and onto the portico.

  She followed him all the way to the rental car in her driveway. The little vomit-green Tempo looked, for that one moment, as beautiful as a Rolls-Royce, for it offered escape from Essie Craw. As he sped away, he quoted Coleridge aloud, an apt passage.

  Like one that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread.

  He drove around for half an hour, working up the courage to do what must be done. Finally, upon his return to the Salcoe house, he parked boldly at the head of the circular driveway, in the shadows of the massive pines. He went to the front door again, insistently pressed the bell for three minutes. If anyone was home and merely unwilling to see visitors, he would have answered that unrelenting ring out of sheer desperation. But no one responded.