police. God knows what might happen. No, no. To avoid jail and protect
our reputations, we must not order lunch sooner than three o'clock. In
fact, bring me another margarita. And another order of these
magnificent nachos, please. More salsahotter if you've got it. A dish
of chopped onions, too, please. And another beer for my dismayingly
restrained friend."
"No," Dom said. "I'm only half-finished with this one."
"That's what I meant by 'dismayingly restrained,' you hopeless Puritan.
You've sucked at that one so long it must be warm."
Ordinarily, Dominick would have leaned back and enjoyed Parker Faine's
energetic performance. The painter's ebullience, his unfailing
enthusiasm for life, was invigorating and amusing. Today, however, Dom
was so troubled that he was not amused.
As the waiter turned away, a small cloud passed over the sun, and Parker
leaned in farther under the suddenly deeper shadow beneath the umbrella,
returning his attention to Dominick, as if he had read his companion's
mind. "All right, let's brainstorm. Let's find some sort of
explanation and figure out what to do. You don't think the problem's
just related to stress ... the upcoming publication of your book?"
"I did. But not any more. I mean, if the problem was just a mild one,
I might be able to accept that career worries lay behind it. But,
Jesus, my concerns about Twilight just aren't great enough to generate
behavior this unusual, this obsessive . . . this crazy. I go walking
almost every night now, and it's not just the walking that's weird. The
depth of my trance is incredible. Few sleepwalkers are as utterly
comatose as I am, and few of them engage in such elaborate tasks as I
do. I mean, I was attempting to nail the windows shut! And you don't
attempt to nail your windows shut just to keep out your worries about
your career."
"You may be more deeply worried about Twilight than you realize."
"No. It doesn't make sense. In fact, when the new book continued to go
well, my anxiety about Twilight started fading. You can't sit there and
honestly tell me you think all this middle-of-the-night lunacy springs
just from a few career worries."
"No, I can't," Parker agreed.
"I crawl into the backs of those closets to hide. And when I wake up
behind the furnace, when I'm still half-asleep, I have the feeling that
something's stalking me, searching for me, something that'll kill me if
it finds my hidey-hole. A couple of mornings I woke up trying to scream
but unable to get it out. Yesterday, I woke up shouting, 'Stay away,
stay away, stay away!" And this morning, the knife . . ."
"Knife?" Parker said. "You didn't tell me about a knife."
"Woke up behind the furnace, hiding again. Had a butcher's knife. I'd
removed it from the rack in the kitchen while I was sleeping."
"For protection? From what?"
"From whatever . . . from whoever's stalking me."
"And who is stalking you?"
Dom shrugged. "Nobody that I'm aware of."
"I don't like this. You could've cut yourself, maybe badly."
"That's not what scares me the most."
"So what scares you the most?"
Dom looked around at the other people on the terrace. Though some had
followed Parker Faine's bit of theater with the waiter, no one was now
paying the least attention to him or Dominick.
"What scares you the most?" Parker repeated.
"That I might . . . might cut someone else."
Incredulous, Faine said, "You mean take a butcher's knife and ... go on
a murdering rampage in your sleep? No chance."
He gulped his margarita. "Good heavens, what a melodramatic notion!
Thankfully, your fiction is not quite so sloppily imagined. Relax, my
friend. You're not the homicidal type."
"I didn't think I was the sleepwalking type, either."
"Oh, bullshit. There's an explanation for this. You're not mad. Madmen
never doubt their sanity."
"I think I'm going to have to see a psychiatrist, a counselor of some
kind. And have a few medical tests."
"The medical tests, yes. But put a hold on the psychiatrist. That's a
waste of time. You're no more neurotic than psychotic."
The waiter returned with more nachos, salsa, a dish of chopped onions, a
beer, and a fifth margarita.
Parker surrendered his empty glass, took the full one. He scooped up
some of the corn chips with generous globs of guacamole and sour cream,
spooned some onions on top, and ate with an appreciation only one step
removed from manic glee.
"I wonder if this problem of yours is somehow related to the changes you
underwent two summers ago."
Puzzled, Dom said, "What changes?"
"You know what I'm talking about. When I first met you in Portland six
years ago, you were a pale, retiring, unadventurous slug."
"Slug?"
"It's true, and you know it. You were bright, talented, but a slug
nonetheless. You know why you were a slug? I'll tell you why. You had
all those brains and all that talent, but you were afraid to use them.
You were afraid of competition, failure, success, life. You just wanted
to plod along, unnoticed. You dressed drably, spoke almost inaudibly,
dreaded calling attention to yourself. You took refuge in the academic
world because there was less competition there. God, man, you were a
timid rabbit burrowing in the earth and curling up in its den."
"Oh, yeah? If I was all that disgusting, why on earth did you ever go
out of your way to strike up a friendship with me?"
"Because, you thick-headed booby, I saw through your masquerade. I saw
beyond the timidity, saw through the practiced dullness and the mask of
insipidness. I sensed something special in you, saw glimpses and
glimmers of it. That's what I do, you know. I see what other people
can't. That's what any good artist does. He sees what most cannot."
"And you called me insipid?"
"It's true-about what an artist does and about you being a rabbit.
Remember how long you knew me before you found enough confidence to
admit being a writer? Three months!"
"Well, in those days, I wasn't really a writer."
"You had drawers full of stories! More than a hundred short stories,
not one of which had ever been submitted to any publication anywhere!
Not just because you were afraid of rejection. You were afraid of
acceptance, too. Afraid of success. How many months did I have to
hammer at you till you finally sent a couple to market?"
"I don't remember."
"I do. Six months! I wheedled and cajoled and demanded and pushed and
nagged until you broke down and started submitting stories. I'm a
persuasive character, but prying you out of your rabbit hole was almost
beyond even my formidable talent for persuasion."
With an almost obscene enthusiasm, Parker scooped up dripping masses of
nachos and stuffed himself. After slurping his margarita, he said,
"Even when your short stories started selling, you wanted to stop. I
had to push you constantly. And after I left Oregon and came back here,
when I left you on your o
wn again, you only continued to submit stories
for a few months. Then you crawled back into your rabbit hole."
Dom did not argue because everything the painter said was true. After
leaving Oregon and returning to his home in Laguna, Parker continued to
encourage Dom through letters and phone calls, but long-distance
encouragement was insufficient to motivate him. He'd convinced himself
that, after all, he was not a writer worthy of publication, in spite of
more than a score of sales he'd racked up in less than a year. He
stopped sending his stories to magazines and quickly fabricated another
shell to replace the one Parker had helped him break out of. Though he
was still compelled to produce stories, he reverted to his previous
habit of consigning them to his deepest desk drawer, with no thought of
marketing them. Parker had continued to urge him to write a novel, but
Dom had been certain that his talent was too humble and that he was too
lacking in self-discipline to tackle such a large and complex project.
He tucked his head down once more, spoke softly, walked softly, and
tried to live a life that was largely beneath notice.
"But the summer before last, all of that changed," Parker said.
"Suddenly you throw away your teaching career. You take the plunge and
become a full-time writer. Almost overnight, you change from an
accountant type to a risk-taker, a Bohemian. Why? You've never been
clear about that. Why?"
Dominick frowned, considered the question for a moment, and was
surprised that he had not thought about it much before this. "I don't
know why. I really don't know."
At the University of Portland, he had been up for tenure, had felt that
he would not be given it, and had grown panicky at the prospect of being
cast loose from his sheltered moorings. Obsessed with keeping a low
profile, he had faded too completely from the notice of the campus
movers-and-shakers, and when the time arrived for the tenure board to
consider him, they had begun to question whether he had embraced the
University with sufficient enthusiasm to warrant a grant of lifetime
employment. Dom was enough of a realist to see that, if the board
refused tenure, he would find it difficult to obtain a position at
another university, for the hiring committee would want to know why he
had been turned down at Portland. In an uncharacteristic burst of
self-promotion, hoping to slip out from under the university's ax before
it fell, he applied for positions at institutions in several Western
states, emphasizing his published stories because that was the only
thing worth emphasizing.
Mountainview College in Utah, with a student body of only four thousand,
had been so impressed by the list of magazines in which he had published
that they flew him from Portland for an interview. Dom made a
considerable effort to be more outgoing than he had ever been before. He
was offered a contract to teach English and creative writing with
guaranteed tenure. He had accepted, if not with enormous delight then
at least with enormous relief.
Now, on the terrace of Las Brisas, as the California sun slid out from
behind a band of white jeweled clouds, he took a sip of his beer,
sighed, and said, "I left Portland late in June that year. I had a
U-Haul trailer hooked to the car, just a small one, filled mostly with
books and clothes. I was in a good mood. Didn't feel as if I'd failed
at Portland. Not at all. I just felt . . . well, that I was getting
a fresh start. I was really looking forward to life at Mountainview. In
fact, I don't remember ever being happier than the day I hit the road."
Parker Faine nodded knowingly. "Of course you were happy!
You had tenure in a hick school, where not much would be expected of
you, where your introversion would be excused as an artist's
temperament."
"A perfect rabbit hole, huh?"
"Exactly. So why didn't you wind up teaching in Mountainview?"
"I told you before . . . at the last minute, when I got there the
second week in July, I just couldn't bear the idea of going on with the
kind of life I'd had before. I was tired of being a mouse, a rabbit."
"Just like that, you were repelled by the low-key life. Why?"
"It wasn't very fulfilling."
"But why were you tired of it all of a sudden?"
"I don't know."
"You must have some idea. Haven't you thought about it a lot?"
"Surprisingly, I haven't," Dom said. He stared out to sea for a long
moment, watching a dozen sailboats and a large yacht as they moved
majestically along the coast. "I just now realized how amazingly little
I've thought about it. Strange I'm usually too self-analytical for my
own good, but in this case I've never probed very deeply."
"Ah ha!" Parker exclaimed. "I knew I was on the right trail! The
changes you went through then are somehow related to the problems you're
having now. So go on. So you told the people at Mountainview that you
didn't want their job any more?"
"They weren't happy."
"And you took a tiny apartment in town."
"One room, plus kitchen and bath. Not much of a place. Nice view of the
mountains, though."
"Decided to live on your savings while you wrote a novel?"
"There wasn't a lot in the bank, but I'd always been frugal."
"Impulsive behavior. Risky. And not a damn bit like you," Parker said.
"So why did you do it? What changed you?"
"I guess it was building for a long time. By the time I got to
Mountainview, my dissatisfaction was so great that I had to change."
Parker leaned back in his chair. "No good, my friend. There must be
more to it than that. Listen, by your own admission, you were as happy
as a pig in shit when you left Portland with your U-Haul. You had a job
with a livable salary, guaranteed tenure, in a place where no one was
ever going to demand too much of you. All you had to do was settle down
in Mountainview and disappear. But by the time you got there, you
couldn't wait to throw it all over, move into a garret, and risk
eventual starvation, all for your art. What the hell happened to you
during that long drive to Utah?
Something must've given you a real jolt, something big enough to knock
you out of your complacency."
"Nope. It was an uneventful trip."
"Not inside your head, it wasn't."
Dominick shrugged. "As far as I remember, I just relaxed, enjoyed the
drive, took my time, looked at the scenery. . . ."
"Amigo!" Parker roared, startling their waiter, who was passing by. "Uno
margarita! And another cerveza for my friend."
"No, no," Dom said. "- I"
"You haven't finished that beer," Parker said. "I know, I know. But
you are going to finish it and drink another, and gradually you're going
to loosen up, and we're going to get to the bottom of this sleepwalking.
I'm sure it's related to the changes you underwent the summer before
last. You know why I'm so sure? I'll tell you why I'm so sure. Nobody
under goes two personality crises in two years for utterly unrelated
reason
s. The two have to be tied together somehow."
Dom grimaced. "I wouldn't exactly call this a personality crisis."
"Oh, wouldn't you?" Leaning forward, lowering his shaggy head, putting
all the force of his powerful personality behind the question, Parker
said, "Wouldn't you really call it a crisis, my friend?"
Dom sighed. "Well . . . yeah. I guess maybe I would. A crisis."
They left Las Brisas late that afternoon, without arriving at any
answers. That night, when he went to bed, he was filled with dread,
wondering where he would find himself in the morning.
And in the morning, he virtually exploded out of sleep with a shrill
scream and found himself in total, claustrophobic darkness. Something
had hold of him, something cold and clammy and strange and alive. He
struck out blindly, flailed and clawed, twisted and kicked, freed
himself, scrambled away in panic, through the cloying blackness, on his
hands and knees, until he collided with a wall. The lightless room
reverberated with thunderous pounding and shouting, an unnerving
cacophony, the source of which he could not identify. He scrambled along
the baseboard until he came to a junction of walls, where he put his
back into the corner and faced out upon the lightless chamber, certain
that the clammy creature would leap on him from the gloom.
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 8
