Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  successfully performing the aortal graft on Viola Fletcher, Ginger had

  been panicked by the sight of water swirling into a drain, but she could

  not imagine why. Damn it, why? She desperately wanted to understand.

  Papa, she thought, I wish you were alive, here to listen, to help.

  Life's nasty surprises had been the subject of one of Papa's little

  sayings that Ginger had once found amusing. When anyone fretted about

  the future, Jacob would shake his head and wink and say, "Why worry

  about tomorrow? Who knows what'll hit you today?"

  How true. And how utterly unamusing flow.

  She felt like an invalid. She felt lost.

  It was Friday, December 6.

  5.

  Laguna Beach, California

  When Dom went to the doctor's office on Monday morning, December 2, in

  the company of Parker Faine, Dr. Cobletz did not recommend immediate

  diagnostic procedures, for he had only recently given Dom a thorough

  examination and had seen no signs of physical disorder. He assured them

  there were other treatments to be tried before jumping to the conclusion

  that it was a brain disorder that sent the writer scurrying upon errands

  of fortification and self-defense inhis sleep.

  After Dom's previous visit, on November 23, the physician had, he said,

  become curious about somnambulism and had done some reading on the

  subject. With most adults the affliction was short-lived; however, in a

  few cases, there was a danger of it becoming habitual, and in its most

  serious forms it resembled the inflexible routines and pattern-obsessed

  behavior of worst-case neurotics. Once habitual, somnambulism was much

  harder to cure, and it could become the dominant factor in the patient's

  life, generating a fear of night and sleep, producing profound feelings

  of helplessness culminating in more serious emotional disorders.

  Dom felt he was already in that danger zone. He thought of the

  barricade he had built across his bedroom door. The arsenal on the bed.

  Cobletz, intrigued and concerned but not worried, had assured

  Dominick-and Parker-that in most instances of persistent somnambulism,

  the pattern of nocturnal rambling could be broken by the administration

  of a sedative before bed. Once a few untroubled nights had passed, the

  patient was usually cured. In chronic cases, the nightly sedative was

  augmented with a diazepam compound during the day when the patient was

  plagued by anxiety. Because the tasks that Dominick performed in his

  sleep were unnaturally strenuous for a somnambulist, Dr. Cobletz had

  prescribed both Valium during the day and a 15 ing. tablet of Dalmane,

  just before slipping under the covers each night.

  On the drive back to Laguna Beach from Dr. Cobletz's offices in

  Newport, with the sea on the right and hills on the left, Parker Faine

  argued that, until the sleepwalking stopped, it was not wise for Dom to

  continue living alone. Hunched over the steering wheel of his Volvo,

  the bearded and shaggyhaired artist drove fast, aggressively but not

  recklessly. He seldom glanced away from the Pacific Coast Highway, yet

  he gave the impression, through the sheer force of his personality, that

  his eyes and attention were fixed constantly and entirely upon Dom.

  "There's plenty of room at my place. I can keep an eye on you. I won't

  hover, mind you. I won't be a mother hen. But at least I'll be there.

  And we would have plenty of opportunity to talk about this, really get

  into it, just you and me, and try to figure how this sleepwalking is

  related to the changes you went through the summer before last, when you

  threw away that job at Mountainview College. I'm definitely the guy to

  help you. I swear, if I hadn't become a goddamned painter, I'd have

  become a goddamned psychiatrist. I have a knack for getting people to

  talk about themselves. How about it?

  Come stay with me for a while and let me play therapist."

  Dom had refused. He wanted to stay at his own house, alone, for to do

  otherwise seemed to be a retreat into the same rabbit hole in which he

  had hidden from life for so many years. The change he had undergone

  during his trip to Mountainview, Utah, the summer before last, had been

  dramatic, inexplicable, but for the better. At thirty-three, he had

  finally seized the reins of life, had mounted it with a flourish, and

  had ridden into new territory. He liked the man he had become, and he

  feared nothing more than slipping back into his dreary former existence.

  Perhaps his somnambulism was mysteriously related to the previous

  changes of attitude that he had undergone, as Parker insisted, but Dom

  had his doubts that the relationship was either mysterious or complex.

  More likely, the connection between the two personality crises was

  simple: The sleepwalking was an excuse to retreat from the challenges,

  excitement, and stress of his new life. Which could not be allowed.

  Therefore, Dom would stay in his own house, alone, take the Valium and

  Dalmane as Dr. Cobletz had prescribed them,

  and tough this thing out.

  That was what he had decided in the Volvo, on Monday morning, and by

  Saturday, the seventh of December, it seemed that he had made the

  correct decision. Some days he needed a Valium and some days he did

  not. Every evening he took a Dalmane tablet with milk or hot chocolate.

  Somnambulism disturbed his nights less frequently. Before beginning

  drug therapy, he walked in his sleep every night, but in the past five

  nights he journeyed just twice, leaving his bed only in the predawn

  hours of Wednesday and Friday mornings.

  Furthermore, his activities in his sleep were far less bizarre and less

  disturbing than they had been. He no longer gathered up weapons, built

  barricades, or tried to nail the windows shut. On both occasions, he

  merely left his Beauty rest for a makeshift bed in the back of the

  closet, where he woke stiff and sore and frightened by some unknown and

  nameless threat that had pursued him in dreams he could not recall.

  Thank God, the worst seemed past.

  By Thursday he had begun to write again. He worked on the new novel,

  picking up where he left off weeks ago.

  On Friday, Tabitha Wycombe, his editor in New York, called with good

  news. Two prepublication reviews of Twilight in Babylon had just come

  in, and both were excellent. She read them to him, then revealed even

  better news: Bookseller excitement, aroused by industry publicity and by

  the distribution of several hundred advance reading copies, continued to

  grow, and the first printing, which had already been raised once, was

  now being raised again. They talked for almost half an hour, and when

  Dom hung up, he felt that his life was back on the rails.

  But Saturday night brought a new development, which might have been

  either a turn for the better or the worse. Every night that he had gone

  walking in his sleep, he had been unable to recall even the smallest

  detail of the nightmares that drove him from his bed. Then, Saturday,

  he was plagued by an uncannily vivid, terrifying dream that sent him

  fleeing through the house in somnambulistic panic, but
this time he

  remembered part of it when he woke, not most of it, but at least the

  end.

  In the last minute or two of the dream, he was standing in a

  half-glimpsed bathroom, everything blurred. An unseen man shoved him

  against a sink, and Dom bent over it, his face thrust down into the

  porcelain bowl. Someone had an arm around him and was holding him on

  his feet, for he was too weak to stand on his own. He felt rag-limp,

  and his knees were quivering, and his stomach was twisting and rolling.

  A second unseen person had two hands on his head, forcing his head into

  the sink. He could not speak. He could not draw breath. He knew he

  was dying. He had to get away from these people, out of this room, but

  he did not have the physical resources to take flight. Though his

  vision remained bleary, he could see the smooth porcelain and the

  chrome-plated rim of the drain in detail, for his face was only inches

  from the bottom of the sink. It was an old-fashioned drain without a

  mechanically operated stopper. The rubber plug had been removed and set

  aside, somewhere out of sight. The water was running, spewing out of a

  faucet, past his face, splattering against the bottom of the basin,

  whirling around and around, down into the drain, around and down. The

  two people pouring him into the sink were shouting, though he could not

  understand them. Around and down ... around.... Staring hypnotically

  into the miniature whirlpool, he grew terrified of the gaping drain,

  which was like a sucking orifice intent upon drawing him into its

  reeking depths. Suddenly he was aware they wanted to stuff him down

  into the drain, dispose of him. Might be a garbage disposal in there,

  something that would chop him to pieces and flush him away He woke,

  screaming. He was in his bathroom. He had walked in his sleep. He was

  at the sink, bent over, screaming into the drain. He leapt back from

  that gaping hole, stumbled, nearly fell over the edge of the bathtub. He

  grabbed a towel rack to steady himself.

  Gasping for breath, shaking, he finally got up enough nerve to return to

  the sink and look into it. Glossy white porcelain. A brass drain rim

  and a dome-shaped brass stopper. Nothing else, nothing worse.

  The room in his nightmare had not been this room. Dominick washed his

  face and returned to the bedroom. According to the clock on the

  nightstand, it was only twotwenty-five A. M.

  Though it made no sense at all and seemed to have no symbolic or real

  connection with his life, the nightmare was profoundly disturbing.

  However, he had not nailed windows shut or gathered up weapons in his

  sleep, so it seemed that this was only a minor setback.

  In fact, it might be a sign of improvement. If he remembered his

  dreams, not just pieces but all of them from beginning to end, he might

  discover the source of the anxiety that had made a night rambler of him.

  Then he would be better able to deal with it.

  Nevertheless, he did not want to go back to bed and risk returning to

  that strange place in his dream. The bottle of Dalmane was in the top

  drawer of the nightstand. He was not supposed to take more than one

  tablet each evening, but surely one indulgence couldn't hurt.

  He went out to the bar cabinet in the living room, poured some Chivas

  Regal. With a shaky hand, he popped the pill in his mouth, drank the

  Chivas, and returned to bed.

  He was improving. Soon, the sleepwalking would stop. A week from now,

  he'd be back to normal. In a month, this would seem like a curious

  aberration, and he'd wonder how he'd allowed it to get the better of

  him.

  Precariously prone upon the trembling wire of consciousness above the

  gulf of sleep, he began to lose his balance. It was a pleasant feeling,

  a soft slipping away. But as he floated down into sleep, he heard

  himself murmuring in the darkness of the bedroom, and what he heard

  himself saying was so strange it startled him and piqued his interest

  even as the Dalmane and whiskey inexorably had their way with him.

  "The moon," he whispered thickly. "The moon, the moon."

  He wondered what he could possibly mean by that, and he tried to push

  sleep away at least long enough to ponder his own words. The moon? "The

  moon," he whispered again, and then he was gone.

  It was three-eleven A. M., Sunday, December 8.

  6.

  New York, New York

  Five days after stealing more than three million dollars from the

  fratellanza, Jack Twist went to see a dead woman who still breathed.

  At one o'clock Sunday afternoon, in a respectable neighborhood on the

  East Side, he parked his Camaro in the underground garage beneath the

  private sanitarium and took the elevator up to the lobby. He signed in

  with the receptionist and was given a visitor's pass.

  One would not think the place was a hospital. The public area was

  tastefully decorated in Art Deco style suited to the building's period.

  There were two small Ertd originals, sofas, one armchair, tables with

  neatly arranged magazines, and all the furniture had a 1920s' look.

  It was too damn luxurious. The Ends were unnecessary. A hundred other

  economies were obvious. But the management felt that image was

  important in order to continue to attract upper-crust clientele and keep

  the annual profit around the hundred percent mark. The patients were of

  all typesmiddle-aged catatonic schizophrenics, autistic children, the

  long-term comatose both young and old-but they all had two things in

  common: Their conditions were all chronic rather than acute, and they

  were from well-to-do families who could afford the best care.

  Thinking about the situation, Jack invariably became angry that no place

  in the city provided fine custodial care for the catastrophically

  brain-injured or mentally ill at a reasonable price. In spite of huge

  expenditures of tax money, New York's institutions, like public

  institutions everywhere, were a grim joke that the average citizen had

  to accept for a lack of alternatives.

  If he had not been a skilled and highly successful thief, he would not

  have been able to pay the sanitarium's exorbitant monthly charges.

  Fortunately, he had a talent for larceny.

  Carrying his visitor's pass, he went to another elevator and rode up to

  the fourth of six floors. The hallways in the upper levels were more

  reminiscent of a hospital than the lobby had been. Fluorescent lights.

  White walls. The clean, crisp, minty smell of disinfectant.

  At the far end of the fourth-floor hall, in the last room on the right,

  lived the dead woman who still breathed. Jack hesitated with his hand

  on the push-plate of the heavy swinging door, swallowed hard, took a

  deep breath, and finally went inside.

  The room was not as sumptuous as the lobby, and it was not Art Deco,

  either, but it was very nice, resembling a medium-priced room at the

  Plaza: a high ceiling and white molding; a fireplace with a white

  mantel; a deep hunter-green carpet; pale green drapes; a green

  leaf-patterned sofa and a pair of chairs. The theory was that a patient

  would be h
appier in a room like this than in a clinical room. Although

  many patients were oblivious of their surroundings, the cozier

  atmosphere at least made visiting friends and relatives feel less bleak.

  The hospital bed was the only concession to utilitarian design, a

  dramatic contrast to everything else. But even that was dressed up with

  green-patterned designer sheets.

  Only the patient spoiled the lovely mood of the chamber.

  Jack lowered the safety railing on the bed, leaned over, and kissed his

  wife's cheek. She did not stir. He took one of her hands and held it

  in both of his. Her hand did not grip him in return, did not flex,

  remained slack, limp, senseless, but at least it was warm.

  "Jenny? It's me, Jenny. How are you feeling today?

  Hmmmmm? You look good. You look lovely. You always look lovely."

  In fact, for someone who had spent eight years in a coma, for someone

  who had not taken a single step and had not felt sunshine or fresh air

  upon her face in all that time, she looked quite good indeed. Perhaps

  only Jack could say that she was still lovely-and mean it. She was not

  the beauty she had once been, but she certainly did not look as if she

  had spent almost a decade in solemn flirtation with death.

  Her hair was not glossy any more, though still thick and the same rich

  chestnut shade as when he had first seen her at her job, behind the

  men's cologne counter in Bloomingdale's, fourteen years ago. The

  attendants washed her hair twice a week here and brushed it every day.

  He could have moved his hand under her hair, along the left side of her

  skull, to the unnatural depression, the sickening concavity. He could