Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  unconscious terror without Jorja being aware of it. Her voice raised

  gooseflesh on Jorja's arms.

  In the morning, she would take Marcie to the doctor. Given her

  unexplained dread of all physicians, the girl might cause a hell of a

  scene. But as much as Marcie feared going to a doctor, Jorja feared not

  going. If it had not been so hard to locate the right physician on

  Christmas Day, Jorja would have gone for help already. She was scared.

  Following Marcie's outburst, when her grandfather's teasing about taking

  her to a hospital had driven her away from the table in a mad panic, the

  day had gone downhill. The girl was so overcome by fear that she peed

  her pants, and for ten or fifteen hideously embarrassing and terrifying

  minutes, she resisted all Jorja's efforts to get her cleaned up. She

  screamed, scratched, and kicked. The tantrum passed at last, and she

  submitted to a bath. But she was like a little zombie, slackfaced and

  empty-eyed, as if the terror, in passing out of her, had taken with it

  all her strength and her mind as well.

  That quasicatatonic state lasted almost an hour while Jorja made a dozen

  telephone calls in an attempt to track down Dr. Besancourt, the

  pediatrician who treated Marcie on those rare occasions when she was

  sick. As Mary and Pete tried unsuccessfully to get a smile or at least

  a word of response from the stricken girl, and as Marcie continued to

  act as if she were deaf and mute, Jorja's mind was increasingly filled

  with half-remembered magazine articles about autistic children. She

  couldn't recall whether autism was a condition that began in infancy or

  whether it was possible for a perfectly normal little girl of seven to

  suddenly withdraw into a private place and close out the rest of the

  world forever. Not being able to remember made her a little crazy.

  Gradually, however, Marcie came out of her daze. She began to answer

  Mary and Pete, though in one-word replies delivered in a flat,

  emotionless voice nearly as unsettling as her screams had been earlier.

  Sucking on her thumb as she had not done in at least two years, she went

  into the living room to play with her new toys. Most of the afternoon,

  she played without any visible pleasure, a faint scowl having taken

  unchallenged possession of her small face. Jorja was no less worried

  because of this change, but she was relieved to see that Marcie showed

  no further interest in the Little Ms. Doctor kit.

  By four-thirty, the girl's scowl had faded, and she had become sociable

  once more. In a good mood again, she was such a natural charmer that

  she almost made it seem as if her outburst at the table had been no

  worse than any child's temper tantrum.

  In fact, on the outside stairs of the apartment complex, beyond Marcie's

  hearing, Jorja's mother paused on the way down to the car and said,

  "She's just trying to let us know that she's hurt and confused. She

  doesn't understand why her father left, and right now she needs a lot of

  special attention, Jorja, a lot of love. That's all."

  Jorja knew the problem was worse than that. She had no doubt that

  Marcie was still disturbed by her father's behavior, deeply hurt by his

  abandonment, and full of unresolved conflicts. But something else was

  eating the girl, something that seemed disturbingly irrational, and

  Jorja was scared of it.

  Not long after Pete and Mary left, the girl began playing Little Ms.

  Doctor with the same unnerving intensity she had exhibited earlier, and

  when bedtime came she wanted to take the kit with her. Now, some of the

  Little Ms. Doctor things lay on the floor at Marcie's side of the bed,

  some on the nightstand. And in the dark bedroom the child dreamed and

  whimpered about doctors, nurses, needles.

  Jorja would have been unable to sleep even if Marcie had been perfectly

  still and quiet. Worry induced insomnia even more effectively than a

  dozen cups of coffee. Since she was awake anyway, she listened

  attentively to her daughter's every dreamy utterance, hoping that she

  would hear something that would help her understand or that would assist

  the doctor in arriving at his diagnosis. It was after two o'clock in

  the morning when Marcie mumbled something different from what she had

  mumbled before, something that had nothing to do with doctors and nurses

  and big sharp needles. With a flurry of violent kicks, the girl flopped

  from her stomach onto her back,

  gasped, and went rigid, perfectly still. "The moon, moon, the moon,"

  she said, in a voice that was filled with both amazement and fear, "the

  moon," a voice of such chilling whispery urgency that Jorja knew it was

  not just meaningless sleeptalk. "The moon, moon, oooooonnn .

  Chicago, Illinois.

  Brendan Cronin, priest on probation, slept warmly under a blanket and

  patchwork quilt, smiling at something in a dream. The winter wind

  sighed through the giant pine tree outside, fluted and soughed in the

  caves, and moaned at his window, exerting itself in evenly spaced gusts

  as if nature were ventilating the night with a huge mechanical bellows

  that faithfully produced eight exhalations to the minute. Even lost in

  his dream, Brendan must have been aware of the wind's slow pulse, for

  when he began to talk in his sleep, the words issued from him in a

  sympathetic rhythm: "The moon . . . the moon . . . the moon . . .

  the moon.........

  Laguna Beach, California.

  "The moon! The moon!"

  Dominick Corvaisis was awakened by his own fearful shouting and by a

  burning pain in his right wrist. He was on his hands and knees in the

  darkness beside his bed, wrenching frantically at something that had a

  grip on his arm. He continued to struggle for a few seconds until the

  mists of sleep cleared, whereupon he realized that he was being held by

  nothing more sinister than the rope with which he had tethered himself.

  Breathing raggedly, heart pounding, he fumbled for the lamp switch and

  winced as the sudden light stung his eyes. A quick look at the

  restraining rope showed that in his sleep (and in the dark) he had

  completely untied one of the four tightly drawn knots and partially

  unraveled a second before losing patience for the task. Then, in the

  panic that always accompanied his sleepwalking, he evidently had begun

  to pull and tug and twist against the belaying line as if he were a dumb

  animal protesting a leash, painfully abrading his right wrist.

  Dom got off the floor and, pushing aside the tangled blankets, sat on

  the edge of the bed.

  He knew he had been dreaming, though he could not recall anything about

  the dream. However, he was pretty sure that it was not the nightmare he

  had endured on other occasions during the past month, for that one had

  had nothing to do with the moon. This was another dream, equally

  terrifying but in a different way.

  His shouts, which had been partly responsible for waking him, had been

  so importunate, so haunted, so fright-filled that he could even now

  summon them in memory as clearly as he had first heard them: "The moon!

  The moon!" He shudd
ered and raised his hands to his throbbing head.

  The moon. What did it mean?

  Boston, Massachusetts.

  Ginger sat straight up in bed with a shrill cry.

  Lavinia, the Hannabys'housekeeper, said, "Oh, I'm sorry, Dr. Weiss.

  Didn't mean to scare you. You were having a nightmare."

  "Nightmare?" Ginger had no recollection of a dream.

  "Oh, yes," Lavinia said, "and a really bad one from the sound of it. I

  was passing in the hall when I heard you crying out. I almost came in

  right away, until I realized you must be dreaming. I hesitated then,

  but you went on and on, shouting it over and over again, until I thought

  I'd better wake you."

  Blinking, Ginger said, "Shouting? What was I shouting?"

  "Over and over again," the housekeeper said."

  "The moon, the moon, the moon." You sounded so frightened."

  "I don't remember."

  "The moon,' " Lavinia assured her, "

  "the moon,' over and over again, in such a voice that I half-thought

  someone was killing you."

  Days of Discovery Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not

  absence of fear.

  _MARK TWAIN

  Is there some -meaning to this life?

  What purpose lies behind the strife?

  Whence do we come, where are we bound?

  These cold questions echo and resound through each day, each lonely

  night. We long to find the splendid light that will cast a revelatory

  beam upon the meaning of the human dream.

  -THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS

  A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.

  -RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  December 26-January 11

  1.

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Between December 27 and January 5, Dr. Ginger Weiss went to Pablo

  Jackson's Back Bay apartment six times. On six of those visits he used

  hypnotic therapy to probe cautiously and patiently at the Azrael Block

  that sealed off a portion of her memory.

  To the old magician, she grew more beautiful each time she arrived at

  his door-more intelligent, charming, and appealingly tough-minded, too.

  Pablo saw in her the kind of woman he would have wanted as a daughter.

  Ginger had stirred in him protective fatherly feelings that he had never

  known before.

  He told her nearly everything he had learned from Alexander Christophson

  at the Hergensheimers' Christmas party. She resisted the idea that her

  memory block had not developed naturally but had been implanted by

  persons unknown. "Too bizarre. Things like that don't happen to

  ordinary people like me. I'm just afarmishteh from Brooklyn, not

  someone who gets involved in international intrigue."

  The only thing about his conversation with Alex Christophson that he did

  not tell her was that the retired espionage officer had warned against

  becoming involved with her. If Ginger knew Alex had been deeply

  disturbed, she might decide that the situation was too dangerous to

  justify Pablo's involvement. Out of concern for her and out of a

  selfish desire to be part of her life, he withheld that information.

  At their first meeting on December 27, prior to the session of hypnosis,

  he prepared a lunch of quiche and salad. As they ate, Ginger said,

  "But, I've never been around a sensitive military installation, never

  been involved in any defense research, never associated with anyone who

  could conceivably be part of a spy ring. It's ludicrous!"

  "If you stumbled on some dangerous bit of knowledge, it wasn't in a high

  security area. It was someplace you had every right to be . . .

  except you just happened to be there at the wrong time."

  "But listen, Pablo, if they brainwashed me, that would've taken time.

  They'd have had to hold me in custody somewhere. Right?"

  "I imagine it would take a few days."

  "So you can't be right," she said. "Of course, I realize that while

  they were forcing me to forget the thing I'd accidentally seen, they'd

  also repress the memory of the place where they held me for the

  brainwashing. But there'd be a blank spot in my past somewhere, an

  empty time when I couldn't remember where I'd been or what I'd done."

  "Not at all. They'd implant a set of false recollections to cover the

  missing days, and you'd never know the difference."

  "Good God! Really? They could do that?"

  "One thing I hope to do is locate those false memories," Pablo explained

  as he finished his quiche. "It'll take a long time, slowly regressing

  you back through your life week by week, but when I find the phony

  memories, I'll recognize them tout de suite because they won't have the

  detail, the substance, of genuine memories. Mere stage sets, you see.

  If we find two or three days of tissue-thin memories, we'll have

  pinpointed the origin of your problem because those will be the dates

  when you were in the hands of these people . . . whoever they may

  be."

  "Yes, yes, I see," she said, suddenly excited. "The first day of the

  mushy memories will be the day that I saw something I shouldn't have

  seen. And the last day will be the day they finished brainwashing me.

  It's terribly difficult to believe. . . . But if someone really did

  implant this memory block, and if all my symptoms-the fugues-are a

  result of those repressed memories struggling to the surface, then my

  problem isn't really psychological. There's a chance I could practice

  medicine again. All I've got to do is dig out the memories, bring them

  into the light, and then the pressure will be relieved."

  Pablo took her hand and gave it a squeeze. "Yes, I believe there's real

  hope. But it's not going to be easy. Every time I probe at the block,

  I risk plunging you into a coma . . . or worse. I intend to be

  oh-so-careful, but the risk remains."

  The first two sessions of deep hypnosis were conducted in armchairs by

  the huge bay window, one on December 27, one on Sunday the 29th, each

  lasting four hours. Pablo regresse'd her day by day through the

  previous nine months but found no obviously artificial memories.

  Also on Sunday, Ginger suggested he question her about Dominick

  Corvaisis, the novelist whose picture affected her in such a peculiar

  manner. When Pablo hypnotized her and established that he was speaking

  to the inner Ginger, to her deep subconscious self, he asked if she had

  ever met Corvaisis, and after a brief hesitation she said, "Yes." Pablo

  pursued the point cautiously and diligently, but he could get almost

  nothing more out of her. At last a thin vapor of memory escaped her:

  "He threw salt in my face."

  "Corvaisis threw salt on you?" Puzzled, Pablo asked, "Why?"

  "Can't . . . quite . . . remember."

  "Where did this happen?"

  Her frown deepened, and when he continued to pursue the subject, she

  withdrew, sinking into that frightening comatose state. He quickly

  retreated before she had spiraled down as deep as she had done before.

  He assured her that he would ask no further questions about Corvaisis if

  only she would return, and gradually she responded to that promise.

  Clearly, Ginger had at one time met Corvaisis. And her encounter with

&nbs
p; him was associated with the memories of which she had been robbed.

  In the next two sessions-Monday the 30th and Wednesday, the first day of

  the New Year-Pablo regressed Ginger yet another eight months, to the end

  of July, two summers ago, without discovering any tissue-thin memories

  that would indicate the work of mind-control specialists.

  Then on Thursday, January 2, Ginger asked him to question her about her

  previous night's unremembered dream. For the fourth time since

  Christmas, she had cried out in her sleep-"The moon!"-with such

  insistence that she woke others in Baywatch. "I think the dream's about

  the place and time that's been stolen from me. Put me in a trance, and

  maybe we'll learn something."

  But when hypnotized and returned to last night's dream, she refused to

  answer questions and drifted into a deeper sleep than a mere hypnotic

  trance. He had pulled the Azrael Trigger once more, which was positive

  proof that her dreams involved those forbidden memories.

  On Friday they did not meet. Pablo needed the day to read further about

  memory blocks of all kinds and to think about how best to proceed.

  In addition, he had recorded all five post-Christmas sessions, so he sat

  at the reproduction Sheraton desk in his booklined study and listened to

  portions of those tapes for hours. He was searching for a single word or

  a change in Ginger's voice that might make a particular answer seem more

  important on rehearing than it had seemed at the time.