Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  world. They had worked on her for three days-Saturday, Sunday, and

  Monday-releasing her, with sanitized recollections, on Tuesday.

  But, in God's name, who were these omnipotent strangers?

  And what had she seen?

  2.

  Portland, Oregon

  Sunday, January 5, Dominick Corvaisis flew to Portland and took a hotel

  room near the apartment house in which he had once lived. Rain was

  falling hard, and the air was cold.

  Except for dinner in the hotel restaurant, he spent the remaining hours

  of Sunday afternoon and evening at a table by the window of his room,

  alternately staring out at the rainlashed city and studying the

  roadmaps. Again and again, he mentally reviewed the trip he had taken

  the summer before last (and would take again starting tomorrow).

  As he had told Parker Faine on Christmas, he was convinced that he had

  stumbled into a dangerous situation out there on the road, and that

  (paranoid as it sounded) the memory of it had been wiped from his mind.

  The mail from his unknown correspondent pointed to no other conclusion.

  Two days ago, he had received a third envelope without a return address,

  postmarked New York. Now, when Dom tired of looking at the maps and

  staring thoughtfully out at the Oregon rain, he picked up that envelope,

  shook out the contents, and studied them. This time there had been no

  note, just two Polaroid photographs.

  The first picture had the least effect on him, although it made him

  tense-unaccountably tense, considering that it was a photograph of

  someone who, as far as he knew, was a stranger to him. A young, pudgy

  priest with unruly auburn hair, freckles, and green eyes. He was facing

  the camera, sitting in a chair near a small writing desk, a suitcase at

  his side. He was very erect, head up and shoulders squared off, hands

  limp in his lap, knees together. The picture disturbed Dom because the

  expression on the priest's face was only one step removed from the

  lifeless, sightless stare of a corpse. The man was alive; that much was

  evident from his rigid posture, yet his eyes were chillingly empty.

  The second photograph hit Dom much harder than the first, and its

  powerful effect did not diminish with familiarity. A young woman was

  the subject of this snapshot, and she was no stranger. Although Dom

  could not recall where they had met, he knew they were acquainted. The

  sight of her made his heart quicken with a fear similar to that which

  filled him when he woke from one of his episodes of sleepwalking. She

  was in her late twenties. Blue eyes. Silver-blond hair. Exquisitely

  proportioned face. She would have been exceptionally beautiful if her

  expression had not been precisely that of the priest: slack, dead,

  empty-eyed. She had been photographed from the waist up, lying in a

  narrow bed, sheets pulled up chastely to her neck. Restraining straps

  held her down. One arm was partially bared to allow clearance for an IV

  needle in her wrist vein. She looked small, helpless, oppressed.

  The photograph instantly brought to mind his own nightmare in which

  unseen men were shouting at him and forcing his face into a sink. A

  couple of times, that bad dream had not begun at the sink itself but in

  a bed in a strange room, where his vision was blurred by a saffron mist.

  Looking at the young woman, Dom was convinced that somewhere there was a

  Polaroid shot of him in similar circumstances: strapped to a bed, an IV

  needle in his arm, his face without expression.

  When he had shown the two photographs to Parker Faine on Friday, the day

  they came in the mail, the artist jumped to similar conclusions. "If

  I'm wrong, roast me in hell and make sandwiches for the devil, but I

  swear this is a snapshot of a woman in a trance or drug-induced stupor,

  undergoing the brainwashing that you evidently underwent. Christ, this

  situation gets more bizarre and fascinating day by day! It's something

  you ought to be able to go to the cops aboutbut you can't, because who's

  to say which side they'd be on?

  It may have been a branch of our own government you ran afoul of out

  there on the road. Anyway, you weren't the only one who got in trouble,

  good buddy. This priest and this woman also stumbled into it. Whoever

  went to this much trouble is hiding something damned big, a lot bigger

  than I thought before."

  Now, sitting at the table by his hotel room window, Dom held one picture

  in each hand, side by side, and let his gaze travel back and forth from

  the priest to the woman. "Who are you?" he asked aloud. "What're your

  names? What happened to us out there?"

  Outside, lightning cracked whiplike in the night over Portland, as if a

  cosmic coachman were urging the rain to fall faster. Like the drumming

  hooves of a thousand harried horses, fat, hard-driven raindrops hammered

  against the wall of the hotel and galloped down the window.

  Later, Dom fastened himself to the bed with a tether that he had

  improved considerably since Christmas. First he wrapped a length of

  surgical gauze around his right wrist and secured it with adhesive tape,

  a barrier between rope and flesh to prevent abrasion. He was no longer

  using an ordinary allpurpose line but a hawser-laid nylon rope, only a

  quarterinch in diameter but with a breaking strength of twenty-six

  hundred pounds. It was expressly made for rock- and mountain-climbing.

  He had switched to the sturdier rope because, on the night of December

  28, he had slipped his previous tether by chewing all the way through it

  while asleep. The mountaineering rope was fray-resistant and nearly as

  impervious to teeth as copper cable would have been.

  That night in Portland, he woke three times, wrestling fu riously with

  the tether, perspiring, panting, his racing heart's accelerator floored

  beneath a heavy weight of fear. "The moon! The moon!"

  3.

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  The day after Christmas, Jorja Monatella took Marcie to Dr. Louis

  Besancourt, and the examination turned into an ordeal that frustrated

  the physician, frightened Jorja, and embarrassed them both. From the

  moment Jorja took her into the doctor's waiting room, the girl screamed,

  screeched, wailed, and wept. "No doctors! They'll hurt me!"

  On those rare occasions when Marcie misbehaved (and they were rare,

  indeed), one hard slap on the bottom was usually all that was required

  to restore her senses and induce contrition. But when Jorja tried that

  now, it had the opposite effect of what she intended. Marcie screamed

  louder, wailed more shrilly, and wept more copiously than before.

  The assistance of an understanding nurse was required to convey the

  shrieking child from the waiting area into an examination room, by which

  time Jorja was not only mortified but worried sick by Marcie's complete

  irrationality. Dr. Besancourt's good humor and bedside manner were not

  enough to quiet the girl, and in fact she became more frightened and

  violent the moment he appeared. Marcie pulled away from him when he

  tried to touch her, screamed, struck him, kicked him, until it became

  necessary for Jorj
a and a nurse to hold her down. When the doctor used

  an ophthalmoscope to examine her eyes, her terror reached a crescendo

  indicated by a sudden loosening of her bladder that was dismayingly

  reminiscent of the fiasco on Christmas Day.

  Her uncontrolled urination marked an abrupt change in her demeanor. She

  became sullen, silent, just as she had for a while on Christmas. She

  was shockingly pale, and she shivered constantly. She had that eerie

  detachment that made Jorja think of autism.

  Lou Besancourt had no simple diagnosis with which to comfort Jorja. He

  spoke of neurological and brain disorders,

  and psychological illness. He wanted Marcie to check into Sunrise

  Hospital for a few days of tests.

  The ugly scene at Besancourt's office was just a warmup for a series of

  fits Marcie threw at the hospital. The mere sight of doctors and nurses

  catapulted her into panic, and invariably the panic became outright

  hysteria that escalated until, exhausted, the child fell into that

  semicatatonic trance from which she needed hours to recover.

  Jorja took a week of sick-leave from the casino and virtually lived at

  Sunrise for four days, sleeping on a rollaway bed in Marcie's room. She

  didn't get much rest. Even in a drugged sleep, Marcie twitched, kicked,

  whimpered, and cried out in her dreams: "The moon, the moon . . ." By

  the fourth night, Sunday, December 29, worried and weary, Jorja almost

  needed medical attention for herself.

  Miraculously, on Monday morning, Marcie's irrational terror simply went

  away. She still did not like being hospitalized, and she pleaded

  aggressively to go home. But she no longer appeared to feel that the

  walls were going to close in and crush her. She remained uneasy in the

  company of doctors and nurses, but she did not shrink from them in

  horror or strike them when they touched her. She was still pale,

  nervous, and watchful. But for the first time in days, her appetite was

  normal, and she ate everything on her breakfast tray.

  Later in the day, after the final testing had been completed, while

  Marcie was sitting in bed eating lunch, Dr. Besancourt spoke with Jorja

  in the hall. He was a hound-faced man with a bulbous nose and moist,

  kind eyes. "Negative, Jorja. Every test, negative. No brain tumors,

  no cerebral lesions, no neurological dysfunction."

  Jorja almost burst into tears. "Thank God."

  "I'm going to refer Marcie to another doctor," Besancourt said. "Ted

  Coverly. He's a child psychologist, and a good one. I'm sure he'll

  ferret out the cause of this. Funny thing is . . . I have a hunch we

  may have cured Marcie without realizing we were doing it."

  Jorja blinked. "Cured her? What do you mean?"

  "In retrospect I can see that her behavior had all the earmarks of a

  phobia. Irrational fear, panic attacks . . . I suspect she'd begun

  to develop a severe phobic aversion to all things medical. And there's

  a treatment called "flooding," wherein the phobic patient is

  purposefully, even ruthlessly exposed to the thing he fears for such a

  long time-hours and hoursthat the power of the phobia is shattered.

  Which is what we might've inadvertently done to Marcie when we forced

  her into the hospital."

  "Why would she have developed such a phobia?" Jorja asked. "Where would

  it've come from? She's never had a bad experience with doctors or

  hospitals. She's never been seriously ill."

  Besancourt shrugged, sidled out of the way of some nurses pushing a

  patient on a gurney. "We don't know what causes phobias. You don't

  have to crash in a plane in order to be afraid of flying. Phobias just

  . . . spring up. Even if we accidentally cured her, there'll be a

  residual apprehension that Ted Coverly can identify. He'll root out any

  remaining traces of phobic anxiety. Don't worry, Jorja."

  That afternoon, Monday, December 30, Marcie was released from the

  hospital. In the car on the way home, she was almost her old self,

  happily pointing out animal shapes in the clouds. At home, she dashed

  into the living room and settled down immediately among the piles of new

  Christmas toys which she had not yet had much opportunity to enjoy. She

  still played with the Little Ms. Doctor kit, though not exclusively or

  with that disturbing intensity that she had exhibited on Christmas Day.

  Jorja's parents raced over to the apartment. Jorja had kept them away

  from the hospital by arguing that they might disturb Marcie's delicate

  condition. Marcie remained in a splendid mood at dinner, sweet and

  amusing, leaving Jorja's parents disarmed.

  For the next three nights, Marcie slept in Jorja's bed in case she

  suffered an anxiety attack, but none materialized. The nightmares came

  with less frequency and less power than before, and Marcie's sleeptalk

  awakened Joria only twice in three nights. "The moon, moon, the moon!"

  But now it was a soft and almost forlorn call rather than a shout.

  In the morning, at breakfast, she asked Marcie about the dream, but the

  girl could not remember it. "The moon?" she said, frowning into her

  bowl of Trix. "Didn't dream about the moon. Dreamed about horses. Can

  I have a horse someday?"

  "Maybe, when we don't live in an apartment any more."

  Marcie giggled. "I know that. You can't keep a horse in an apartment.

  The neighbors would complain."

  Thursday, Marcie saw Dr. Coverly for the first time. She liked him. If

  she still had an abnormal fear of doctors, she hid it well.

  That night Marcie slept in her own bed, with only the company of a teddy

  bear named Murphy. Jorja got up three times between midnight and dawn

  to look in on her daughter. Once she heard the now-familiar chant-"moon,

  moon, moon"-in a whisper that, because it was an eerie blend of fear and

  delight, made the hair prickle on her scalp.

  And on Friday, with three days of school vacation still ahead for

  Marcie, Jorja put her in Kara Persaghian's care once more and returned

  to work. It was almost a relief to get back to the noise and smoke of

  the casino. Cigarettes, stale beer, and the occasional blast of

  halitosis were infinitely more pleasing than the antiseptic stink of the

  hospital.

  She picked up Marcie at Kara's place, and on the way home the girl

  excitedly showed her the product of a day spent drawing on butcher's

  paper: scores of pictures of the moon in every imaginable hue.

  On Sunday morning, January 5, when Jorja got out of bed and went to brew

  coffee, she found Marcie at the dining room table, engaged in a curious

  task. The girl, still in her pajamas, was taking all the photographs

  out of their picture album and making neat stacks of them.

  "I'm putting the pictures in a shoebox, because I need the . . .

  album," the girl said, frowning over the hard word. "I need it for my

  moon collection." She held up a picture of the moon clipped from a

  magazine. "I'm going to make a big collection."

  "Why? Baby, why're you so interested in the moon?"

  "It's pretty," Marcie said. She put the picture on a blank page of the

  photo album and stared at it. In her fixed gaze, in the intensity of


  her fascination with the photograph, there was an echo of the

  single-mindedness with which she had played Little Ms. Doctor.

  With a quiver of apprehension, Jorja thought, This is how the damn

  doctor phobia started. Quietly. Innocently. Has Marcie merely traded

  one phobia for another?

  She had the urge to run to the telephone and somehow get hold of Dr.

  Coverly, even if it was Sunday and his day off.

  But as she stood by the table, studying her daughter, Jorja decided she

  was overreacting. Marcie certainly had not traded one phobia for

  another. After all, the girl wasn't afraid of the moon. Just . . .

  well, strangely fascinated by it. A temporary enthusiasm. Any parent

  of a bright seven-year-old was accustomed to these short-lived but

  fiercely burning fascinations and infatuations.

  Nevertheless, Jorja decided she would tell Dr. Coverly about it when

  she took Marcie to his office for a second session on Tuesday.

  At twelve-twenty A M. Monday, before she turned in for the night, Jorja

  looked in on Marcie to see if she was sleeping soundly. The girl was

  not in bed. In her dark room, she had drawn a chair up to the window

  and was sitting there, staring out.

  "Honey? What's wrong?"

  "Nothing's wrong. Come see

  Marcie said softly, dream ily.

  Heading toward the girl, Jorja said, "What is it, Peanut?"

  "The moon," Marcie said, her eyes fixed on the silvery crescent high in

  the black vault of the sky. "The moon."

  4.