the house to the gate at the end of the small property.
She intended to find her way back to Newbury Street, locate a telephone,
and call the police, but as she reached the gate, that plan was abruptly
forgotten. On each of the two gateposts was a wrought-iron carriage
lamp with amber panes of glass. Either they'd been left burning by
accident or were activated by a solenoid that had mistaken the dreary
winter morning for twilight. They were electric lamps but had those
flickering bulbs that imitated gas flames, so the lantern-glass was
alive with shimmering, dancing amber light. That throbbing, yellowish
luminosity made Ginger's breath catch, and she was once more pitched
into a state of unreasoning panic.
No! Not again.
But, yes. Yes. The mist. Nothingness. Gone.
Colder.
Her feet and hands were going numb.
She was apparently on Newbury Street again. She had crawled under a
parked truck. Lying in the gloom under the oil pan, she peered out from
beneath her sanctuary, getting a wheel-level view of the vehicles parked
on the other side of the street.
Hiding. Every time she recovered from a fugue, she was hiding from
something unspeakably terrifying. Today, of course, she was hiding from
Pablo's killer. But what about other days? What had she been hiding
from then? Even now, she was hiding not only from the gunman but from
something else that hovered tantalizingly at the edge of remembrance.
Something she had seen out in Nevada. Something.
"Miss? Hey, miss?"
Ginger blinked and turned stiffly toward the voice, which came from the
back of the truck. She saw a man on his hands and knees, looking under
the tailgate. For a moment she thought it was the gunman.
"Miss? What's wrong?"
Not the gunman. Evidently, he had given up when he couldn't find her
quickly and had fled. This was someone she had never seen before, and
this was one occasion when a stranger's face was welcome.
He said, "What the hell are you doing under there?"
Ginger was filled with self-pity. She realized how she had looked,
running crazily through the neighborhood like some demented freak. All
dignity had been stolen from her.
She squirmed toward the man who had spoken to her, grasped the gloved
hand he offered, and allowed him to help her slide out from beneath the
truck, which proved to be a Mayflower Moving Company van. The rear
doors were open. She glanced inside and saw boxes, furniture. The guy
who had pulled her out was young, brawny, and dressed in quilted thermal
coveralls with the Mayflower logo stitched across the chest.
"What's going on?" he asked. "Whore you hiding from, lady?"
As the Mayflower man spoke, Ginger noticed a policeman standing in the
middle of the intersection half a block away,
directing traffic, where a signal light had failed. She ran toward him.
The Mayflower man called after her.
She was surprised she could run at all. She felt as if she were a
creature constructed of nothing but aches and pains and chills. Yet she
ran with a dreamy effortlessness into the shrieking wind. The gutters
were full of icy slush, but the street itself was relatively dry and
calcimine-streaked with deicing compounds. Dodging out of the way of a
couple of oncoming cars, she even found the strength to call out to the
cop as she drew near him. "There's been a man killed! Murder! You've
got to come! Murder!" Then, when he started toward her with a look of
concern on his broad Irish face, she saw the shiny brass buttons on his
heavy, winter-weight uniform coat, and all was lost again. They were
not exactly like the buttons on the leather topcoat the killer had been
wearing; they were not decorated with a lion passant, but with some
other raised figure. But one glimpse sent her thoughts flashing toward
remembrance of buttons she had seen then, durinp- the mysterious events
at the Tranquility Motel. Some forbidden recollection began to surface,
and that pulled the Azrael Trigger.
As she lost control and ran off into her private darkness, the last
thing she heard was her own pathetic cry of despair.
Coldest.
That morning, at least for Ginger Weiss, Boston was the coldest place on
earth. Bitter, polar, piercing, marrow-freezing, the January day
induced a glaciation of the spirit as well as the flesh. When the fugue
receded, she was sitting on the ground in ice and snow. Her hands and
feet were numb, stiff. Her lips were chapped and cracked.
This time she had taken refuge in the narrow space between a row of
well-manicured bushes and a brick building, in a shadowy corner where
the angled wall of a bay-windowed tower met a flat portion of the main
facade. The former Hotel Agassiz. Where Pablo had his apartment. Where
he had been killed. She had come nearly full circle.
She heard someone approaching. Between the hoary branches of the
snow-dressed and ice-laced shrubs, she saw someone climbing over the low
wrought-iron fence that separated the front lawn from the sidewalk. She
did not see the person himself, merely his booted feet, legs clad in
blue trousers, and the flaps of a long, heavy, navy-blue coat. But as
he came across the narrow strip of lawn toward the shrubbery, she knew
who he was: the traffic cop from whom she had turned and run.
Fearing yet another seizure at the sight of his coat buttons, Ginger
closed her eyes.
Perhaps irreversible psychological damage was a side-effect of the
brainwashing she had undergone, an inevitable result of the tremendous
and constant stress generated by the artificially repressed memories
struggling mightily to make themselves known. Even if she could find
another hypnotist to do for her what Pablo had done, perhaps there was
no way the block could be broken or the pressure relieved, in which case
she was destined to deteriorate further. If she was stricken by three
fugues in one morning, what was to prevent three more in the next hour?
The policeman's boots crunched noisily through the sleetskinned snow. He
stopped in front of her. She heard him pressing against the low bushes
and parting them to look into her hiding place. "Miss? Hey, what's
wrong? What were you shouting about murder? Miss?"
Maybe she would fall into a fugue and remain there forever.
" Oh, now, what're you crying about?" the cop said sympathetically.
"Darlin', I can't help if you won't tell me what's wrong."
She would not be the daughter of Jacob Weiss if she failed to respond
warmly and eagerly to the slightest sign of kindness in others, and the
policeman's concern finally affected her. She opened her eyes and looked
up at the topmost brass button on his coat. The sight of it did not
bring the hateful darkness upon her. But that meant nothing, for the
ophthalmoscope, black gloves, and other triggering items had not
affected her later, when she had forced herself to confront them again.
In a crackle of ice, the cop pushed between the bushes. She said,
"They've killed Pablo. They murdered Pablo."
&nb
sp; And as she spoke those words, her distress over her condition was made
worse by a rush of guilt. The 6th of January
would forever be a black day in her life. Pablo was dead. Because he
tried to help her.
Such a very cold day.
5.
On the Road
Monday morning, the 6th of January, Dom Corvaisis cruised his old
Portland neighborhood in a rented Chevrolet, trying to recapture the
mood he had been in when he had left Oregon for Mountainview, Utah, more
than eighteen months ago. The rain, as heavy as any he had ever seen,
had stopped near dawn. Now the sky, though still cloudy from horizon to
horizon, was a particularly powdery, dry-looking shade of gray, like a
burnt field, as if there had been a fire behind the clouds that had
forced out all that precipitation. He drove through the university
campus, stopping repeatedly to let the familiar scenes stir feelings and
attitudes of times past. He parked across the street from the apartment
where he'd lived, and as he stared up at the windows, he tried to recall
the man he had been then.
He was surprised at how difficult it was to recollect the timidity with
which that other Dom Corvaisis had viewed life. Though he could bring to
mind the way he had been, there was no intimacy or poignancy to those
memories. He could see those old days again, but he could not feel
them, which seemed to indicate that he could never be that old Dom
again, regardless of how much he feared the possibility.
He was convinced that he had seen something terrible on the road the
summer before last, and that something monstrous had been done to him.
But that conviction generated both a mystery and a contradiction. The
mystery was that the event had wrought in him an undeniably positive
change. How could an experience fraught with pain and terror effect a
beneficial change in his outlook? The contradiction was that, in spite
of the beneficial effect on his personality, the event filled his dreams
with horror. How could his ordeal have been both terrifying and
positive, both horrible and uplifting at the same time?
The answer, if it could be found, was not here in Portland
but out on the highway. He started the engine, put the Chevy in gear,
pulled away from his old apartment building, and went looking for
trouble.
The most direct route from Portland to Mountainview began with
Interstate 80 north. But as he had done nineteen months ago, Dom took a
more roundabout trail, heading south on Interstate 5. That special
summer, he had scheduled a layover in Reno for a few days to do some
research for a series of short stories about gambling, so the less
direct route had been necessary.
Now in his rented Chevy, he followed the familiar highway, keeping his
speed down to fifty, even as low as forty on the steeper hills, for he
had been pulling a U-Haul trailer that last day in June, and he had not
made good time. And, as before, he stopped for lunch in Eugene.
Hoping to spot something that would goose his memory and provide a link
with the mysterious events of the previous trip, Dom looked over the
small towns that he passed. However, he saw nothing that made him
uneasy, and nothing bad happened all the way to Grants Pass, where he
arrived shortly before six o'clock that evening, right on schedule.
He stayed in the motel where he had been a guest eighteen months ago. He
remembered the number of the room-tenbecause it was near the soft drink
and ice machines, which had been the source of irritating noises half
the night. It was unoccupied, and he took it, vaguely explaining to the
clerk that it had sentimental associations for him.
He ate at the same restaurant, across the road from the motel.
He was seeking satori, which was a Zen word meaning "sudden
enlightenment," a profound revelation. But enlightenment eluded him.
All day he had used the rearview mirror, hoping to spot a tail. During
dinner, he surreptitiously watched the other customers. But if he was
being followed, his tail was masterful, invisible.
At nine o'clock, rather than use the telephone in his room, he walked to
a nearby service station pay phone. With his credit card, he placed a
call to the number of another pay phone in Laguna Beach. By
prearrangement, Parker Faine was waiting there with a report on the mail
that he had collected for Dom earlier in the day. There was little
chance that either of their phones was tapped; however, after receiving
those two disturbing Polaroid snapshots, Dom had decided (and Parker had
agreed) that in this case prudence and paranoia were synonymous.
"Bills," Parker said, "advertisements. No more strange messages, and no
more'Polaroids. How's it going at your end?"
"Nothing so far," Dom said, leaning wearily against the Plexiglas and
aluminum wall of the phone booth. "Didn't sleep well last night."
"But you didn't go for a walk?"
"Didn't even get one knot untied. Had a nightmare, though. The moon
again. Anybody follow you to that pay phone?"
"Not unless he was as thin as a dime and a master of camouflage," Parker
said. "So you can call me here again tomorrow night and not have to
worry that they've tapped the line."
"We sound like two madmen," Dom said.
"I'm kind of having fun," Parker said. "Cops and robbers, hide and
seek, spies-I was always good at games like that when I was a kid. You
just hang in there, my friend. And if you need help, I'll come fast."
"I know," Dom said.
He walked back to the motel through a cold damp wind. As in the hotel in
Portland, he woke three times before dawn, always surfacing from an
unremembered nightmare, always shouting about the moon.
Tuesday, January 7, Dom rose early and drove to Sacramento, then took
Interstate 80 east toward Reno. Rain fell, silvery and cold, for most
of the drive, and by the time he reached the foothills of the Sierras,
it was snowing. He stopped at an Arco station, bought tire chains, and
put them on before heading into the mountains.
The summer before last, he had taken more than ten hours to get from
Grants Pass to Reno, and this time the drive took even longer. When he
finally checked in at Harrah's Hotel where he had stayed before, called
Parker Faine from a pay phone, and had a bite of dinner in the coffee
shop, he was too tired to do anything but pick up a copy of the Reno
newspaper and return to his room. So at eight-thirty that evening,
sitting in bed in his underwear, he saw the story about Zebediah Lomack.
MOON MAN'S ESTATE
WORTH HALF A MILLION DOLLARS
RENO-Zebediah Harold Lomack, 50, whose suicide on Christmas Day led to
the discovery of his bizarre obsession with the moon, left an estate
valued at more than $500,000. According to documents filed with the
probate court by Eleanor Wolsey, sister of the deceased and executrix of
Lomack's will, most of the funds are in accounts at various savings and
loan associations and in treasury bills. The modest house in which
Lomack lived at 1420 Wass Valley Road, has an
appraised value of only
$35,000.
Lomack, a professional gambler, is said to have amassed his wealth
primarily from the game of poker. "He was one of the best players I
ever knew," said Sidney "Sierra Sid" Garfork of Reno, another
professional gambler and winner of last year's World Championship of
Poker at Binion's Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. "He took to cards when
he was just a kid the way some others might have a natural knack for
baseball or math or physics." According to Garfork and other friends of
Lomack, the gambler's estate would have been even larger if he had not
had a weakness for dice games. "He lost back more than half his
winnings at the craps tables, and the IRS took a big chunk, of course,"
Garfork said.
On Christmas night, responding to a neighbor's report of shotgun fire,
Reno police officers found Lomack's body in the garbagestrewn kitchen of
his home. Upon further investigation, they found thousands of
photographs of the moon decorating walls, ceilings, and furniture.
There was more to the story, which had apparently been a local sensation
for the past two weeks. Dom read with growing fascination and
uneasiness. Most likely, Zebediah Lomack's mad obsession with the moon
had nothing to do with Dom's own problems. Coincidence Yet . . . he
felt a stirring of precisely that fear-part terror, part horror, and
part awe-that filled him when he woke from his nightmares, that also
overwhelmed him when he went sleepwalking and tried to nail windows
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 41
