"Me, too," Ernie said, lifting the other two bags out of the truck.
"Me too,' " Faye said, affectionately mimicking him as she picked up the
two lightest suitcases. "Don't play cool with me, you big softy. I
know you've worried about her almost like you used to worry about our
own Lucy. When you first saw the change in Sandy back at the airport, I
was watching you, and I thought your heart was going to melt."
He followed her with the two heavier bags. "Do they have a medical term
for a calamity like that, for a melting heart?"
"Sure. Cardio-liquefaction."
He laughed in spite of the tension that knotted his stomach. Faye was
always able to make him laugh-usually when he needed it most. When they
got inside; he would put his arms around her, kiss her, and convey her
straight upstairs and into bed. Nothing else would be as certain to
chase away the fear that had popped up in him like a jack-in-the-box.
Time spent with Faye was always the best medicine.
She put her two bags down by the office door and fished her keys out of
her purse.
When it had become clear, early on, that Ernie was likely to have an
exceptionally swift recovery and that they would not need to stay in
Milwaukee for months, Faye had decided against flying home to search for
a motel manager. They simply kept the place closed. Now they needed to
unlock, turn up the thermostat, clean away the accumulated dust.
A lot of work to be done . . . but still enough time for a little
horizontal dancing first, Ernie thought with a grin.
He was standing behind Faye as she put the key in the office door, so
fortunately she did not see him twitch and jump in surprise when the
bright day was suddenly claimed by shadows. They were not actually
plunged into darkness; a large cloud merely moved across the sun; the
level of light dropped by no more than twenty percent. Yet even that
was sufficient to startle and unnerve him.
He looked at his watch.
He looked toward the east, from whence the night would come.
I'll be all right, he thought. I'm cured.
On the road: Reno to Elko County. Following the paranormal experience in
Lomack's house on Tuesday, when countless paper moons took orbit around
him, Dominick Corvaisis spent a few days in Reno. On his previous
journey from Portland to Mountainview, he had stayed over to research a
series of short stories about gambling. Re-creating that trip, he
passed Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in "The Biggest Little City in
the World."
Dom wandered from casino to casino, watching gamblers. There were young
couples, retirees, pretty young women, middle-aged women in stretch
pants and cardigans, leatherfaced cowboys fresh from the range and
soft-faced rich men on junkets from far cities, secretaries, truckers,
executives, doctors, ex-cons and off-duty cops, hustlers and dreamers,
escapees from every social background, drawn together by the hope and
thrill of organized games of chance, surely the most democratizing
industry on earth.
As during his previous visit, Dom gambled only enough to be part of the
scene, for his primary purpose was to observe. After the storm of paper
moons, he had reason to believe that Reno was the place where his life
had been changed forever and where he would find the key to unlock his
imprisoned memories. Those around him laughed, chattered, grumbled
about the unkindness of cards, shouted to encourage the rolling dice,
but Dom remained cool and alert, among them yet distanced from them, the
better to spot any clue to the unremembered events in his past.
No clue was revealed.
Each night he contacted Parker Faine in Laguna Beach, hoping that the
unknown correspondent had sent an additional message.
No message was received.
Each night before sleep came, he tried to understand the impossible
dance of paper moons. And he sought an explanation of the circular,
swollen, red rings in his hands, which he had watched fade as he knelt
in a drift of moons in Lomack's living room. No understanding came.
Day by day, his craving for Valium and Dalmane diminished, but his
unremembered nightmares-the moon-grew worse. Each night, he fought
fiercely against the tether with which he moored himself to his bed.
By Saturday, Dom still suspected that the answer to his night fear and
somnambulism lay in Reno. But he decided that he must not change his
plans, must go on to Mountainview. If he concluded the journey without
achieving satori, he could return to Reno at that time.
The summer before last, he departed Harrah's at ten-thirty a m. Friday,
July 6, after an early lunch. On Saturday, January 11, he therefore
followed that timetable, driving onto I-80 at ten-forty, heading
northeast across the Nevada wasteland toward distant Winnemucca, where
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had robbed a bank in another age.
The immense unpopulated expanses of land were little different from the
way they had been a thousand years ago. The highway and power lines,
often the only signs of civilization, followed the route that had been
called the Humboldt Trail in the days of wagon trains. Dom drove over
barren plains and hills bearded with scrub, through an uninviting yet
starkly beautiful primeval world of sagebrush, sand, alkaline flats, dry
lakes, solidified lava beds with columnar crystallizations, distant
mountains. Sheered bluffs and veined monoliths showed traces of borax,
sulfur, alum, and salt. Isolated rocky buttes were splendidly painted
in ocher, amber, umber, and gray. North of the trackless Humboldt Sink,
where the Humboldt River simply vanished into the thirsty earth, were
more streams, as well as the Humboldt itself, and here the forbidding
land featured some contrastingly fertile valleys with lush grasses and
trees-cottonwoods, willows, though not in profusion. Adequate water
meant communities and agriculture, but even in the hospitable valleys,
the settlements were small, the grip of civilization tenuous.
As always, Dom was humbled by the vastness of the West. But the
landscape also aroused new feelings this time: a sense of mystery and an
unsettling awareness of limitless-and eeriepossibilities. Hurtling
through this lonely realm, it was easy to believe something frightening
had happened to him here.
At two-forty-five he stopped for gasoline and a sandwich in Winnemucca,
a town of only five thousand souls yet by far the largest in a county of
sixteen thousand square miles. Then I-80 turned eastward. The land
rose gradually toward the rim of the Great Basin. More mountains peaked
on every horizon, with snow far down their slopes, and more bunch-grass
appeared midst the sagebrush, and there were genuine meadows in some
places, though the desert was by no means left entirely behind.
At sunset, Dom pulled off the interstate at the Tranquility Motel,
parked near the office, got out of the car, and was surprised by a cold
wind. Having driven so long through deserts, he was psychologically
prepared for heat, though he knew it was winte
r on the high plains. He
reached into the car, grabbed a fleece-lined suede jacket, and put it
on. He started toward the motel . . . then stopped, suddenly
apprehensive.
This was the place.
He did not know how he knew. But he knew.
Here, something strange had happened.
He had stopped here on Friday evening, July 6, the summer before last.
He had found the curious isolation of the place and the majesty of the
land enormously appealing and inspiring. Indeed, he had become
convinced that this territory was good material for fiction, and he had
decided to stay a couple of days to familiarize himself with it and to
brood about story ideas suitable to the background. He had not left for
Mountainview, Utah, until Tuesday morning, the 10th of July.
Now, he turned slowly, studying the scene in the fast-fading light,
hoping to prick his memory. As he turned, he became convinced that what
had happened to him here was more important than anything that would
ever happen to him, anywhere, as long as he lived.
The diner, with its big windows and blue neon sign, was at the western
end of the complex, detached from the motel, surrounded by a large
parking lot to accommodate long-haul trucks, of which three were in
attendance. The entire length of the single-story white motel was
served by a breezeway sheltered under an aluminum awning that glistened
darkly with a well-kept coat of forest-green enamel. The west wing had
ten rooms with glossy green doors. It was separated from the east wing
by a two-story section that housed the office on the first floor and, no
doubt, the owner's quarters on the second. Unlike the west wing, the
east wing was L-shaped, with six rooms in the first section, four in the
shorter arm. Dom kept turning and saw the dark sky in the east, the
interstate dwindling into that gloom, then the immense and uninhabited
panorama of shadowed land to the south. More plains and mountains lay
in the west, where the sky above was streaked crimson by the sunset.
Moment by moment, Dom's apprehension grew, until he had turned in a
complete circle and was looking once more at the Tranquility Grille. As
if in a dream, he moved toward the diner. By the time he reached the
door, his heart was hammering. He had the urge to flee.
Steeling himself, he opened the door and went inside.
It was a clean well-lighted place, cozy and warm. Delicious odors
filled the air: French fries, onions, fresh hamburger sizzling on the
griddle, frying ham.
In dreamlike fear, he crossed to an empty table. A ketchup bottle, a
squeeze-bottle of mustard, a sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers, and an
ashtray were clustered in the center. He picked up the salt shaker.
For a moment he did not know why he had picked it up, but then he
remembered sitting at this very table the summer before last, his first
night at the Tranquility Motel. He had spilled a bit of salt and had
reflexively cast a pinch of it over his shoulder, inadvertently throwing
it in the face of a young woman approaching behind him.
He sensed that the incident was important, but he did not know why.
Because of the woman? Who had she been? A stranger. What had she
looked like? He tried to recall her face but could not.
His heart raced without apparent reason. He felt as if he were on the
brink of some devastating revelation.
He strove to recall additional details, but they eluded him.
He put the salt shaker down. Still moving dreamily, shivering with
unfocused anxiety, he crossed to the corner booth by the front windows.
It was unoccupied, but Dom was sure that the young woman, having blinked
the salt out of her eyelashes, had come here that other night.
"Can I help you?"
Dom was aware that a waitress in a yellow sweater was standing beside
him and had spoken to him, but he remained spellbound by the tantalizing
ascension of some terrible memory. It had not swum into view yet, but
it was rising, rising. The woman out of his past, whose face remained a
blank to him, had sat in this booth, radiantly beautiful in the orange
light of the sunset.
"Mister? Is something wrong?"
The young woman had ordered dinner, and Dom had gone on with his meal,
and the sunset had faded, and night had fallen, and- No!.
The memory swam out of the deeps, almost broke through the murky surface
into light, into his consciousness, but at the last moment he recoiled
from it in panic, as if he had seen the horrible face of some
monstrously evil leviathan streaking toward him. Abruptly not wanting
to remember, refusing, Dom loosed a wordless cry, stumbled back, turned
away from the startled waitress, and ran. He was aware of people
staring, aware that he was making a scene, but he did not give a damn.
All he cared about was getting out. He hit the door, flung it open, and
rushed out under a post-sunset, black, purple, and scarlet sky.
He was afraid. Afraid of the past. Afraid of the future.
But afraid mostly because he did not know why he was afraid.
Chicago, Illinois.
Brendan Cronin was saving his announcement for after dinner, when Father
Wycazik, with a full belly and with a glass of brandy in hand, would be
in his best mood of the day. Meanwhile, in the company of Fathers
Wycazik and Gerrano, he ate a hearty dinner: double portions of potatoes
and beans and ham, disposing of a third of a loaf of homemade bread.
Though he had regained his appetite, he had not regained his faith. When
his belief in God had collapsed, it had left in him a terrible dark
emptiness and despair, but now the despair was gone, and the emptiness,
though not entirely filled, was shrinking. He was beginning to perceive
that one day he might lead a meaningful life that had nothing to do with
the Church. For Brendan-for whom no temporal pleasures had been as
enticing as the spiritual joy of the Mass-the mere contemplation of a
secular life was a revolutionary development.
Perhaps his despair had lifted because, since Christmas, he had at least
journeyed along from atheism to a qualified agnosticism. Recent events
had conspired to make him consider the existence of a Power that, though
not necessarily God, was nevertheless above nature.
After dinner, Father Gerrano went upstairs to spend a few hours with the
latest novel by James Blaylock, the fantasist whom Brendan, too, found
interesting, but whose colorful tales of bizarre fantasy creatures and
even more bizarre human beings were too imaginative for a hard-nosed
realist like Father Wycazik. Adjourning to the study with Brendan, the
rector said, "He writes well, but when I'm finished with one of his
stories, I get the peculiar feeling that nothing's what it seems to be,
and I don't like that feeling."
"Maybe nothing is what it seems to be," Brendan said.
The rector shook his head, and his gray hair caught the light in such a
way that it looked like steel wire. "No, when I read for entertainment,
I prefer it in big, solid, heavy blocks that let you grapple with the
reality of life
."
Grinning broadly, Brendan said, "If there's a heaven, Father, and if I
somehow manage to get there with you, I hope I'll have a chance to
arrange a meeting between you and Walt Disney. I'd love to see you
convince him that he should've spent his time animating the collected
works of Dostoevsky instead of the adventures of Mickey Mouse."
Laughing at himself, the rector poured their drinks, and they settled
into armchairs, the fallen priest with a glass of schnapps, his superior
with a small brandy.
Deciding there would be no better time for his news, Brendan said, "If
it's all right with you, I'll be going away for a while, Father. I'd
like to leave on Monday, if I can. I need to go to Nevada."
"Nevada?" Father Wycazik made it sound as if his curate had just said
Bangkok or Timbuktu. "Why Nevada?"
With the taste of peppermint schnapps on his tongue and the scent
burning his sinuses, Brendan said, "That's where I'm being called ' Last
night, in the dream, though I still saw nothing but a brilliant light, I
suddenly knew where I was. Elko County, Nevada. And I knew I must go
back there in order to find an explanation for Emmy's cure and Winton's
resurrection."
"Back there? You've been there before?"
"The summer before last. Just before I came to St. Bernadette's."
Upon leaving his post with Monsignor Orbella in Rome, Brendan had flown
directly to San Francisco to carry out a final assignment from his
Vatican mentor. He stayed two weeks with Bishop John Santefiore, an old
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 46
