Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  Their mutual unremembered ordeal had affected Jack Twist. But as with

  Sandy, the mysterious events of that July night had wrought only

  beneficial changes in him.

  Ernie Block said, "I think what you've indirectly told us is that you

  were a professional thief." When Jack Twist said nothing, Ernie

  continued: "It occurs to me that you were almost certainly forced to

  reveal your criminal life to the people who brainwashed us. In fact,

  from what little you've said, I figure those safe-deposit boxes in which

  the postcards turned up were kept under the identities you also used

  when committing robberies; therefore, since that July, the Army and

  government must've known about your illegal activities."

  Jack's silence was confirmation that he had, indeed, been a thief.

  Ernie said, "Yet, once they'd blocked your memories of what really

  happened here that summer, they turned you loose and let you continue

  with what you'd been doing. Why in the hell would they do that? I can

  understand the Army and government bending-even breaking-the law to hide

  whatever happened at Thunder Hill if it involves national security. But

  otherwise, you'd expect them to uphold the law, wouldn't you? So why

  wouldn't they at least anonymously inform the New York police or arrange

  for you to be caught in the middle of a crime?"

  Jorja said, "Because from the start they've not been certain that our

  memory blocks would hold up. They've been monitoring us, at least

  checking in on us once in awhile, to be sure we don't need a refresher

  course in forgetfulness. What happened to Ginger and Pablo Jackson

  seems to prove they're watching, all right. And if they decided it was

  necessary to grab Jack-or any of us-and put him through another session

  with the mind-control doctors, they'd want him where they could reach

  him without too much trouble. It'd be a lot easier to snatch Jack out

  of his apartment or from his car than to spirit him out of prison."

  "Good grief," Jack said, smiling at her, "I think you've hit on it.

  Absolutely." Although Jorja had been slightly chilled by his smile the

  first time she'd seen it, she perceived it differently now; it was a

  warmer smile than it had seemed initially.

  Marcie murmured wordlessly in her sleep. Suddenly and curiously shy

  about meeting Jack Twist's eyes, Jorja used her daughter's dreamy

  mutterings as an excuse to look away from him.

  Jack said, "Whatever secret they're protecting is so important they had

  to let me carry on with whatever crimes I chose to commit."

  Ginger Weiss shook her head. "Maybe not. Maybe they engineered this

  guilt. Maybe they planted the seed, so you'd change."

  "No," Jack said. "If they didn't have time to weave the story of the

  toxic spill into everyone's false memories, they sure wouldn't have had

  time to finesse me toward the straightand-narrow path. Besides . . .

  this is difficult to explain . . .

  but, since coming here tonight, I feel in my heart that I've learned

  guilt and found my way back into society because something so important

  happened to us two summers ago that it put my own suffering in

  perspective and made me see that none of my bad experiences was so bad

  as to justify the warping of my entire life."

  "Yes!" Sandy said. "I feel that, too. All the hell I went through as a

  child . . . none of it matters after what happened that July."

  They were silent, trying to imagine what experience could have been so

  shattering as to make even the most painful of life's tricks seem of

  little consequence. But none of them could puzzle it out.

  After he selected more songs on the jukebox, Jack asked a lot of

  questions of the others, filling the gaps in his knowledge of their

  various ordeals and putting together a complete picture of their

  discoveries to date. That done, he guided them through a discussion of

  strategy, formulating a set of tasks for tomorrow.

  Jorja was again intrigued by Jack's leadership skills. By the time the

  group discussed what steps should be taken next and settled on an

  agenda, they had agreed to undertake precisely the tasks Jack thought

  ought to be accomplished, though there was never a sense that he had

  commanded or manipulated them. When he'd first appeared in the Blocks'

  apartment, he'd proved he could take control of a situation and, by

  sheer force of personality, make people obey him. But now he chose

  indirection, and the speed with which everyone came around to his

  purposes was proof this was the right tactic.

  Jorja realized that he impressed her for many of the same reasons that

  Ginger Weiss had impressed her. She saw in him the kind of person she

  had been struggling to become since her divorce-and the kind of man that

  Alan could never have been.

  The final problem the group dealt with was the danger of an attack by

  Falkirk's men. Now that there was a real chance their memory blocks

  would substantially decay-or crumble completely-in the near future, they

  posed a greater threat to their enemy than at any time since July, the

  summer before last. Tomorrow, they would be separated most of the day

  as they carried out their various tasks and researches, but tonight they

  were in danger if they all stayed at the motel, making one easy target.

  Therefore, they agreed that most of them would go to bed now, while two

  or three drove into Elko and spent part of the night circling through

  town, always on the move, alert. Assuming that the Tranquility was

  under observation, the enemy would at once realize they could no longer

  seize everyone in a clean sweep. At four o'clock in the morning, a

  second group of outriders could rendezvous with the first team in Elko

  and relieve them, so they could come back here and get some sleep.

  "I'll volunteer for the first team," Jack said. "I just have to fetch

  my Cherokee from the hills, where I left it. Who'll go with me?"

  "I will," Jorja said at once, then became aware of the weight of her

  daughter on her lap. "Uh, that is, if someone'll let Marcie sleep in

  their room tonight."

  "No problem," Faye said. "She can stay with Ernie and me .

  Jack said they ought to divide their numbers further, and Brendan Cronin

  volunteered to join him and Jorja on the first team. The priest's

  response triggered a peculiar feeling in Jorja, a pang she would not

  identify as disappointment until much later.

  Because everyone else had errands to run early tomorrow, the second team

  was composed of only Ned and Sandy. A rendezvous between the teams was

  set for four o'clock in the morning at the Arco Mini-Mart.

  "If you get there first," Jack said, "for God's sake don't buy a

  Hamwich. Okay, I guess that's it. We should get moving."

  "Not quite yet," Ginger said. The physician folded her hands and looked

  down at her interlaced fingers, collecting her thoughts. "Since this

  afternoon, when Brendan first arrived, when the rings appeared on his

  and Dom's hands, when the motel office was filled with that strange

  noise and the light ... I've been chewing over everything we've been

  able to learn, trying to make
those bizarre phenomena fit in somehow.

  I've hit on an explanation for some of it; not all, but some of it."

  Everyone expressed an eagerness to hear the theory, halfformed though it

  might be.

  Ginger said, "As different as our dreams are, one element links all of

  them: the moon. Okay. Our other dreams-decon suits, IV needles, beds

  with restraining straps-proved to be based on real experiences, real

  threats. In fact, they weren't dreams but memories surfacing in the

  form of dreams. So it seems reasonable to suppose the moon also

  featured prominently in whatever happened to us, that the moon, too, is

  a memory trying to surface in our dreams. Agreed?"

  "Agreed," Dom said, and everyone else nodded.

  "We've seen how Marcie's lunar obsession changed to a fascination with a

  scarlet moon," Ginger continued. "And Jack's told us that, a couple

  nights ago, the ordinary moonlight in his own nightmare turned into a

  bloody glow. None of the rest of us has dreamed of a red moon yet, but

  I submit that the appearance of this scarlet image in Marcie's and

  Jack's dreams is proof that it's also a memory. In other words, on the

  night of July 6, we saw something that made the moon turn red. And the

  apparitional light, which sometimes fills Brendan's bedroom, which some

  of us witnessed today in the motel office, is a strange sort of

  reenactment of what happened to the real moon on the night in July. The

  apparitional light is a message meant to nudge our memories."

  "Message," Jack said. "All right. But who the devil's sending the

  message? Where's the light come from? How is it generated?"

  "I've got an idea about that," Ginger said. "But let me take this one

  step at a time. First, let's consider what might've happened to make

  the moon turn red that night."

  Jorja listened, as did the others, with interest at first and then with

  growing uneasiness, while Ginger got up from her chair and, pacing,

  outlined an unnerving explanation.

  Ginger Weiss wholeheartedly embraced the scientific worldview. To her,

  the universe unfailingly operated by the rules of logic and reason, and

  no mystery could long endure once attacked in a logical fashion. But

  unlike some in the scientific community-and many in the

  medical'community-she did not believe that a vivid imagination was

  necessarily a hindrance to logic and reason. Otherwise, she might not

  have devised the theory she now conveyed to the others in the

  Tranquility Grille.

  It was a pretty strange theory, and she was nervous about how the others

  would receive it. So she paced to the jukebox, over to the service

  counter, back to the table, moving constantly as she talked:

  "The men who dealt with us in the first day or two of imprisonment were

  wearing decontamination suits designed to handle biological risks. They

  must've been worried we were infected with something. So perhaps part

  of what we saw was a scarlet cloud of biological contaminant. When it

  passed overhead, it turned the moon red."

  "And we were all infected with some strange disease," Jorja said.

  Ginger said, "That may be why, yesterday at the special place along the

  highway, I had the memory-flash of Dom shouting, 'It's inside me. It's

  inside me." That would have been a logical thing for him to shout if,

  that night, he had found himself caught up in a red cloud of some

  contaminant and realized he was breathing it in. And Brendan's told us

  that the same words-'It's inside me'-came spontaneously to his lips last

  night in Reno, when the red apparitional light filled his room."

  "Bacteria? Disease? Then why didn't we get sick?" Brendan said.

  "Because they treated us immediately," Dom said. "We've already worked

  that one out, Brendan-yesterday, before you got here. But, Ginger, the

  light that filled the office this afternoon was too bright to represent

  moonlight filtered through a red cloud."

  "I know," Ginger said, pacing. "Underdeveloped as it is, my idea

  doesn't explain everything-like the rings on your hands. So maybe it's

  not the right idea. On the other hand, it does explain some things, and

  maybe if we think about it long enough, we'll see how it explains these

  other puzzles, as well. And as a theory, it has one big plus."

  "What's that?" Ned asked.

  "It could explain why Brendan was involved in two miracle cures in

  Chicago. It could explain the whirling paper moons in Zebediah Lomack's

  house. And the destruction here at the diner on Saturday night, when

  Dom was trying to recall what had happened the summer before last. It

  could explain the source of the apparitional light."

  On the jukebox, the last of a series of songs had faded to its end as

  Ginger began to speak. But no one got up to choose more music, for they

  were riveted by her promise to explain the inexplicable.

  "To this point," Ginger said, "the theory's pretty mundane. A red cloud

  of contaminant. Nothing hard to accept in that. But now . . . you've

  got to take a big leap of imagination with me. We've been assuming that

  the miraculous healing and certainly the poltergeist phenomena have some

  mysterious external source. Father Wycazik, Brendan's rector, thinks

  that external source is God. The rest of us don't feel it's exactly

  divine. We don't know what the hell it is, but we all assume that it's

  an external power, something out there somewhere that's taunting us or

  trying to reach us with a message or threatening us. But what if these

  wonders have an internal source. Suppose Brendan and Dom really possess

  some power, and suppose that they possess it because of what happened

  during the night of the red moon. Suppose they have telekinesis-which

  is the power to move objects without touching them, which would explain

  the whirling paper moons and the destruction in the diner."

  Everyone looked at Dom and Brendan in amazement, but no one was more

  startled than those two men, who gaped at Ginger, shocked.

  Dom said, "But that's ridiculous! I'm no psychic, no sorcerer."

  "Me neither," Brendan said.

  Ginger shook her head. "Not consciously, no. I'm saying maybe the

  power is in you, and you're just not aware of it. Bear with me. Think

  about it. The first time the rings appeared on Brendan's hands, the

  first time he exercised his healing power, was when he was combing the

  hair of the little girl in the hospital. He's said he was overwhelmed

  with pity for her and filled with frustration and anger that he couldn't

  help her. Maybe it was his intense frustration and anger that freed the

  power in him, even though he wasn't aware of it. He couldn't be aware of

  it because the acquisition of this power is part of what he's been made

  to forget. Okay, the second time, with the wounded policeman, Brendan

  found himself in an extreme crisis, which might trigger these powers."

  She began pacing and talking more rapidly to prevent debate until she'd

  finished. "Now think about Dom's experiences. The first one, in Reno,

  at Lomack's house. The way you told it to us, Dom ... as you wandered

  through the house, you became so frustrated by the ever-deepening nature
>
  of the mystery that you wanted to rush through those rooms and tear

  those paper moons off the walls. Those were your very words. And, of

  course, that's what happened: You pulled those moons off the walls, not

  with your hands but with this power. And remember, the pictures only

  fell to the floor when you shouted, 'Stop it, stop it!" When it did

  stop, you thought something had heard you and obeyed or relented, but in

  fact you stopped it yourself."

  Brendan, Dom, and a couple of the others still looked skeptical.

  But Ginger had captured Sandy Server's imagination. "It makes sense! It

  makes even more sense if you think about what happened here on Saturday

  night, right in this very room. Dom was trying to remember back to that

  Friday in July, trying to remember what happened right up to the second

  where his memory block took effect. And while he was struggling to

  remember . . . all of a sudden this strange noise, this thunder,

  started to rumble through the diner, and everything started to shake. He

  could've been unconsciously using this power of his to re-create the

  effects of whatever happened back then."

  "Good!" Ginger said encouragingly. "See? The more you think about it,

  the more it hangs together."

  "But the strange light," Dom said. "You're saying Brendan and I somehow

  manufactured that?"

  "Yes, possibly," Ginger said, returning to the table, leaning on her

  empty chair. "Pyrokinesis. The ability to spontaneously generate heat

  or fire with the power of the mind alone."

  "This wasn't fire," Dom said. "It was light."

  "So . . . call it 'photokinesis,' " Ginger said. "But I think when