Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  “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.”

  PART II

  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

  FOUR

  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 a farmishteh 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 regressed 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 him was associated with the memories of which she had been robbed.

  In the next two sessions—Monday the 30th and Wednesday, 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 book-lined 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.

  He found nothing startling, though he noticed that, during hypnotic regression, a subtle note of anxiety had entered her voice when their backward journey through time had reached August 31 of the year before last. It was nothing dramatic that would have caught his attention at the time the recordings were made. But by telescoping all the sessions into one afternoon, using the fast-forward control to skip from day to day, he saw the pattern of s
teadily building anxiety, and he suspected they were getting close to the event now hidden behind the Azrael Block.

  Therefore, during their sixth post-Christmas session on Saturday, January 4, Pablo was not surprised when the breakthrough came. As usual, Ginger was sitting in one of the armchairs by the bay window, beyond which a fine snow was falling. Her silver-blond hair glowed with spectral light. As he regressed her back through July of the previous year, her brows knitted, and her voice became whispery and tense, and Pablo knew she was drawing closer to the moment of her forgotten ordeal.

  Since they were going backward in time, he had already taken her through her busy months as a surgical resident at Memorial Hospital, back to the moment when she first reported to George Hannaby for duty on Monday, July 30, more than seventeen months ago. Her memories remained sharp and richly detailed as Pablo conveyed her into Sunday, July 29, when she still had been settling into her new apartment. July 28, 27, 26, 25, 24 ... through those days she had been unpacking and shopping for furniture... all the way back to July 21, 20, 19.... On July 18, the moving van arrived with her household goods, which she had shipped from Palo Alto, California, where she had lived the previous two years while taking an advanced course of study in vascular surgery. Farther back...

  On July 17, she arrived in Boston by car and booked a room overnight at the Holiday Inn Government Center, as close to Beacon Hill as possible, not yet able to stay at her new apartment because she had no bed there.

  “By car? You drove cross-country from Stanford?”

  “It was the first vacation I ever really had. I like to drive, and it was a chance to see a little of the country,” Ginger said, but in such an ominous voice that she might have been talking about a journey through hell rather than a transcontinental holiday.

  So Pablo began to regress her through the days of her journey, back across the midwestern heartland, around the northernmost horn of the Rocky Mountains, through Utah, into Nevada, until they came to Tuesday morning, July 10. She had stayed the previous night at a motel, and when he asked for the name of it, a shudder passed through her.

  “T-Tranquility.”

  “Tranquility Motel? Where is this place? Describe it, too.”

  On the arms of her chair, her hands curled into fists. “Thirty miles west of Elko, on Interstate 80.” Haltingly, reluctantly, she described the twenty-unit Tranquility Motel and Grille. Something about the place terrified her. Every muscle in her body went rigid.

  Pablo said, “So you stayed the night of July ninth at the motel. That was a Monday. All right, so now it’s Monday, July ninth. You’re just arriving at the motel. You haven’t stayed there yet; you’re just driving up to it.... What time of the day is it?”

  She did not answer, and her tremors grew more pronounced, and when he asked again, she said, “I didn’t arrive on Monday. F-Friday.”

  Startled, Pablo said, “The previous Friday? You stayed at the Tranquility Motel from Friday, July sixth, through Monday, July ninth? Four nights at this small motel in the middle of nowhere?” He leaned forward in his chair, sensing that they had found the time when her mind had been tampered with. “Why would you want to stay so long?”

  In a slightly wooden voice, she said, “Because it was peaceful. I was on vacation, after all.” Her strangely stilted voice became more flat and devoid of nuance with each word she spoke. “I needed to relax, you see, and this was a perfect place to relax.”

  The old magician looked away from her, watched the faintly luminous snow slanting down through the dreary gray afternoon beyond the window, and carefully considered his next question. “You said this motel has no swimming pool. And the rooms you’ve described aren’t luxurious. Not resort-style rooms for long-term visits. What on earth did you do for four days out there in the middle of nowhere, Ginger?”

  “Like I said, I relaxed. Just relaxed. Napped. Read a couple of books. Watched some TV. They have good TV even way out there on the plains because they’ve got their own little satellite receiver dish on the roof.” Her manner of speech was now entirely altered, and she sounded as if she were reading from a script. “After two intense years at Stanford, I needed a few days of doing absolutely nothing.”

  “What books did you read while at the motel?”

  “I ... I don’t remember.” Her hands were still fisted, and she was still rigid. Fine pearly beads of sweat popped out along her hairline.

  “Ginger, you’re there now, in the motel room, reading. Understand? You are reading whatever you were reading then. Now look at the title of the book and tell me what it is.”

  “I ... no ... no title.”

  “Every book has a title.”

  “No title.”

  “Because there really is no book—is there?” he said.

  “Yes. I just relaxed. Napped. Read a couple of books. Watched some TV,” she said in a soft, dead, emotionless voice. “They have good TV even way out there on the plains because they’ve got their own little satellite receiver dish on the roof.”

  “What TV shows did you watch?” Pablo asked.

  “News. Movies.”

  “What movies?”

  She flinched. “I ... don’t remember.”

  Pablo was quite sure that the reason she did not remember these things was precisely because she had never done them. She had been at that motel, all right, because she could describe it in minute detail, but she could not recall the books and the TV programs because she had never passed any of that time in those pursuits. Through clever post-hypnotic suggestions, she had been instructed to say that she had done those things, and she had actually been made to remember vaguely having done them, but they were merely artificial memories designed to cover what had really transpired at that motel. A specialist in brainwashing could insert false memories in a subject’s mind, but even if he worked very hard at it and built an intricate web of interlocking details, he could not make the phony memories as convincing as real ones.

  Pablo said, “Where did you eat dinner each night?”

  “The Tranquility Grille. It’s a small place, and it doesn’t have much of a menu, but the food is reasonably good.” That response was, once again, delivered in a flat and hollow voice.

  Pablo said, “What did you eat at the Tranquility Grille?”

  She hesitated. “I ... I don’t remember.”

  “But you told me the food was good. How could you make that judgment if you don’t remember what you ate?”

  “Uhhh ... it’s a small place, and it doesn’t have much of a menu.”

  The more insistently he pressed for details, the more tense she became. Her voice remained emotionless as she spewed out her programmed responses, but her face twisted and hardened with anxiety.

  Pablo could have told her that her apparent memories of those four days at the Tranquility Motel were false. He could have ordered her to blow them out of her mind the way one might blow dust from an old book, and she would have done it. Then he could have told her that her true memories were locked behind an Azrael Block, and that she must hammer it into more dust. But if he had done so, she would have plunged, as programmed, into a coma—or worse. He would have to spend many days, possibly weeks, looking for tiny cracks to exploit cautiously.

  For today, he contented himself with identifying the precise number of hours of her life that had been stolen from her. He took her back to Friday, July 6, of the summer before last, and asked exactly when she signed the register at the Tranquility Motel.

  “A little after eight o’clock.” She no longer spoke in a wooden voice because these were real memories. “It was still an hour before sunset, but I was exhausted. All I wanted was dinner, a shower, and bed.” She described the man and woman behind the check-in counter in detail. She even recalled their names: Faye and Ernie.

  Pablo said, “Once you had checked in, you ate at the Tranquility Grille next to the motel. So describe the place.”

  She did so, and in convincing detail. But when he jumped her ahead t
o the moment at which she left the restaurant, her recollections were phony again, thin and without color. Clearly, her memories had been altered from some point after she had gone into the Tranquility Grille on that Friday evening until she had left the motel and had headed toward Utah the following Tuesday morning.

  Pablo backtracked, returning Ginger to the small restaurant once more, searching for the exact moment at which the genuine memories ended and the false began. “Tell me about your dinner from the moment you went into Tranquility Grille that Friday evening. Minute by minute.”

  Ginger sat up straight in her chair. Her eyes were still closed, but under the shuttered lids, they moved visibly, as if she were looking left and right upon entering the Tranquility Grille. She unfisted her hands and got up, much to Pablo’s surprise. She walked away from her chair, toward the center of the room. He walked beside her to prevent her from bumping into furniture. She did not know she was in his apartment but imagined herself to be making her way between the tables in the restaurant. As she moved, the tension and fear left her, for now she was wholly in that time, prior to all her trouble, when she had had nothing about which to be tense or afraid.

  In a quiet, anxiety-free voice she said, “Took me a while to freshen up and get over here, so it’s almost twilight. Outside, the plains are orange in the late sunlight, and the inside of the diner is full of that glow. I think I’ll take that booth over in the corner by the window.”

  Pablo went with her, guiding her past the Picasso painting toward one of the sofas that was decorated with colorful pastel accent pillows.

  She said, “Mmmm. Smells good. Onions... spices ...french fries ...”

  “How many people in the diner, Ginger?”

  She paused and turned her head, surveying the room with closed eyes. “The cook behind the counter and a waitress. Three men... truck drivers, I guess ... on stools at the counter. And... three at that table... and the chubby priest... another guy over at that booth ...” Ginger continued pointing and counting. “Oh, eleven in all, plus me.”

  “All right,” Pablo said, “let’s go to that booth by the windows.”

  She began walking again, smiled vaguely at someone, side-stepped an obstacle that only she could see, then suddenly twitched in surprise, jerked one hand to her face. “Oh!” She stopped.

  “What is it?” Pablo asked. “What’s happened?”

  She blinked furiously for a moment, smiled, and spoke to someone in the Tranquility Grille back there on July 6 of last year. “No, no, I’m all right. It’s nothing. I’ve already brushed it off.” She wiped her face with one hand. “See?” She had been looking down, as if the other person was seated, and now she raised her eyes as he got up.

  Pablo waited for her to continue the conversation.

  She said, “Well, when you spill salt you’d better throw some over your shoulder, or God knows what’ll happen. My father used to throw it three times, so if you’d been him, you’d have buried me in the stuff.”

  She started walking again, and Pablo said, “Stop. Wait, Ginger. The man who threw salt over his shoulder—tell me what he looks like.”

  “Young,” she said. “Thirty-two or thirty-three. About five-ten. Lean. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Sort of handsome. Seems shy, sweet.”

  Dominick Corvaisis. No doubt about it.

  She began to move again. Pablo stayed at her side until, realizing she was about to sit in the restaurant booth, he guided her gently to the sofa. She sat back on it and looked out a window, smiling at her private panorama of Nevada plains washed in the light of a dying sun.

  Pablo watched and listened while Ginger exchanged pleasantries with the waitress and ordered a bottle of Coors. The beer was served, and Ginger pantomimed sipping it while she watched the sun fade. Seconds ticked past, but Pablo didn’t speed her through the scene because he knew they were approaching the crucial moment when her real memories gave way to phony ones. The event—the thing that she saw and should not have seen—had transpired around this time, and Pablo wanted to learn everything he could about the minutes leading up to it.