Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  Then he told Brendan and Ginger to push three tables together and pull up chairs to accommodate everyone, and they did as they were told.

  Ernie watched the crooked-eyed man with keen interest.

  The newcomer was concerned about the diner’s front door, which had not shattered during the weird phenomena on Saturday night because it was made of much thicker glass than the windows had been. It was not boarded up, so it offered a weak point to anyone trying to monitor them with a directional microphone. He wanted to know if any plywood was left from the window job, and Dom told him there was, and he sent Ned and Dom to bring back a suitable piece from the stack in the maintenance room behind the motel. They soon returned with a section of wood that was slightly larger than the door, and the newcomer stood it in front of the glass portal, bracing it in place with a table. “Not perfect,” he said, “but good enough to defeat a rifle mike, I think.” Then he headed toward the back of the restaurant to “have a look in the storeroom,” and on his way he told Sandy to plug in the jukebox, switch it to free-play, and punch in some songs. “Some background noise makes eavesdropping more difficult.” Even before he explained why he wanted music, Sandy jumped up and headed for the jukebox, quick to obey him.

  Abruptly, Ernie realized why the crooked-eyed man fascinated him. The guy’s quick thinking, precision movements, and ability to command indicated that he was—or had once been—a career soldier, an officer, a damn good one. He could tune an intimidatingly hard edge into his voice one moment, and the next moment tune it out in favor of cajolery.

  Hell, Ernie thought, he’s fascinating because he reminds me of me!

  That was also why the newcomer had been able to needle Ernie so effectively back in the apartment. The guy knew just where to stick the sharp points because he and Ernie were, in some ways, two of a kind.

  Ernie laughed softly. Sometimes, he thought, I can be such a perfect jackass.

  The crooked-eyed man returned from the storeroom and smiled with satisfaction when he saw everyone seated at the long table which he had told Brendan and Ginger to put together from three smaller ones. He came to Ernie and said, “No hard feelings?”

  “Hell, no,” Ernie said. “And thanks ... thanks a lot.”

  The newcomer went to the head of the table, where a chair had been left for him. With Kenny Rogers crooning on the jukebox, the guy said, “My name’s Jack Twist, and I don’t know any more than you what in hell’s happening, probably less than you know. The whole thing gives me the heebie-jeebies, but I also have to tell you this is the first time in eight years that I’ve really and truly felt like I’m on the right side of an issue, the first time I’ve felt like one of the good guys—and dear God in Heaven, you can’t know how much I’ve needed to feel that!”

  Lieutenant Tom Homer, Colonel Falkirk’s aide-de-camp, had enormous hands. The small tape recorder was totally concealed in his right hand when he carried it into the windowless office. His fingers were so large that he seemed certain to have trouble using the little control buttons. But he was remarkably dextrous. He produced the recorder, placed it on the desk, switched it on, and set it in the playback mode.

  The tape had been duplicated from the reel-to-reel machine on which all phone-monitored conversations were recorded. It was a portion of an exchange that had taken place between several people at the Tranquility only minutes ago. The first part of the tape concerned the witnesses’ discovery that the source of their trouble was not Shenkfield but Thunder Hill. Leland listened with dismay. He had not anticipated that their quest would take the right trail so soon. Their cleverness worried and angered him.

  On the tape: “For God’s sake, shut up. If you think you can plot in privacy here, you’re badly mistaken.”

  “That’s Twist,” Lieutenant Horner said. He had a big voice, too, which was as well controlled as his enormous hands: a soft rumble. He stopped the tape. “We knew he was coming here. And we know he’s dangerous. We figured he’d be more cautious than the others, sure, but we didn’t expect him to act as if he was at war from the get-go.”

  As far as they knew, Jack Twist’s memory block had not seriously deteriorated. He was not suffering fugues, sleepwalking, phobias, or obsessions. Therefore, only one thing might have motivated him to suddenly lease a plane and fly to Elko County: mail from the same traitor who had sent Polaroids to Corvaisis and to the Blocks.

  Leland Falkirk was furious that someone involved in the cover-up, probably someone at Thunder Hill, was sabotaging the entire operation. He had made this discovery only last Saturday night, when Dominick Corvaisis and the Blocks had sat at the kitchen table and discussed the strange snapshots they’d been sent. Leland had ordered an immediate investigation and intense screening of everyone at the Depository, but that was going a lot slower than he had anticipated.

  “There’s worse,” Horner said. He switched on the tape again.

  Leland listened to Twist tell the others about rifle microphones and infinity transmitters. Shocked, they adjourned to the diner, where they could discuss their strategy without being overheard.

  “They’re in the diner now,” Horner said, shutting off the recorder. “Ripped out the phones. I’ve spoken by radio with the observers we have stationed south of 1-80. They watched the witnesses move to the Grille, but they haven’t had any luck tuning in with a rifle mike.”

  “And won’t,” Leland said sourly. “Twist knows what he’s doing.”

  “Now that they’re aware of Thunder Hill, we’ve got to move on them as soon as possible.”

  “I’m waiting to hear from Chicago.”

  “Sharkle’s still barricaded in his house?”

  “Last I heard, yes,” Leland said. “I’ve got to know if his memory block has completely crumbled. If it has, and if he gets a chance to tell anyone what he saw that summer, then the operation’s blown, anyway, and it’d be a mistake to move against the witnesses at the motel. We’ll have to fall back to another plan.”

  Under the diner’s wagonwheel lights, safe in her mother’s lap, Marcie dozed off even as Jack Twist introduced himself. In spite of the nap the girl had taken on the plane, sooty rings of weariness encircled her eyes, and a tracery of blue veins marked her porcelain-pale skin.

  Jorja was tired, too, but Twist’s dramatic arrival was an effective antidote to the narcotizing effects of the dinner. She was wide awake and eager to hear what he had to tell them of his own tribulations.

  He began by briefly mentioning his imprisonment in Central America, with which his military career had ended. He made the experience sound more boring and frustrating than frightening, but Jorja sensed that he had endured grueling hardship. From his matter-of-fact tone, she had the impression that he was a man so secure in his self-image, so certain of his emotional and physical and intellectual strengths, that he never needed to boast or to hear the praise of others.

  When he spoke of Jenny, his late wife, he was less able to maintain an air of detachment. Jorja heard the cadences of lingering grief in this part of his story; a river of love and longing flowed beneath his feigned placidity. The intimacy of mind and spirit between Jack Twist and Jenny, prior to her coma, had surely been extraordinary, for only a special and magical relationship would have ensured his unflagging devotion through the woman’s long deathlike sleep. Jorja tried to imagine what a marriage of that sort might be like, then realized that, regardless of how magical their marriage had been, Jack would not have committed himself so totally to his afflicted wife if he’d been any less than the man he was. Their relationship had been special, yes, but even more special was this man himself. That realization increased Jorja’s already strong interest in Twist and his story.

  He was vague in describing the enterprises by which he had financed Jenny’s long stay at a sanitarium. He made it clear only that what he had done was illegal, that he was not proud of it, and that his lawless days were over. “At least I never killed any innocent bystanders, thank God. Otherwise, I think it’s best if yo
u don’t know any details that might somehow make you accessories-after-the-fact.”

  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 straight-and-narrow path. Besides ... this is difficult to explain ... but, since coming here tonight, I feel in my heart that I re-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, half-formed 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 world-view. 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 Sarver’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 you and Brendan met, you subconsciously recognized the power in each other. On a deep level, you were both reminded of what happened to you that July night, the thing you’ve been forced to forget. And both of you wanted to blast those memories into view. So unwittingly you generated that weird light, which was a re-creation of the way the moon changed from white to red on the night of July 6. It was your subconscious trying to jolt the memory through the block.”

  Ginger could see that their minds were spinning with all these odd ideas, and she wanted to keep them unsettled a while longer, because when they were unsettled they were more likely to absorb what she was saying. Given time for quiet reflection, the heavy armor of skepticism would fall back into place, and her ideas would bounce off.