That night, he sat by the bedroom window, in the dark, while Della tossed and turned and slept and pretended to sleep.
But there was no strange man watching the house. At times, he was all but certain that he had seen a flicker of movement by the hedge or down along the curb where scattered oak trees offered some degree of shelter. But a closer look never revealed anything out of place.
Once, having fallen asleep with his head on his arms and his arms on the window sill, he came awake, snuffling with some undefined fright. He snapped his head up and looked onto the lawn. He would have sworn that, in that first instant, there had been a face pressed against the glass, looking in at him. But there was nothing out there except the night, the wind and the occasional pulse of fireflies. No one could have moved so quickly, in just a fraction of a second. It had to be part of a dream.
Eventually the morning came.
Wednesday was uneventful. He wanted to return to the cabin and prowl around it some more, but he could not build up his courage for that. Instead, they passed the day together and spent the evening at the movies. There, Pete bought three bags of popcorn when they were only two of them to eat it. They laughed about his absent-mindedness, but the incident put him on edge.
He only watched the lawn for a short while that night Again, the stranger did not appear.
On Thursday, he was the stranger. At breakfast, he drank Della's orange juice as well as his own, but he could not remember drinking more than a single glass. As they day progressed, this confusion of numerical perception continued until, eventually, he became so confused with the minutest bits of day-to-day living that he doubted his sanity.
At Porter-Mullion's building downtown, on his way to check in at the office for a few minutes, Pete could not find the proper floor. In the elevator, at the board of buttons, all the numbers seemed to be the same. He pushed a few at random, but they did not take him to the proper floor. He though of pushing each one, in turn, until he was where he wanted to go, but the moment he had pressed one button, he could not remember which one it had been.
He felt like an idiot, having to ask someone to get him to the proper floor. He got out of the elevator the fifth time it opened on a hallway, and walked to the stairs. He had no idea whether he was nearer the roof or the lobby, but he decided to walk up, checking each floor for the Porter-Mullion offices. If he didn't find it going up, he could find it on his way down.
He had gone up five floors, but he could not remember how many there had been. Sometimes, he was sure it had been five. Other times, he was positive it was ten. Again, it might have been no more than one. At some point in his exhausting journey, he found himself going down, though he could not remember having reached the last flight. He looked up. Stairs twisted out of sight, musty, dimly lit, smelling of old pine and floor wax. He shrugged, turned and continued downward. When he rounded the bend and looked down the next flight, it suddenly seemed endless. As far as he could see, steps followed steps, thousands upon thousands of them, dwindling in the distance. He swayed as vertigo took him, and he thought he would fall to his death down those thousands of steps.
He looked at his watch to see how long he had been here.
There were four watches on his arm.
He wiped at his eyes.
There were still four watches, all precisely the same, large-faced with a luminous dial. They all read ten minutes past twelve. He had been on the stairs for forty-five minutes, at least. Or perhaps two hours. It was even possible that he had been on the stairs for less than a minute. He looked away from the watches. There were only three of them now.
The steps before him divided before his eyes. Where there had been a flight of twelve, there were now twenty-four.
And now, forty-eight.
He leaned against the wall, raising a hand to shield his eyes.
There were a hundred fingers on his hand.
He started to scream . . .
. . . and unlocked his front door, walked in and closed it behind him.
The aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled the air of the living room. Della sat in the large, yellow recliner, siping coffee from a ceramic mug. She was wearing a housecoat that fell only to mid-thigh, and she was enormously appealing.
"What's for supper?" he asked.
She watched him for a long, long while, as if she were unable to speak, "You were gone for three days, this time," she finally said. "You disappeared again."
V
All things considered, the Emerald Leaf Motel was not the sort of place he would have chosen to spend three days. First of all, it was only thirty-one miles from home. And though it was clean enough, it was so sterile and secluded that it would have bored him to tears inside of a single afternoon; it had been designed for the tourist passing through, not for those with time to kill.
Yet he had stayed here.
The memory of those three days was curiously bright on his mind. He got out of the Thunderbird, fished the room key from his pocket, and led Della to Room 34. The door opened onto a small, unlit room that smelled predominantly of clean sheets and bathroom cleanser. He flipped on the light, revealing a pleasant chamber, with a television, a made-up bed, desk and chair, and a coffee table.
They searched the desk drawers and even under the bed, but they found nothing curious. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the bath.
"The maid would have straightened it, changed the sheets and all," Della said.
He nodded, distracted by the shimmering visions of those three days.
"You remember it?" she asked, though she had asked the same question a dozen times before. She wanted to say, instead, "Why?", but she knew that was a question for later.
"I remember it too well," he said.
"Still?"
"Yes. It's such a strong memory that it interferes with everything else, makes my mind wander. It hangs there—" He turned and looked at the bed. "I remember how comfortable it was. I slept on the right side, as if you were on the left, and that amused me at the time." He walked into the bathroom. "No stopper for the tub, just the shower. I remember that too. And the first shelf of the medicine cabinet is rusted along the edge." He opened the mirrored door and proved his statement.
"And you didn't do anything but stay here, in your room?"
"I watched television."
"You never do."
"I know, but I did this time."
"Where did you eat?" she asked.
She looked around the room while he tried to remember. The place was so impersonalized, without a single article of his own, that he might never have been here. Perhaps no one had ever been here. There was not even a cigarette burn on the surface of the desk.
"I can't remember eating," he said at last. "I must have gone out to restaurants."
"Maybe the desk clerk will know."
He looked around the room once again. "Let's go see him."
The 4:00-to-midnight shift clerk was a small, balding man named Leroy Simmons. The only distinguishing feature of his bland white face was a small moustache. And even that was so thin that it might have been drawn on with a pencil. He looked up at them, blankly, then offered Pete a tentative smile.
"Can I help you with something?" He shifted his gaze, nervously, to Della, considering her. Pete had evidently signed the register without a "Mr. and Mrs." preceding his name.
"Yes," Pete said, wondering how to phrase everything he had to ask. "Do you remember when I checked in?"
"Three evenings ago, wasn't it?" Simmons asked. He pulled the guest register to him and flipped through the pages of duplicate copy, perforated sign-in cards. "Here it is. Thursday evening at 6:20." Again, he looked at Della, certain she was the center of some trouble about to descend on him.
Pete thought a moment, then forced a smile. "It seems I've had a bit of amnesia," he said. "From a war wound. It happens now and again."
Simmons looked startled. His little mouth drew up in a tart bow, circled by the black line of his moustache.
"I see."
"I was wondering if you might help me reconstruct those days I was here."
"I'm only on duty evenings," Simmons said.
"As best you can, then."
Simmons played with a black and gold pen that was chained to the top of the formica counter. "What do you want to know?"
"Did I come here during the evening? To buy a paper or magazine or anything?"
"Twice," Simmons said, "A paper both times."
Pete frowned. He could not remember having read a paper. Considering how brilliant were his memories of the rest of those three days, that was an odd ommission.
"Did we talk about anything?" he asked.
"The weather," Simmons said. "Pleasantries." He blushed, an unpleasant change on the pallid, round face. He looked as if he were ready to burst. "You'll excuse me if I don't remember exactly what was said. So many strangers go in and out, and the talk is always the same."
He had nothing else to tell them. At last, Pete took out his checkbook and said, "How much do I owe?"
Simmons looked startled. "You paid for three days, when you came in."
Pete looked in his book; he could not find a stub to verify what Simmons had told him.
"No, you paid by cash," Simmons said. "It was unusual. You insisted on paying me then. You said you might have to leave in a hurry and you didn't want to chance getting caught in a line at the desk if you had to depart during a rush hour."
Outside, on the concrete veranda before the office, Della breathed the golden, late afternoon air and said, "Well, he threw a little light on the situation, anyway."
"None at all," Pete corrected.
"What?"
He took his wallet from his hip pocket and opened it. There were two fives and two ones in the money clip. "I had twelve dollars Thursday afternon, in these same denominations. I remember that clearly. I think this is the same twelve. What did I pay him with?"
"I don't understand—"
"That makes two of us."
To their right, a maid pushed a cart of cleaning tools along the wide cement walkway, stopped before the open door of the maintenance room and pushed her equipment inside, wiped her hands on the dust rag at her waist, then threw that after the cart. As she closed the door, Pete approached her.
"Excuse me," he said.
She looked up, wide-faced, perhaps Spanish or Puerto Rican. She had been pretty, once, twenty years and a hundred pounds ago. The years had worn her down while building her up, and her dark eyes looked at him suspiciously out of the layers of fat that cushioned them.
"Yes?" she asked.
"Have you been cleaning Room 34 these past three days?"
She squinted her eyes, an act that made them all but invisible. "I didn't touch anything," she said.
"I'm not accusing you," he said. He took a five dollar bill from his wallet, folded it and held it out to her. "I only want some information."
She looked at Della, down at the five, up at Pete, then down at the five again. She took the money and stuffed it in one of her uniform pockets. "What do you want to know?"
"Have you noticed anything unusual about number 34? Anything at all, no matter how insignificant it might seem."
"The bed is never slept in. And the towels are never used. I don't believe anyone's even in there—though they say someone's renting it."
Della stepped forward now. "Haven't you seen my husband in there, or hanging about the hotel somewhere, waiting for you to finish with the room?"
The maid looked him over as if he were an interesting fungus that had sprung up in the center of the veranda. "Never seen him," she told Della. She seemed more at ease talking to a woman. "And he wouldn't have had to hang around somewhere waiting for me to finish with his room, 'cause it hasn't taken me even a minute the last three days. I just walk in, check that the bed is empty, look at the towels, run a dust cloth over the desk and leave."
"Have you said anything to Mr. Simmons about it— about the empty room?" Della asked.
"I said. But he wouldn't listen. He just stares at me, kind of like I'm not there. Then he says, like he didn't even hear me, 'It's none of your concern, Hattie.' I had to ask the afternoon man whether there was anyone there, and he told me there was."
Pete had been only half paying attention to the conversation. And now, as Della put another question to the maid, he lost interest altogether. Over the heavy woman's shoulder, a hundred and fifty feet down the veranda, a man stood in the dorway, half concealed by the shadows, watching the three of them. His pale face was all that was visible, and only part of that. But he was instantly recognizable as the man who had watched the house, the same man they had seen in the restaurant that night when he had come home from his first lost journey.
Only seconds after he realized they were being watched, Pete saw the stranger draw back, as if he knew he had been seen.
Della asked him something.
He pushed away from her and the maid and ran along the breezeway, keeping the stranger's room at the center of his line of vision. If he looked away, even for a moment, he would never be able to distinguish one room from the next when he looked back.
The watcher slammed the door.
In the next moment, Pete was there, pounding loudly and shouting to be let in. When he got no response, he tried the knob and found that the door was unlocked. He pushed the crimson panel inward and stepped into the room.
The room was unoccupied.
He crossed to the closed bathroom door and pulled that open. The bathroom was unoccupied as well. The window was open, but it did not appear to be large enough to permit a grown man escape.
When he turned around, Della and the maid were standing at the open doorway to the main room. Della's face was unnaturally white, her lips drawn together until they almost disappeared, bloodless lips against bloodless skin. The maid just looked angry.
"Whose room is this?" he asked the heavy woman before she could reprimand him for forcing his way into a room that wasn't his.
"How should I know?" She covered the pocket where the five dollars lay, effectively sealing it from him with one pudgy hand.
He pushed past her and went back to the motel office. "Who is occupying Room 27?" he asked, reaching for the registration book.
It was on the top sheet of card duplicates. The name of the occupant was listed as D. J. Mullion.
"Who?" Della asked.
He could hardly speak. "You," he croaked.
She took it from him and looked at her initials. "It's not my handwriting though. And it says the room was rented—an hour and ten minutes ago. I was with you then."
"What did he look like?" Pete asked Simmons.
"The man in 27? Well, he was tall. And thin. Sharp nose, like a beak. That's about all. He wasn't one of those people who leave any sort of lasting impression."
"What kind of car did he come in?1"
"A VW," Simmons said, reading from the register. "There's the license number."
Pete looked at it. He wanted to rip the ledger apart, to scream and kick at things. As calmly as he could, he said, "He gave you the license number of my Thunderbird. He probably lied about the VW part of it as well."
Simmons stood up, his stool rattling on the tiled floor. "I better go check the room," he said. His bland face was creased with a frown. "See if he stole anything."
"Do that," Pete said.
Then he and Della were alone in the tiny lobby, listening to the banshee roar of the trucks on the distant highway. The air seemed flat, the darkness beginning to press the light from the room.
"Do we have to stay here and wait for him?" she asked.
"No."
"Then let's get away from here, Pete. Please."
"You think I'm crazy, breaking into a strange room like that? Telling wild stories about strange men watching me from dark doorways, all of that? I know it sounds—"
His voice trailed away, for he realized that he was talking much too fast, that he was not communicating anyth
ing but his own panic.
Color had returned to Della's face. Now some of it drained away again. He took time to notice how beautiful she was, even when her face was pasty with fear.
"I don't think you're crazy," she said. "I saw him too, Pete. I saw him, just before he closed the door on you."
VI
Pete discovered the new complications when he woke from a bad dream Monday night. All that day, he had been tense, expectant. When nothing out of the ordinary transpired, the tension broke loose in a nightmare and sent him scurrying down imaginary alleyways, running from his own shadow and from things far worse than that.
The dream ended as he sat straight up in bed, unable to breathe, his stomach cramped with pain. There was perspiration dripping from his jawline. The sheets around him were soaked.
But something was wrong.
For a long while, as his chest heaved with his labored breathing and he gripped the edge of the mattress with his right hand in order to still the dizziness that bothered him, he could not place the source of his annoyance. Della still slept. The clock hummed; the soft green glow from the clock-radio face was the only source of light. But something was definitely wrong; there was something in the room which did not belong here, which had never been here before.
As his pulse slowed and the dizziness abated along with the memory of the nightmare, he realized that he could hear voices, soft, murmuring voices speaking close at hand. He could not see anyone in the bedroom, and nothing about the furniture seemed out of place to him.
He rose and crept, quietly, to the window. The lawn was empty and still, the town quiet. He could not see anyone lurking about the willow or the hedges. There was no movement among the oak trees by the curb. Certainly, there was no one close enough to be heard.
Apparently, there was someone in the house, more than one someone, and the best he could do for a weapon was a handsized dumbell with twenty pounds of weight on it. He hefted it and left the bedroom.
The whispers continued, barely audible strings of words which only occasionally were clear enough to understand. ". . . twice in one week . . . only then . . . what am I going to ... isn't . . . where . . ."
Koontz, Dean - Time Thieves Page 3