Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers
Page 1
STRANGERS [065-5.0]
BY DEAN KOONTZ
Synopsis:
A group of seemingly diverse people are experiencing fugue states and
debilitating nightmares. Have they all shared a common experience? And,
does that experience portend the end of humanity as we know it?
Praise for Dean Koontz's
STRANGERS
"Koontz] is a great storyteller, and STRANGERS features a plot so
original you'll be reading, with chills, well into morning."
-New York Daily News
"The plot twists ingeniously ... an engaging, often chilling, book. I
found the novel tough to put down, except when making sure that the
doors and windows were securely locked."
-New York Times Book Review
"Koontz is a master at constructing vivid, eerily realistic worlds that
hold readers spellbound. A memorable thriller."
-Booklist
"Dean Koontz is a master storyteller, building suspense page by page,
episode by episode. He has absolutely amazing knowledge of his subject
matter, whether it be religion, military weapons, medicine, or an
understanding of human nature. STRANGERS is absolutely enthralling."
-Witchita Falls Times
"An almost unbearably suspenseful page-turner. His ability to maintain
the mystery through several plot twists is impressive, as is his array
of believable and sympathetic characters. STRANGERS may be the suspense
novel of the year."
-Library Journal
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that
this book is stolen property. it was reported as "unsold and destroyed"
to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received
any
payment for this "stripped book."
To Bob Tanner
whose enthusiasm at a crucial stage
was more important than he can know.
Definition for "fugue"
taken from Taber's EnCyclopedia Medical Dictionary, Clayton L. Thomas,
M.D., M.P.H., (Ed.), 12th Edition, p. F-44. Published in 1973 by F.A.
Davis Company, Philadelphia.
This Berkley book contains the complete text of the original hardcover
edition. It has been completely reset in a typeface designed for ea,,;y
reading and was printed from new film.
STRANGERS
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with
G. P. Putnam's Sons
Printing HISTORY
G. P. Putnam's Sons edition published / April 1986
Berkley edition / December 1986
All rights reserved.
Copyright 0 1986 by Nkui, Inc.
Cover photo credit (D Jeny Bauer.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or
any other means, without permission.
For information address: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 200 Madison Avenue, New
York, New York 10016.
The Putnam Berkley World Wide Web site address is
littp:Hw.berkley.com
ISBN: 0-425-11992-0
Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison
Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
BERKLEY and the "B" design are trademarks belonging to Berkley
Publishing Corporation.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
30 29 28 27 26 25
A faithful friend is a strong defense.
A faithful friend is the medicine of life.
-APOCRYPHA
A terrible darkness has fallen upon us, but we must not surrender to it.
We shall lift lamps of courage and find our way through to the morning.
-ANONYMOUS MEMBER OF THE
FRENCH RESISTANCE (1943)
November 7-December 2
1.
Laguna Beach, California
Dominick Corvaisis went to sleep under a light wool blanket and a crisp
white sheet, sprawled alone in his bed, but he woke elsewhere-in the
darkness at the back of the large foyer closet, behind concealing coats
and jackets. He was curled in the fetal position. His hands were
squeezed into tight fists. The muscles in his neck and arms ached from
the tension of a bad though unremembered dream.
He could not recall leaving the comfort of his mattress during the
night, but he was not surprised to find that he had traveled in the dark
hours. It had happened on two other occasions, and recently.
Somnambulism, a potentially dangerous practice commonly referred to as
sleepwalking, has fascinated people throughout history. It fascinated
Dom, too, from the moment he became a baffled victim of it. He had
found references to sleepwalkers in writings that dated as far back as
1000 B.C.
The ancient Persians believed that the wandering body of a sleepwalker
was seeking his spirit, which had detached itself and drifted away
during the night. Europeans of the grim medieval period favored demonic
possession or lycanthropy as an explanation.
Dom Corvaisis did not worry about his affliction, though he was
discomfited and somewhat embarrassed by it. As a novelist, he was
intrigued by these new nocturnal ramblings, for he viewed all new
experiences as material for his fiction.
Nevertheless, though he might eventually profit from creative use of his
own somambulism, it was an affliction. He crawled out of the closet,
wincing as the pain in his neck spread up across his scalp and down into
his shoulders. He had difficulty getting to his feet because his legs
were cramped.
As always, he felt sheepish. He now knew that somnambulism was a
condition to which adults were vulnerable, but he still considered it a
childish problem. Like bed-wetting.
Wearing blue pajama bottoms, bare-chested, slipperless, he shuffled
across the living room, down the short hall, into the master bedroom,
and into the bath. In the mirror, he looked dissipated, a libertine
surfacing from a week of shameless indulgence in a wide variety of sins.
In fact, he was a man of remarkably few vices. He did not smoke,
overeat, or take drugs. He drank little. He liked women, but he was
not promiscuous; he believed in commitment in a relationship. Indeed,
he had not slept with anyone inwhat was it now?-almost four months.
He only looked this bad-dissipated, wrung-out-when he woke and
discovered that he had taken one of his unscheduled nocturnal trips to a
makeshift bed. Each time he had been exhausted. Though asleep, he got
no rest on the nights he walked.
He sat down on the edge of the bathtub, bent his leg up to look at the
bottom of his left foot, then checked the bottom of his right foot.
Neither was cut, scratched, or particularly dirty, so he had not left
the house while sleepwalking. He had awakened in closets twice before,
once last week and once twelve days prior to that, and he had not had
dirty feet on those occasions, either. As before, he felt as if he had
traveled miles while unconscious, but if he actually had gone that far,
he had do
ne it by making countless circuits of his own small house.
A long, hot shower soaked away a lot of his muscle discomfort. He was
lean and fit, thirty-five years old, with recuperative powers
commensurate with his age. By the time he finished breakfast, he felt
almost human.
After lingering with a cup of coffee on the patio, studying the pleasant
geography of Laguna Beach, which shelved down the hills toward the sea,
he went to his study, sure that his work was the cause of his
sleepwalking. Not the work itself so much as the amazing success of his
first novel, Twilight in Babylon, which he had finished last February.
His agent put Twilight up for auction, and to Dom's astonishment a deal
was made with Random House, which paid a remarkably large advance for a
first novel. Within a month, movie rights were sold (providing the
down-payment on his house), and the Literary Guild took Twilight as a
main selection. He had spent seven laborious months of sixty-,
seventy-, and eighty-hour weeks in the writing of that story, not to
mention a decade getting himself ready to write it, but he still felt
like an overnight success, up from genteel poverty in one great leap.
The once-poor Dominick Corvaisis occasionally caught a glimpse of the
now-rich Dominick Corvaisis in a mirror or a sun-silvered window, saw
himself unguarded, and wondered if he really deserved what had come his
way. Sometimes he worried that he was heading for a great fall. With
such triumph and acclaim came considerable tension.
When Twilight was published next February, would it be well received and
justify Random House's investment, or would it fail and humiliate him?
Could he do it again-or was Twilight a fluke?
Every hour of his waking day, these and other questions circled his mind
with vulturine persistence, and he supposed the same damn questions
still swooped through his mind while he slept. That was why he walked
in his sleep: he was trying to escape those relentless concerns, seeking
a secret place to rest, where his worries could not find him.
Now, at his desk, he switched on the IBM Displaywriter and called up
chapter eighteen on the first disk of his new book, as yet untitled. He
had stopped yesterday in the middle of the sixth page of the chapter,
but when he summoned the document, intending to begin where he had left
off, he saw a full page where there had been half. Unfamiliar green
lines of text glowed on the word processor's video display.
For a moment he blinked stupidly at the neat letters of light, then
shook his head in pointless denial of what lay before him.
The back of his neck was suddenly cool and damp.
The existence of those unremembered lines on page six was not what gave
him the creeps; it was what the lines said. Furthermore, there should
not have been a page seven in the chapter, for he had not yet created
one, but it was there. He also found an eighth page.
As he scrolled through the material on the disk, his hands became
clammy. The startling addition to his work-in-progress was only, a
two-word sentence, repeated hundreds of times:
I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared.
Double-spacing, quadruple indentation, four sentences to a line,
thirteen lines on page six, twenty-seven lines on page seven, another
twenty-seven on page eight-that made 268 repetitions of the sentence.
The machine had not created them by itself, for it was merely an
obedient slave that did precisely what it was told. And it made no
sense to speculate that someone had broken into the house during the
night to tamper with his electronically stored manuscript. There were
no signs of a break-in, and he could not think of anyone who would play
such a prank. Clearly, he had come to the word processor while
sleepwalking and had obsessively typed in this sentence 268 times,
though he had absolutely no recollection of having done it.
I'm scared.
Scared of what-sleepwalking? It was a disorienting experience, at least
on the morning end, but it was not an ordeal that would cause such
terror as this.
He was frightened by the quickness of his literary ascent and by the
possibility of an equally swift descent into oblivion. Yet he could not
completely dismiss the nagging thought that this had nothing to do with
his career, that the threat hanging over him was something else
altogether, something strange, something his conscious mind did not yet
see but which his subconscious perceived and which it had tried to
convey to him by means of this message left while he was sleeping.
No. Nonsense. That was only the novelist's overactive imagination at
work. Work. That was the best medicine for him.
Besides, from his research into the subject, he knew that most adult
sleepwalkers made short careers of it. Few experienced more than half a
dozen episodes, usually contained within a time span of six months or
less. Chances were good that his sleep would never again be complicated
by midnight ramblings and that he would never again wake huddled and
tense in the back of a closet.
He deleted the unwanted words from the disk and went to work on chapter
eighteen.
When he next looked at the clock, he was surprised to see that it was
past one and that he had labored through the lunch hour.
Even for southern California, the day was warm for early November, so he
ate lunch on the patio. The palm trees rustled in a mild breeze, and
the air was scented with autumn flowers. With style and grace, Laguna
sloped down to the shores of the Pacific. The ocean was spangled with
sunlight.
Finishing his last sip of Coke, Dom suddenly tilted his head back,
looked straight up into the brilliantly blue sky, and laughed. "You
see-no falling safe. No plummeting piano. No sword of Damocles."
It was November 7.
2.
Boston, Massachusetts
Dr. Ginger Marie Weiss never expected trouble in Bernstein's
Delicatessen, but that was where it started, with the incident of the
black gloves.
Usually, Ginger could deal with any problems that came her way. She
relished every challenge life presented, thrived on trouble. She would
have been bored if her path had been always easy, unobstructed. However,
it had never occurred to her that she might eventually be confronted
with trouble she could not handle.
As well as challenges, life provides lessons, and some are more welcome
than others. Some lessons are easy, some difficult.
Some are devastating.
Ginger was intelligent, pretty, ambitious, hard-working, and an
excellent cook, but her primary advantage in life was that no one took
her seriously on first encounter. She was slender, a wisp, a graceful
sprite who seemed as insubstantial as she was lovely. Most people
underestimated her for weeks or months, only gradually realizing that
she was a formidable competitor, colleague-or adversary.
The story of Ginger's mugging was legend at Columbia Presbyterian, in
New York, where she had served her internship four years
prior to the
trouble at Bernstein's Deli catessen. Like all interns, she had often
worked sixteen-hour shifts and longer, day after day, and had left the
hospital with barely enough energy to drag herself home. One hot, humid
Saturday night in July, after completing an especially grueling tour of
duty, she headed for home shortly after ten o'clockand was accosted by a
hulking Neanderthal with hands as big as shovel blades, huge arms, no
neck, and a sloping forehead.
"You scream," he said, launching himself at her with jackin-the-box
suddenness, "and I'll bust your goddamned teeth out." He seized her arm
and twisted it behind her back. "You understand me, bitch?"
No other pedestrians were close, and the nearest cars were two blocks
away, stopped at a traffic light. No help in sight.
He shoved her into a narrow night-mantled serviceway between two
buildings, into a trash-strewn passage with only one dim light. She
slammed into a garbage bin, hurting her knee and shoulder, stumbled but
did not fall. Many-armed shadows embraced her.
With ineffectual whimpers and breathless protests, she made her
assailant feel confident, because at first she thought he had a gun.