Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  her with one hand on her arm.

  "Sorry," he said. "That was stupid of me."

  "My fault," she said.

  "Daydreaming," he said.

  "I wasn't looking where I was going," she said.

  "You all right?"

  "Fine. Really."

  He held the bag of groceries toward her.

  She thanked him, took the bag-and noticed his black gloves. They were

  obviously expensive, of high-grade genuine leather, so neatly and

  tightly stitched that the seams were hardly visible, but there was

  nothing about those gloves that could explain her instant and powerful

  reaction to them, nothing unusual, nothing strange, nothing threatening.

  Yet she did feel threatened. Not by the man. He was ordinary, pale,

  doughy-faced, with kind eyes behind thick tortoiseshell glasses.

  Inexplicably, unreasonably, the gloves themselves were what abruptly

  terrified her. Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart hammered.

  The most bizarre thing was the way every object and all the people in

  the deli began to fade as if they were not real but merely figments of a

  dream that was dissolving as the dreamer woke. The customers having

  breakfast at the small tables, the shelves laden with canned and

  packaged food, the display cases, the wall clock with the Manischewitz

  logo, the pickle barrel, the tables and chairs all seemed to shimmer

  and slip away into a niveous haze, as if a fog was rising from some

  realm beneath the floor. Only the portentous gloves did not fade, and,

  in fact, as she stared at them they grew more detailed, strangely more

  vivid, more real, and increasingly threatening.

  "Miss?" the doughy-faced man said, and his voice seemed to come from a

  great distance, from the far end of a long tunnel.

  Although the shapes and colors of the delicatessen bleached toward white

  on all sides of Ginger, the sounds did not dwindle as well but, instead.

  , grew louder, louder, until her ears filled with a roar of meaningless

  jabber and with the jarring clatter of silverware, until the clinking of

  dishes and the soft chatter of the electronic cash register were

  thunderous, unbearable.

  She could not take her eyes off the gloves.

  "Is something wrong?" the man asked, holding up one leather-clad hand,

  half-reaching toward her in an inquisitive gesture.

  Black, tight, shiny . . . with a barely visible grain to the leather,

  neat little stitches along the fingers . . . taut across the knuckles

  . . .

  Dizzy, disoriented, with a tremendous weight of indefinable fear

  pressing down on her, she suddenly knew that she must run or die. Run

  or die. She did not know why. She did not understand the danger. But

  she knew she must run or perish where she stood.

  Her heartbeat, already fast, became frantic. The breath that was

  snagged in her throat now flew free with a feeble cry, and she lunged

  forward as if in pursuit of the pathetic sound that had escaped her.

  Amazed by her response to the gloves but unable to be objective about

  it, confused by her own behavior even as she acted, clutching the

  grocery bag to her breast, she shouldered past the man who had collided

  with her. She was only vaguely aware that she almost knocked him off

  his feet. She must have wrenched open the door, though she could not

  remember having done so, and then she was outside, in the crisp November

  air. The traffic on Charles Street-car horns, rumbling engines, the

  hiss-sighcrunch of tires-was to her right, and the deli windows flashed

  past on her left as she ran.

  Thereafter she was oblivious of everything, for the world around her

  faded completely away, and she was plunging through a featureless

  grayness, legs pumping hard, coattails flapping, as if fleeing across an

  amorphous dreamscape, struck dumb by fear. There must have been many

  other people on the sidewalk, people whom she dodged or shoved aside,

  but she was not cognizant of them. She was aware only of the need to

  escape. She ran deer-swift though no one pursued her, with her lips

  peeled back in a grimace of pure terror though she could not identify

  the danger from which she fled.

  Running. Running like crazy. Temporarily blind, deaf.

  Lost.

  Minutes later, when the mists cleared, she found herself on Mount Vernon

  Street, part of the way up the hill, leaning against a wrought-iron

  railing beside the front steps of a stately red-brick town house. She

  was gripping two of the iron balusters, with her hands curled so tightly

  around them that her knuckles ached, her forehead on the heavy metal

  balustrade as if she were a melancholy prisoner slumped against the door

  of her cell. She was sweating and gasping for breath. Her mouth was

  dry, sour. Her throat burned, and her chest ached. She was bewildered,

  unable to recall how she had arrived at this place, as if washed onto an

  alien shore by moon-timed tides and waves of amnesia.

  Something had frightened her.

  She could not remember what it had been.

  Gradually the fear subsided, and her breathing! rei!ained an almost

  regular rhythm; her heartbeat slowed slightly.

  She raised her head and blinked her eyes, looking around warily and in

  bafflement as her tear-bluffed vision slowly cleared. She turned her

  face up until she saw the bare black branches of a linden and a low,

  ominous gray November sky beyond the skeletal tree. Antique iron gas

  lamps glowed softly, activated by solenoids that had mistaken the wintry

  morning for the onset of dusk. At the top of the hill stood the

  Massachusetts State House, and at the bottom the traffic was heavy where

  Mount Vernon intersected Charles Street.

  Bernstein's Delicatessen. Yes, of course. It was Tuesday, and she had

  been at Bernstein's when . . . when something happened.

  What? What had happened at Bernstein's?

  And where was the deli bag?

  She let go of the iron railing, raised her hands, and blotted her eyes

  on her blue knit gloves.

  Gloves. Not hers, not these gloves. The myopic man in the Russian hat.

  His black leather gloves. That was what had frightened her.

  But why had she been gripped by hysteria, overwhelmed by dread at the

  sight of them? What was so frightening about black gloves?

  Across the street, an elderly couple watched her intently, and she

  wondered what she had done to draw their attention. Though she strained

  to remember, she could not summon the faintest recollection of her

  journey up the hill. The past three minutes-perhaps longer?-were

  utterly blank. She must have run up Mount Vernon Street in a panic.

  Evidently, judging by the expressions on the faces of those observing

  her, she had made quite a spectacle of herself.

  Embarrassed, she turned away from them and started hesitantly down Mount

  Vernon Street, back the way she had come. At the bottom, just around

  the corner, she found her bag of groceries lying on its side on the

  pavement. She stood over it for long seconds, staring at the crumpled

  brown bundle, trying to recall the moment when she had dropped it. But

  where that moment should have been, her memor
y contained only grayness,

  nothingness.

  What's wrong with me?

  A few items had spilled from the fallen parcel, but none was torn open,

  so she put them back in the paper sack.

  Unsettled by her baffling loss of control, weak in the knees, she headed

  home, her breath pluming in the frosty air. After a few steps she

  halted. Hesitated. Finally she turned back toward Bernstein's.

  She stopped just outside the deli and had to wait only a minute or two

  before the man in the Russian hat and the tortoiseshell glasses came out

  with a grocery bag of his own.

  "Oh." He blinked in surprise. "Uh . . . listen, did I say I'm sorry?

  The way you stormed out of there, I thought maybe I'd only meant to say

  it, you know -"

  She stared at his leather-sheathed right hand where it gripped the brown

  paper bag. He gestured with his other hand as he spoke, and she

  followed it as it described a brief, small pattern in the chilly air.

  The gloves did not frighten her now. She could not imagine why the

  sight of them had thrown her into a panic.

  "It's all right. I was here waiting to apologize. I was startled and

  ... and it's been an unusual morning," she said, quickly turning away

  from him. Over her shoulder, she called out, "Have a nice day."

  Although her apartment was not far away, the walk home seemed like an

  epic journey over vast expanses of gray pavement.

  What's wrong with me?

  She felt colder than the November day could explain.

  She lived on Beacon Hill, on the second floor of a four story house that

  had once been the home of a nineteenthcentury banker. She'd chosen the

  place because she liked the carefully preserved period detail: elaborate

  ceiling moldings, medallions above the doorways, mahogany doors, bay

  windows with French panes, two fireplaces (living room, bedroom)

  withornately carved and highly polished marble mantels. The rooms had a

  feeling of permanence, continuity, stability.

  Ginger prized constancy and stability more than anything, perhaps as a

  reaction to having lost her mother when she was only twelve.

  Still shivering even though the apartment was warm, she put away the

  groceries in the breadbox and refrigerator, then went into the bathroom

  to look closely at herself in the mirror. She was very pale. She did

  not like the hunted, haunted look in her eyes.

  To her reflection, she said, "What happened out there, shnook? You were

  a real meshuggene, let me tell you. Totally farfufket. But why? Huh?

  You're the big-shot doctor, so tell me. Why?"

  Listening to her voice as it echoed off the high ceiling of the

  bathroom, she knew she was in serious trouble. Jacob, her father, had

  been a Jew by virtue of his genes and heritage, and proud of it, but he

  had not been a Jew by virtue of his religious practices. He seldom went

  to synagogue and observed holidays in the same secular spirit with which

  many fallen-away Christians celebrated Easter and Christmas. And Ginger

  was one step farther removed from the faith than Jacob had been, for she

  called herself an agnostic. Furthermore, while Jacob's Jewishness was

  integral, evident in everything he did and said, that was not true of

  Ginger. If asked to define herself, she would have said, "Woman,

  physician, workaholic, political dropout," and other things before

  finally remembering to add, "Jew." The only time Yiddish peppered her

  speech was when she was in trouble, when she was deeply worried or

  scared, as if on a subconscious level she felt those words possessed

  talismanic value, charms against misfortune and catastrophe.

  "Running through the streets, dropping your groceries, forgetting where

  you are, afraid when there's no reason to be afraid, acting like a

  regular farmishteh, " she said disdainfully to her reflection. "People

  see you behaving like that, they'll think for sure you're a shikker, and

  people don't go to doctors whore drunkards. Nu?"

  The talismanic power of the old words worked a little magic, not much

  but enough to bring color to her cheeks and soften the stark look in her

  eyes. She stopped shivering, but she still felt chilled.

  She washed her face, brushed her silver-blond hair, and changed into

  pajamas and a robe, which was her usual ensemble for a typically

  self-indulgent Tuesday. She went into the small spare bedroom that she

  used as a home office, took the well-thumbed Taber's Cyclopedic Medical

  Dictionary from the bookshelf, and opened it to the F listings.

  Fugue.

  She knew what the word meant, though she did not know why she had come

  in here to consult the dictionary when it could tell her nothing new.

  Maybe the dictionary was another talisman. If she looked at the word in

  cold print, it would cease to have any power over her. Sure. Voodoo

  for the overeducated. Nevertheless, she read the entry:

  fugue (fyug) [L. fuga, flight]. Serious personality dissociation.

  Leaving home or surroundings on impulse. Upon recovering from the fugue

  state there usually is loss of memory for actions occurring while in the

  state.

  She closed the dictionary and returned it to the shelf.

  She had other reference volumes that could provide more detailed

  information about fugues, their causes and significance, but she decided

  not to pursue the matter. She simply could not believe her transient

  attack had been a symptom of a serious medical problem.

  Maybe she was under too much stress, working too hard, and maybe the

  overload had led to that one, isolated, transient fugue. A two- or

  three-minute blank. A little warning. So she would continue taking off

  every Tuesday and would try to knock off work an hour earlier each day,

  and she would have no more problems.

  She had worked very hard to be the doctor that her mother had hoped she

  would be, to make something special of herself and thereby honor her

  sweet father and the long-dead but well-remembered and desperately

  missed Swede. She had made many sacrifices to come this far. She had

  worked more weekends than not, had forgone vacations and most other

  pleasures. Now, in only six months, she would finish her residency and

  establish a practice of her own, and nothing would be allowed to

  interfere with her plans. Nothing was going to rob her of her dream.

  Nothing.

  It was November 12.

  3.

  Elko County, Nevada

  Ernie Block was afraid of the dark. Indoor darkness was bad, but the

  darkness of the outdoors, the vast blackness of night here in northern

  Nevada, was what most terrified Ernie. During the day he favored rooms

  with several lamps and lots of windows, but at night he preferred rooms

  with few windows or even no windows at all because sometimes it seemed

  to him that the night was pressing against the glass, as if it were a

  living creature that wanted to get in at him and gobble him up. He

  obtained no relief from drawing the drapes, for he still knew the night

  was out there, waiting for its chance. He was deeply ashamed of

  himself. He did not know why he had recently become afraid of the dark.

 
; He just was.

  Millions of people shared his phobia, of course, but nearly all of them

  were children. Ernie was fifty-two.

  On Friday afternoon, the day after Thanksgiving, he worked alone in the

  motel office because Faye had flown to Wisconsin to visit Lucy, Frank,

  and the grandkids. She would not be back until Tuesday. Come December,

  they intended to close up for a week and both go to Milwaukee for

  Christmas with the kids; but this time Faye had gone by herself.

  Ernie missed her terribly. He missed her because she was his wife of

  thirty-one years and his best friend. He missed her because he loved

  her more now than he had on their wedding day. And because ... without

  Faye, the nights alone seemed longer, deeper, darker than ever.

  By two-thirty Friday afternoon he had cleaned all the rooms and changed

  the linens, and the Tranquility Motel was ready for its next wave of

  journeyers. It was the only lodging within twelve miles, perched on a

  knoll north of the superhighway, a neat little way station on a vast

  expanse of sagebrush-strewn plains that sloped up into grassy meadows.

  Elko lay over thirty miles to the east, Battle Mountain forty miles to

  the west. The town of Carlin and the tiny village of Beowawe were

  closer, though from the Tranquility Motel Ernie had not a glimpse of

  either settlement. In fact, from the parking lot, no other building was

  visible in any direction, and there was probably no motel in the world

  more aptly named than this one.