But Thursday afternoon at the beach, when the water proved too cold for
swimming, Parker organized a volleyball game and surfside races. He got
Dom and the boys involved in a complicated game of his own devising,
involving two frisbees, a beach ball, and an empty soda can. Under his
direction they also built a sandcastle complete with a menacing dragon.
Later, during an early dinner at Hamburger Hamlet in Costa Mesa, while
the kids were in the bathroom, Parker said, "Dom, good buddy, this Big
Brother thing was sure one of the best ideas I've ever had."
"Your idea?" Dominick said, shaking his head. "I had to drag you into
it kicking and screaming."
"Nonsense," Parker said. "I've always had a way with kids. Every artist
is a bit of a kid at heart. We have to stay young to create. I find
kids invigorate me, keep my mind fresh."
"Next, you'll be getting a dog," Dom said.
Parker laughed. He finished his beer, leaned forward. "You okay? At
times today, you seemed ... distracted. A little out of it."
."Lot on my mind," Dom said. "But I'm fine. The sleepwalking's pretty
much stopped. And the dreams. Cobletz knows what he's doing."
"Is the new book going well? Don't shit me, now."
:'It's going well," Dom lied.
'At times you have that look," Parker said, watching him intently. "That
. . . doped up. Following the prescribed dos age, I assume?"
The painter's perspicacity disconcerted Dom. "I'd have to be an idiot
to snack on Valium as if it was candy. Of course, I follow the
prescribed dosage."
Parker stared hard at him, then apparently decided not to push it.
The movie was good, but during the first thirty minutes Dom grew nervous
without reason. When he felt the nervousness building toward an anxiety
attack, he slipped out to the men's room. He'd brought another Valium
for just such an emergency.
The important thing was that he was winning. He was getting well. The
somnambulism was losing its grip on him. It really was.
Beneath a strong pine-scented disinfectant, there was an acrid stench
from the urinals. Dom felt slightly nauseous. He swallowed the Valium
without water.
That night, in spite of the pills, he had the dream again, and he
remembered more of it than just the part where people were forcing his
head into a sink.
In the nightmare, he was in a bed in an unknown room, where there seemed
to be an oily saffron mist in the air. Or perhaps the amber fog was
only in his eyes, for he could not see anything clearly. furniture
loomed beyond the bed, and at least two people were present. But those
shapes rippled and writhed as if this were purely a realm of smoke and
fluid, where nothing had a fixed appearance.
He almost felt as if he were underwater, very deep underneath the
surface of some mysterious cold sea. The atmosphere in the dream-place
had more weight than mere air. He could barely draw breath. Each
inhalation and exhalation was agony. He sensed that he was dying.
The two blurred figures came close. They seemed concerned about his
condition. They spoke urgently to each other. Although he knew they
were speaking English, he could not understand them. A cold hand
touched him. He heard the clink of glass. Somewhere a door shut.
With the flash-cut suddenness of a scene transition in a film, the dream
shifted to a bathroom or kitchen. Someone was forcing his face down
into the sink. Breathing became even more difficult. The air was like
mud: with each inhalation it clogged his nostrils. He choked and gasped
and tried to blow out the mud-thick air, and the two people with him
were shouting at him, and as before he could not understand what they
were saying, and they pressed his face down into the sink Dom woke and
was still in bed. Last weekend he had been flung free of the dream only
to discover that he had walked in his sleep and had been acting out the
nightmare at his own bathroom sink. This time, he was relieved to find
himself beneath the sheets.
I am getting better, he thought.
Trembling, he sat up and switched on the light.
No barricades. No signs of somnambulistic panic.
He looked at the digital clock: two-oh-nine A. M. A halfempty can of
warm beer stood on the nightstand. He washed down another Dalmane
tablet.
I am getting better.
It was Friday the thirteenth.
10.
Elko County, Nevada
Friday night, three days after his weird experience on the I80, Ernie
Block couldn't sleep at all. As darkness embraced him, his nerves wound
tighter, tighter, until he thought he would start screaming and be
unable to stop.
Slipping out of bed as soundlessly as he could, pausing to make sure
that Faye's slow and even breathing had not changed, he went into the
bathroom, closed the door, turned on the light. Wonderful light. He
reveled in the light. He put down the lid of the commode and sat for
fifteen minutes in his underwear, just letting the brightness scar him,
as mindlessly happy as a lizard on a sun-washed rock.
Finally he knew he must return to the bedroom. If Faye woke, and if
he'remained in here too long, she would begin to think something was
wrong. He was determined to do nothing that would make her suspicious.
Although he had not used the toilet, he flushed it for cover, and went
to the sink to wash his hands. He had just finished rinsing off the
soap and had plucked the towel off the rack when his eyes were drawn to
the only window in the room. It was above the bathtub, a rectangle about
three feet wide and two feet high, which opened outward on an overhead
piano hinge. Although the glass was frosted and provided no view of the
night beyond, a shiver passed through Ernie as he stared at the opaque
pane. More disturbing than the shiver was the sudden rush of peculiar,
urgent thoughts that came with it:
The window's big enough to get through, I could get away, escape, and
the roof of the utility room is under the window, so there's not a long
drop, and I could be off, into the arroyo behind the motel, up into the
hills, make my way east, get to a ranch somewhere and get help. . . .
Blinking furiously as that swift train of thoughts flashed through his
mind and faded away, Ernie discovered that he had stepped from the sink
to the bathtub. He did not remember moving.
He was bewildered by the urge to escape. From whom?
From what? Why? This was his own home. He had nothing to fear within
these walls.
Yet he could not take his glaze from the milky window. A dreaminess had
come over him. He was aware of it but unable to cast it off.
Got to get out, get away, there won't be another chance, not another
chance like this, now, go now, go, go. . . .
Unwittingly, he had stepped into the tub and was directly in front of
the window, which was set in the wall at face-level. The porcelain
coating of the tub was cold against his bare feet.
Slide back the latch, push up the window, stand on the rim of the tub,
pull yourself up
onto the sill, out and away, a threeor four-minute
headstart before you're missed, not much but enough. . . .
Panic rose in him without reason. There was a fluttering in his guts, a
tightness in his chest.
Without knowing why he was doing it, yet unable to stop himself, he slid
the bolt from the latch on the bottom of the window. He pushed out. The
window swung up.
He was not alone.
Something was at the other side of the window, out there on the roof,
something with a dark, featureless, shiny face. Even as Ernie recoiled
in surprise, he realized it was a man in a white helmet with a tinted
visor that came all the way down over his face, so darkly tinted that it
was virtually black.
A black-gloved hand reached through the window, as if to grab him, and
Ernie cried out and took a step backward and fell over the edge of the
tub. Toppling out of the tub, he grabbed wildly at the shower curtain,
tore it loose from several of its rings, but could not arrest his fall.
He hit the bathroom floor with a crash. Pain flashed through his right
hip.
"Ernie!" Faye cried, and a moment later she pushed open the door.
"Ernie, my God, what's wrong, what happened?"
"Stay back." He got up painfully. "Someone's out there."
Cold night air poured through the open window, rustling the
half-wrecked, bunched-up shower curtain.
Faye shivered, for she slept in only a pajama shirt and panties.
Ernie shivered, too, though partly for different reasons. The moment the
pain had throbbed through his hip, the dreaminess had left him. In the
sudden rush of clear-mindedness, he wondered if the helmeted figure had
been imaginary, a hallucination.
"On the roof?" Faye said. "At the window? Who?"
"I don't know," Ernie said, rubbing his sore hip as he stepped back into
the tub and peered out the window again. He saw no one this time.
"What'd he look like?" Faye asked.
"I couldn't tell. He was in motorcycle gear. Helmet, gloves," Ernie
said, realizing how outlandish it sounded.
He levered himself up on the windowsill far enough to lean out and look
across the full length and breadth of the utility room's roof. Shadows
were deep in places, but nowhere deep enough to hide a man. The
intruder was gone-if indeed he had ever existed.
Abruptly Ernie became aware of the vast darkness behind the motel. It
stretched across the hills, off to the distant mountains, an immense
blackness relieved only by the stars. Instantly, a crippling weakness
and vulnerability overwhelmed him. Gasping, he dropped off the sill,
back into the tub, and started to turn away from the window.
"Close it up," Faye said.
Squeezing his eyes shut to guard against another glimpse of the night,
he turned once more to the in-rushing cold air, fumbled blindly for the
window, and pulled it shut so hard that he almost broke the pane. With
unsteady hands he struggled to secure the latch bolt.
When he stepped out of the tub, he saw concern in Faye's eyes, which he
expected. He saw surprise, which he also expected. But he saw a
penetrating awareness for which he was unprepared. For a long moment
they looked at each other, neither of them speaking.
Then she said, "Are you ready to tell me about it?"
"Like I said . . . I thought I saw a guy on the roof."
"That's not what I'm talking about, Ernie. I mean, are you ready to
tell me what's wrong, what's been eating at you?"
Her eyes did not waver from his. "For a couple of months now. Maybe
longer."
He was stunned. He thought he had concealed it so well. She said,
"Honey, you've been worried. Worried like I've never seen you before.
And scared."
"No. Not scared exactly."
"Yes. Scared," Faye said, but there was no scorn in her, just an
Iowan's forthrightness and a desire to help. "I've only ever seen you
scared once before, Ernie-back when Lucy was five and came down with
that muscle fever, and they thought it might be muscular dystrophy."
"God, yes, I was scared shitless then."
"But not since."
"Oh, I was scared in Nam sometimes," he said, his admission echoing
hollowly off the bathroom walls.
"But I never saw it." She hugged herself. "It's rare that I see you
like this, Ernie, so when you're scared I'm scared. Can't help it. I'm
even more scared because I don't know what's wrong. You understand?
Being in the dark like I am . . . that's worse than any secret you're
withholding from me."
Tears came to her eyes, and Ernie said, "Oh, hey, don't cry. It's going
to be all right, Faye. Really it is."
"Tell me!" she said.
"Okay."
"Now. Everything."
He had woefully underestimated her, and he felt thickheaded. She was a
Corps wife, after all, and a good one. She had followed him from
Quantico to Singapore to Pendleton in California, even to Alaska, almost
everywhere but Nam and, later, Beirut. She had made a home for them
wherever the Corps allowed dependents to follow, had weathered the bad
times with admirable aplomb, had never complained, and had never failed
him. She was tough. He could not imagine how he had forgotten that.
"Everything," he agreed, relieved to be able to share the burden.
Faye made coffee, and they sat in their robes and slippers at the
kitchen table while he told her everything. She could see that he was
embarrassed. He was slow to reveal details, but she sipped her coffee,
remained patient, and gave him a chance to tell it in his own way.
Ernie was about the best husband a woman could want, but now and then
his Block-family stubbornness reared its head, and Faye wanted to shake
some sense into him. Everyone in his family suffered from it,
especially the men. Blocks did things this way, never that way, and you
better never question why. Block men liked their undershirts ironed but
never their underpants. Block women always wore a bra, even at home in
the worst summer heat. Blocks, both men and women, always ate lunch at
precisely twelve-thirty, always had dinner at six-thirty sharp, and God
forbid if the food was put on the table two minutes late: The subsequent
complaining would burst eardrums. Blocks drove only General Motors
vehicles. Not because GM products were notably better than others, but
because Blocks had always driven only General Motors vehicles.
Thank God, Ernie was not a tenth as bad as his father or brothers. He
had been wise enough to get out of Pittsburgh, where the Block clan had
lived for generations in the same neighborhood. Out in the real world,
away from the Kingdom of the Blocks, Ernie had loosened up. In the
Marine Corps he could not expect every meal at precisely the time that
Block tradition demanded. And soon after their marriage, Faye had made
it clear that she would make a first-rate home for him but would not be
bound by senseless traditions. Ernie adapted, though not always easily,
and now he was a black sheep among his people, guilty of such sins as
driving a variety of vehicles not made by General Mo
tors.
Actually, the only area where the Block family stubbornness still had a
hold on Ernie was in some man-woman matters. He believed that a husband
had to protect his wife from a variety of unpleasantnesses that she was
just too fragile to handle. He believed that a husband should never
allow his wife to see him in a moment of weakness. Although their
marriage had never been conducted according to those rules, Ernie did
not always seem to realize they had abandoned the Block traditions more
than a quarter of a century ago.
For months, she had been aware something was seriously wrong. But Ernie
continued to stonewall it, straining to prove he was a happy retired
Marine blissfully launched on a second career in motels. She had
watched an unknown fire consuming him from within, and her subtle and
patient attempts to get him to open up hadgone right over his head.
During the past few weeks, ever since returning from Wisconsin after
Thanksgiving, she had been increasingly aware of his reluctance-even
inability-to go out at night. He could not seem to make himself
comfortable in a room where even one lamp was left unlit.
Now, as they sat in the kitchen with cups of steaming coffee, the blinds
tightly closed and all the lights on, Faye listened intently to Ernie,
interrupting only when he seemed to need a word of encouragement to keep
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 19