type used for it: PRESTIGE ELITE, ARTISAN 10, COURIER 10, LETTER GOTHIC.
He smoothed out the original rumpled note and placed each of the copies
beside it for comparison. He hoped to eliminate all four type styles
that he possessed, disproving the theory that he had sent the note to
himself. But the Courier 10 appeared to be a perfect match.
That did not conclusively prove he'd written the note. In offices and
homes all over the country, there must be millions of printwheels and
printer elements in the Courier face.
He compared the paper of the original note to that of the copy he had
made. They were both twenty-pound, 8 1/2 x 11", standard products sold
under a dozen labels in thousands of stores in all fifty states. Neither
sheet was of sufficient quality to contain fibers. Dom held them up to
the light and saw that neither page featured a mill seal or brand-name
watermark, which might have proven that the original note had not been
typed on paper from his own stock.
He thought: Parker, Dr. Cobletz, and me. Who else could know?
And what was the note trying to tell him, exactly? What secret was
buried in his past? What suppressed trauma or forgotten event lay at
the root of his somnambulism?
Sitting at his desk, staring at the night beyond the big window,
straining blindly toward understanding, he grew tense.
Again, he felt a need for Valium, almost a craving, but he resisted.
The note engaged his curiosity, logic, and reason. He was able to focus
his intellect on the search for a solution and concentrate with an
intensity of which he had not been capable recently, and thus he found
the will power to forsake the solace of tranquilization.
He was beginning to feel good about himself for the first time in weeks.
In spite of the helplessness in which he had been wallowing, he now
realized that, after all, he still had the power to shape and direct the
course of his own life. All he had needed was something like the note,
something tangible on which he could focus.
He paced around the house, carrying the note, thinking. Eventually he
came to a front window from which he could see his curbside mailbox-a
brick column with a metal receptacle mortared into it-standing in the
bluish fall of light from a mercury-vapor streetlamp.
Because he kept the post office drawer in town, the only mail he got at
home was that addressed to "Occupant" and occasional cards or letters
from friends who had both his mailing and street address but who
sometimes forgot that all correspondence was to go to the former.
Standing at the window, staring at the curbside receptacle, Dom realized
that he had not picked up today's delivery.
He went outside, down the front walk to the street, and used a key to
unlock the receptacle. Except for the breeze that rustled the trees,
the night was quiet. The wind carried the scent of the sea, and the air
was chilly. The overhead mercury-vapor lamp was sufficiently bright for
Dom to identify the mail as he withdrew it from the box: six advertising
flyers and catalogs, two Christmas cards . . . and a plain white
business-size envelope with no return address.
Excited, fearful, he hurried back into the house, to his study, tearing
open the white envelope and extracting a single sheet of paper as he
went. At his desk, he unfolded the letter.
The moon.
No other words could have shocked him as badly as those.
He felt as if he had fallen into the White Rabbit's hole and was
tumbling down into a fantastic realm where logic and reason no longer
applied.
The moon. This was impossible. No one knew he had awakened from bad
dreams with those words on his lips, repeating them in panic: "The moon,
moon. . . ." And no one knew that, while sleepwalking, he had typed
those words on the Displaywriter. He'd told neither Parker nor Cobletz,
because those incidents had transpired after he'd begun drug therapy and
after the drugs seemed to be working, and he had not wanted to appear to
be slipping backward. Besides, although those two words filled him with
dread, he did not understand their significance. He did not know why
they had the power to raise gooseflesh, and he instinctively felt that
it was unwise to mention this development to anyone until he had gotten
a better handle on it. He had been afraid Cobletz would conclude that
the drugs were not helping him and would discontinue them in favor of
psychotherapy-and Dom had needed the drugs.
The moon.
No one knew, damn it. No one but . Dom himself.
In the streetlamp's dim glow, he had not checked for a postmark. Now,
he saw that its point of origin was not a mystery, as was the case with
the letter that had come this morning. It was clearly stamped NEW YORK,
N Y., and dated December 18. Wednesday of last week.
He almost laughed out loud. He was not insane, after all. He was not
sending these cryptic messages to himself-could not possibly be sending
them-because he had been in Laguna last week. Three thousand miles
separated him from the mailbox in which this-and undoubtedly the
other-strange message had first been deposited.
But who had sent him the notes-and why? Who in New York could know that
he was sleepwalking ... or that he had repeatedly typed "the moon" on
his word processor? A thousand questions crowded Dom Corvaisis' mind,
and he had no answers to any of them. Worse, at the moment, he could
see no way even to seek answers. The situation was so bizarre that
there was no logical direction for his inquiries to take.
For two months, he had thought that his sleepwalking was the strangest
and most frightening thing that had ever happened-or ever would
happen-to him. But whatever lay
behind the somnambulism must be even stranger and more frightening than
the nightwalking itself.
He recalled the first message he had left for himself on the word
processor: I'm afraid. What had he been hiding from in closets? When
he had started to nail the windows shut while sound asleep, what had he
hoped to keep out of his house?
Dom saw now that his sleepwalking had not been caused by stress. He was
not suffering anxiety attacks because he feared the success or failure
of his first novel. It was nothing as mundane as that.
Something else. Something very strange and terrible.
What did he know in his sleep that he did not know when awake?
6.
New Haven County, Connecticut
The sky had cleared before nightfall, but the moon had not yet risen.
The stars shed little light upon the cold earth.
With his back against a boulder, Jack Twist sat in the snow atop a
knoll, at the edge of pines, waiting for the Guardmaster armored truck
to appear. Only three weeks after personally netting more than a
million dollars from the mafia warehouse job, he was already setting up
another heist. He was wearing boots, gloves, and a white ski suit, with
the hood over his head and tied securely under his chin. Three hundred
yards behind him and to the southwest, beyond the small woods,
the
darkness was relieved by the light of a housing development; however,
Jack waited in utter blackness, his breath steaming.
In front of him, two miles of night-clad fields lay northeast, barren
but for a few widely spaced trees and some winterstripped brush. In the
distance beyond the emptiness, there were electronics plants, then
shopping centers, then residential neighborhoods, none of which was
visible from Jack's position, though their existence was indicated by
the glow of electric lights on the horizon.
At the far edge of the fields, headlights appeared over a low rise.
Raising a pair of night binoculars, Jack focused on
the approaching vehicle, which was following the two-lane county road
that bisected the fields. In spite of the leftward cast of his left
eye, Jack had superb vision, and with the help of the night binoculars,
he ascertained that the vehicle was not the Guardmaster truck, therefore
of no consequence to him. He lowered the glasses.
In his solitude upon the snowy knoll, he thought back to another time
and a warmer place, to a humid night in a Central American jungle, when
he had studied a nocturnal landscape with binoculars just like these.
Then, he had been searching anxiously for hostile troops that had been
stalking and encircling him and his buddies. . . .
His platoon-twenty highly trained Rangers under the leadership of
Lieutenant Rafe Eikhorn, with Jack as second in command-had crossed the
border illegally and gone fifteen miles inside the enemy state without
being detected. Their presence could have been construed as an act of
war; therefore, they wore camouflage suits stripped of rank and service
markings, and they carried no identification.
Their target was a nasty little "re-education" camp, cynically named the
Institute of Brotherhood, where a thousand Miskito Indians were
imprisoned by the People's Army. Two weeks earlier, courageous Catholic
priests had led another fifteen hundred Indians through the jungles and
out of the country before they could be imprisoned, too. Those
clergymen had brought word that the Indians at the Institute would be
murdered and buried in mass graves if not rescued within the month.
The Miskitos were a fiercely proud breed with a rich culture that they
refused to forsake for the anti-ethnic, collectivist philosophy of the
country's latest leaders. The Indians' continued loyalty to their own
traditions would ensure their extermination, for the ruling council did
not hesitate to call up the firing squads to solidify its power.
Nevertheless, twenty Rangers in mufti would not have been committed to
such a dangerous raid merely to save Miskitos. Both left- and right-wing
dictatorial regimes routinely slaughtered their citizenry in every
corner of the world, and the United States did not-could not-prevent
those state-sanctioned murders. But in addition to the Indians at the
Institute,
there were eleven others whose rescue, along with the Indians, made the
risky operation worthwhile.
Those eleven were former revolutionaries who had fought the just war
against the now-deposed right-wing dictator, but who had refused to
remain silent when their revolution had been betrayed by totalitarians
of the left. Undoubtedly, those eleven possessed valuable information.
The opportunity to debrief them was more important than saving the lives
of a thousand Indians-at least as far as Washington was concerned.
Undetected, Jack's platoon reached the Institute of Brotherhood in a
farming district at the edge of the jungle. It was a concentration camp
in all but name, a place of barbed-wire fences and guard towers. Two
buildings stood outside the fenced perimeter of the camp: a two-story
concrete-block structure from which the government administered the
district, and a dilapidated wooden barracks housing sixty troops.
Shortly after midnight, the platoon of Rangers stealthily took up
positions and launched a rocket attack on the barracks and the concrete
building. The initial artillery barrages were followed by hand-to-hand
combat. Half an hour after the last shot was fired, the Indians and
other prisoners-as jubilant a group as Jack had ever seen-were formed
into a column and moved out toward the border, fifteen miles away.
Two Rangers had been killed. Three were wounded.
As first in command of the platoon, Rafe Eikhorn led the exodus and
oversaw security along the column's flanks, while Jack stayed behind
with three men to be sure the last of the prisoners got out of the camp
in orderly fashion. It was also his responsibility to gather up files
relating to the interrogation, torture, and murder of Indians and
district peasants. By the time he and his four men left the Institute
of Brotherhood, they were two miles behind the last of the Miskitos.
Though Jack and his men made good time, they never caught up with their
platoon and were still miles from the Honduran border when, at dawn,
hostile army helicopters, like giant black wasps, came in low over the
trees and began off-loading enemy troops wherever a clearing could be
found. The other Rangers and all the Indians reached freedom, but Jack
and his three men were captured and transported to a facility similar to
the Institute of Brotherhood. However, the place was so much worse than
the concentration camp that
it had no official existence. The ruling council did not admit that
such a hellhole existed in the new workers' paradiseor that monstrous
inquisitions were conducted within its walls. In true Orwellian
tradition, because the four-story complex of cells and torture chambers
had no name, it did not exist.
Within those nameless walls, in cells without numbers, Jack Twist and
the three other Rangers were subjected to psychological and physical
torture, relentless humiliation and degradation, controlled starvation,
and constant threats of death. One of the four died. One went mad.
Only Jack and his closest friend, Oscar Weston, held on to both life and
sanity during the eleven and a half months of their incarceration. . .
.
Now, eight years later, leaning against a boulder atop a knoll in
Connecticut, waiting for the Guardmaster truck, Jack heard sounds and
detected odors which were not of this wind-swept winter night. The hard
footfalls of jackboots on concrete corridors. The stench from the
overflowing slops bucket, which was the cell's only toilet. The
pathetic cry of some poor bastard being taken from his cell to another
session with interrogators.
Jack took deep breaths of the clean, cold Connecticut air. He was seldom
troubled by bad memories of that time and nameless place. He was more
often haunted by what had happened to him after his escape-and by what
had happened to his Jenny in his absence. It was not his suffering in
Central America that turned him against society; rather, subsequent
events were what had soured him.
He saw other headlights out on the black fields and raised his night
binoculars. It was the Guardmaster armored tra
nsport.
He looked at his watch. Nine-thirty-eight. It was right on schedule,
as it had been every night for a week. Even with the holiday tomorrow,
the truck kept to its route. Guardmaster Security was nothing if not
reliable.
On the ground beside Jack was an attache case. He lifted the lid. The
blue numerals of a digital scanner were locked on the Guardmaster's open
radio link to the company dispatcher. Even with his state-of-the-art
equipment, he had needed three nights to discover the truck's frequency.
He turned the volume dial on his own receiver. Static crackled, hissed.
Then he was rewarded by a routine exchange between the driver and the
distant dispatcher.
"Three-oh-one," the dispatcher said. "Reindeer," the driver said.
"Rudolph," the dispatcher said. "Rooftop," the driver said.
The hiss and crackle of static settled in once more.
The dispatcher had opened the exchange with the truck's number, and the
rest of it had been the day's code which served as confirmation that 301
was on schedule and in no trouble of any kind.
Jack switched off his receiver. The lighted dials went dark.
The armored transport passed less than two hundred feet from his
position on the knoll, and he turned to watch its dwindling taillights.
He was confident of Guardmaster's schedule now, and he would not be
returning to these fields until the night of the stickup, which was
tentatively scheduled for Saturday, January 11. Meanwhile, there was a
great deal more planning to be done.
Ordinarily, planning a job was nearly as exciting and satisfying as the
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 26