carried every volume back into the house.
He began to cry, but he was still determined he would not wind up in a
padded room. He picked up a score of books and headed back toward the
barbecue pit, feeling as if he were in hell and condemned, for eternity,
to the performance of this frantic ritual.
When he figured he had filled the pit again, he suddenly realized he was
not carrying books to the place of burning but away from it. Again, he
had drifted off into his moondream and, instead of destroying the
objects of his obsession, he was re-collecting them.
As he headed back toward the house, he noticed how the crust of snow
glimmered with a scintillant, reflected light. Against his will, his
head came up. He looked into the deep and nearly cloudless sky.
He said, "The moon."
He knew then that he was a dead man.
Laguna Beach, California.
For Dominick Corvaisis, Christmas was usually not much different from
other days. He had no wife or children to make it special. Raised in
foster homes, he had no relatives with whom he could share a turkey and
mincemeat pie. A couple of friends, including Parker Faine, always
invited him to join in their festivities, but he declined, for he knew
he would feel like the proverbial fifth wheel. However, Christmas was
not sad or lonely. He was never bored by his own company, and his home
overflowed with good books that could fill the day with delight.
But this Christmas Dom could not concentrate to read, for he was
preoccupied by the mysterious mail he had received the previous day and
by the need to resist the urge to pop a Valium. Though he had been
afraid that he would dream and walk in his sleep, he had taken no Valium
yesterday and no Dalmane last night. He was determined to avoid any
further reliance on chemicals, though he continued to crave them.
In fact, the craving became so bad that he emptied the pills into the
toilet and flushed them away, because he did not trust himself. As the
day wore on, his anxiety rose to the level he had experienced before he
had begun drug therapy.
At seven o'clock Christmas night, Dom arrived at Parker's rambling
hillside contemporary and accepted a glass of homemade eggnog with a
cinnamon stick in it. The burly painter's beard, usually bushy and
untamed, was neatly trimmed, and his mane of hair was newly cut and
combed in honor of the holiday. Though he was more conservatively
groomed and more subdued in dress than was his habit, he was every bit
as ebullient as one expected him to be. "What a Christmas!
Peace and love reigned in this house today, I tell you! My cherished
brother made only forty or fifty nasty and envious remarks about my
success, which is not half as many as he lets loose with on a less
blessed occasion. My sainted halfsister, Carla, only once called her
sister-in-law Doreen a bitch, and even that might be considered
justified in light of the fact that Doreen started it by calling Carla a
'brainless New Age crackpot full of psychobabble." Ah, truly a day of
fellowship and caring! Not one punch thrown this year, if you can
believe it. And Carla's husband, though he got plastered as usual, did
not throw up or fall down a flight of stairs, as in past years, though
he did insist on doing his Bette Midler imitation at least a dozen
times."
As they moved toward a grouping of chairs by the windowwall overlooking
the sea, Dom said, "I'm going on a trip, a long drive. I'll fly to
Portland and rent a car up there. Then I'll retrace the journey I took
the summer before last, from Portland down to Reno, across Nevada and
half of Utah on Interstate 80, then to Mountainview."
Dom sat down as he spoke, but Parker remained on his feet, very still.
The announcement pleasantly electrified him. "What's happened? That's
no vacation. That's not a route you'd take for pleasure. Are you
sleepwalking again? Must be. And something's happened to convince you
this is related to the changes you underwent that summer."
"I haven't begun sleepwalking again, but I'm sure I will, probably
tonight, because I've thrown the damn drugs away. They weren't curing
me. I lied. I was getting hooked, Parker. I didn't care because it
seemed that being hooked was better than enduring the things I did while
sleepwalking. But now all that's changed because of these." He held up
the two notes from his unknown correspondent. "The problem's not just
within me, not just psychological. There's something stranger at work
here." He gave the first note to Parker. His fearful state of mind was
betrayed by the sheet of paper, which shook in his hand.
When the painter read it, he looked baffled.
Dom said, "It came in the mail yesterday at the post office. No return
address. There was another note delivered to the house." He explained
about having typed the words "the moon" on his word processor hundreds
of times in his sleep and about waking from a dream with those same
words on his lips, then passed the second note to Parker.
"But if I'm the first one you've told about this moon thing, how could
anyone have known enough to send such a note?"
"Whoever he is," Dom said, "he knows about my sleepwalking, maybe
because I've gone to a doctor about it-"
"You're saying you're being watched?"
"Apparently, to a degree. Periodically monitored if not constantly
watched. But while the monitor knows about my sleepwalking, he probably
doesn't know about my typing those words on the Displaywriter, or that I
woke up repeating them in the night. Not unless he was standing beside
my bed, which he wasn't. However, he indisputably does know that I'll
react to "the moon," that those words'll frighten me. So he must know
what lies behind this whole crazy mess."
At last Parker sat down on the edge of a chair. "Find him, and you'll
know what's going on."
"New York is a big place," Dom said. "I have no starting point there.
But when I got this first note-this business about the answer to my
sleepwalking lying in the past I realized you must be right about this
personality crisis being tied to the previous one. The dramatic change
I went through on the trip from Portland to Mountainview is somehow
connected. If I make that trip again, stop at the same motels, eat in
the same roadside restaurants, try to recreate it as exactly as I can .
. . something might turn up. My memory might be jogged."
"But how could you have forgotten something so major?"
"Maybe I didn't forget it. Maybe the memory was taken from me."
Leaving that possibility for later exploration, Parker said, "Whoever
the hell this guy is-what reasons would he have for sending these notes?
I mean, you've imagined a situation where it's you against Them, some
unknown Them, and so this guy is on their side, not yours."
"Maybe he doesn't agree with everything that's been done to me-whatever
it is that I've forgotten was done to me."
"Done to you? What're we talking about here?"
Dom nervously turned his glass of eggnog around and around
in his hands.
"I don't know., But this correspondent ... he obviously wants me to
know my problem's not psychological, that there's something more behind
it. I think maybe he wants to help me find the truth."
"So why doesn't he just call you up and tell you the truth?"
, "The only thing I can figure is that he doesn't dare risk telling me.
He must be part of some conspiracy, God knows what, but part of some
group that doesn't want the truth to come out. If he approaches me
directly, the others will know, and he'll be in deep shit."
As if it helped him think, Parker ran one hand through his hair several
times, mussing it badly. "You make this sound like some all-knowing
secret society is on your ass-like the Illuminatus Society,
Rosicrucians, CIA, and the Fraternal Order of Masons all rolled into
one! You actually think you've been brainwashed?"
"If you want to call it that. Whatever traumatic episode I've
forgotten, I didn't forget it without assistance. Whatever I saw or
experienced was apparently so shocking, so traumatic, that it's still
festering in my subconscious, trying to reach me through sleepwalking
and through the messages I leave on the Displaywriter. It was so damned
big that even brainwashing hasn't been able to wipe it out, so big that
one of the conspirators is risking his own neck to send me hints."
After reading them one more time, Parker returned the two notes to Dom,
chugged down his own eggnog. "Shit. I think you've got to be right,
which upsets me. I don't want to believe it. It sounds too much as if
you've let your novelistic imagination run wild, as if you're trying out
the plot of a new book on me, something a bit more colorful than you
should write. But crazy as the whole thing sounds, I can't think of any
other answer."
Dom realized he was squeezing the eggnog glass so tightly that he was in
danger of shattering it. He put it on a small table and blotted his
hands on his slacks. "Me neither. There's nothing else that explains
both the crazy damn sleepwalking, and my personality change between
Portland and Mountainview, and those two notes."
His face lined with worry, Parker said, "What could it have been, Dom?
What did you stumble into when you were out there on the road?"
"I don't have the foggiest."
"Have you considered that it might be something so bad ... so damn
dangerous that you'd be better off not knowing?"
Dom nodded. "But if I don't learn the truth, I won't be able to stop
the sleepwalking for good. In my sleep I'm running from the memory of
whatever happened to me out there on the road, the summer before last,
and to stop running I've got to find out what it was, face up to it.
'Cause if I don't stop the sleepwalking, it'll eventually drive me mad.
That might sound a bit melodramatic, too, but it's true. If I don't
learn the truth, then the thing I fear in my dreams is going to start
haunting the waking hours as well, and I'm not going to have a moment's
peace, waking or sleeping, and eventually the only solution will be to
put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger."
"Jesus."
:,I mean it."
'I know you do. God help you, my friend, I know you do.
Reno, Nevada.
A cloud saved Zeb Lomack ' It drifted across the moon before the grip of
the lunar obsession had completely reclaimed him. With the empyreal
lantern briefly dimmed, Zebediah abruptly became aware that he was
standing coatless in the freezing December night, gaping up at the sky,
mesmerized by moonbeams. If the cloud had not broken the trance, he
might have stood there until the object of his grim fascination had
descended past the horizon. Then, having sunk back into his lunacy, he
might have returned to one of the rooms papered with the ancient
god-face that the Greeks called Cynthia, that the Romans called Diana,
there to lie in a stupor until, days hence, he had starved to death.
Reprieved, he let out a wretched cry and ran to the house. He slipped
and fell in the snow, fell again on the porch steps, but immediately
scrambled up, desperately seeking the safety of the indoors, where the
face of the moon could not work its charms on him. But of course there
was no safety inside, either. Though he closed his eyes and began at
once to tear blindly at the moon pictures, ripping them from the kitchen
walls and casting them on the garbage-covered floor, he began to succumb
to his obsession yet again. Eyes tightly shut, he could not see the
cratered images, but he could feel them. He could feel the pale light of
a hundred moons upon his face, and he could feel the roundness of the
moons in his hands as he tore them off the wall, which was crazy because
they were only pictures that could not produce light or warmth and could
not convey by touch the roundness of the lunar globe, yet he
nevertheless felt those things strongly. He opened his eyes and was
instantly captured by the familiar celestial body.
Just like my dad. Asylum-bound.
Like a distant crackle of lightning, that thought flickered through Zeb
Lomack's rapidly dimming mind. It jolted him and allowed him to recover
just long enough to turn away from the living room door and fling
himself toward the kitchen table, where the loaded shotgun waited.
Chicago, Illinois.
Father Stefan Wycazik, descendant of strong-willed Poles, rescuer of
troubled priests, was not accustomed to failure, and he did not handle
it well. "But after everything I've told you, how can you still not
believe?" he demanded.
Brendan Cronin said, "Father Stefan, I'm sorry. But I simply don't feel
any stronger about the existence of God than I did yesterday."
They were in a bedroom on the second floor of Brendan's parents'
gingersnap brick house in the Irish neighborhood called Bridgeport,
where the young priest was spending the holiday according to Father
Wycazik's orders, issued yesterday after the Uptown shootout. Brendan,
dressed in gray slacks and a white shirt, was sitting on the edge of a
double bed that was covered by a worn, yellow chenille spread. Stefan,
choosing to feel needled by his curate's stubbornness, moved constantly
around the room from dresser to highboy to window to bed to dresser
again, as if trying to avoid the prickling pain of his failure.
"Tonight," Father Wycazik said, "I met anatheist who was half-converted
by Tolk's incredible recovery. But you're unimpressed."
"I'm happy for Dr. Sonneford," Brendan said mildly, "but his renewed
belief doesn't rekindle my own."
The curate's refusal to be properly impressed by recent miraculous
events was not the only thing that irritated Father Wycazik. The young
priest's pacific demeanor was also bothersome. If he could not find the
will to believe in God again, then it seemed he should at least be
disheartened and downcast by his continued lack of faith. Instead,
Brendan appeared untroubled by his miserable spiritual condition, which
was quite different from his attitude when Father Wycazik had seen him
last. He had changed
dramatically; for reasons that were not at all
clear, a great peace seemed to have settled over Brendan.
Still determinedly pressing his argument, Stefan said, "It was you,
Brendan, who cured Emmy Halbourg and healed Winton Tolk. It was you,
through the power of those stigmata on your hands. Stigmata that God
visited upon you as a sign."
Brendan rooked at his palms, now unmarked. "I believe ... somehow I
did heal Emmy and Winton. But it wasn't God acting through me."
"Who else but God could've granted you such curing power?"
"I don't know," Brendan said. "Wish I did. But it wasn't God. I felt
no divine presence, Father."
"Good grief, how much more strongly do you expect Him to make His
presence felt? Do you expect Him to thump you on the head with His
great Staff of Justice, tip His diadem to you, and introduce Himself?
You've got to meet Him halfway, Brendan."
The curate smiled and shrugged. "Father, I know these amazing events
seem to have no explanation other than a religious one. But I feel very
strongly that something other than God lies behind it."
"Like what?" Stefan challenged.
"I don't know. Something tremendously important, something really
wonderful and magnificent ... but not God. Look, you've said that the
rings were stigmata. But if that's what they were, why wouldn't they
have been in a form that had some Christian significance? Why
rings-which seem to have no relation to the message of Christ?"
When Brendan began Stefan's unconventional course of psychological
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 34