Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

  her precious daughter could be taken from her, and her heart swelled and

  ached with love.

  When at last Jorja said, "Honey, better put your pajamas on and brush

  your teeth," she could not keep a tremor out of her voice.

  The girl looked bewildered, as if she were not quite sure where she was

  or who Jorja was. Then her eyes cleared, and she gave her mother a

  smile that could melt butter. "Hi, Mommy. I been coloring moons."

  "Well, now it's time to get ready for bed," Jorja said.

  "In a little while, okay?" The girl appeared to be relaxed, yet she was

  gripping a crayon so tightly that her knuckles were white. "I want to

  color some more moons."

  Jorja wanted to destroy the hateful album. But Dr. Coverly had warned

  that arguing with the child about the moons and forbidding her to

  collect them would only strengthen her obsession. Jorja was not sure he

  was right, but she stifled the urge to destroy the album.

  ,,Tomorrow, you'll have lots of time to color, Peanut."

  Reluctantly, Marcie closed the album, put away her crayons, and went to

  the bathroom to brush her teeth.

  Alone beside the child's desk, Jorja was overcome by weariness. In

  addition to working a full shift, she'd arranged a mortician for Alan's

  body, ordered flowers, and settled details with the cemetery for

  Monday's funeral. She had also called Alan's estranged father in Miami

  to break the bad news. She was drained. Wearily, she opened the album.

  Red. The girl was coloring all the moons red, both those she had drawn

  and those clipped from newspapers and magazines. She had already

  painted more than fifty lunar images. The obsessive quality of the

  girl's work was evident in the great care she had taken to keep the

  crayon from slipping past the outline of each moon. The crayon had been

  applied more heavily picture by picture, until some moons were coated

  with so much scarlet wax that they had a glisteningly wet look.

  The use of red-and red alone-profoundly disturbed Jorja. It almost

  seemed as if Marcie had glimpsed an augury of some onrushing terror, a

  premonition of blood.

  Elko County, Nevada.

  Faye Block had gone downstairs to the file cabinets, from which she had

  extracted the motel registry that had been in use the summer before

  last. Upon her return, she put the book on the kitchen table, in front

  of Dom, open to the guest lists of Friday and Saturday, July 6 and 7.

  "There, just like Ernie and I remembered. That Friday was the night

  they closed the interstate because of a toxic spill. A truckload of

  dangerous chemicals headed out to Shenkfield. That's a military

  installation about eighteen miles southwest of here. We had to close

  the motel until Tuesday, until they got the situation under control."

  Ernie said, "Shenkfield's an isolated testing ground for chemical and

  biological weapons, so the crap in that truck was damned nasty."

  Faye continued, a new wooden note in her voice, as if reciting carefully

  memorized lines. "They erected roadblocks and ordered us to evacuate

  the danger zone. Our guests left in their own cars." Her face remained

  expressionless. "Ned and Sandy Sarver were allowed to go up to their

  trailer near Beowawe because it was outside the quarantine area."

  Astonished and confused, Dom said, "Impossible. I don't remember any

  evacuation. I was here. I remember reading, researching the geography

  for a series of short stories . . . but those memories are so thin I

  suspect they aren't real. No substance to them. Still, I was here and

  nowhere else, and something weird was done to me." He indicated the

  Polaroid snapshot of himself. "There's the proof."

  When Faye spoke, she sounded stiffer than before, and Dom saw a

  strangeness in her eyes, a slightly glazed look. "Until the all-clear

  was given, Ernie and I stayed with friends who have a small ranch in the

  mountains ten miles northeast of here-Eiroy and Nancy Jamison. It was a

  difficult spill to clean up. The Army needed more than three days to do

  the job. They wouldn't let us back here until Tuesday morning."

  "What's wrong with you, Faye?" Dom asked.

  She blinked. "Huh? What do you mean?"

  "You sound as if you'd been . . . programmed with that little

  speech."

  She seemed genuinely baffled. "What're you talking about?"

  Frowning, Ernie said, "Faye, your voice went . . . flat."

  "Well, I was only explaining what happened." She leaned over and put one

  finger on Friday's page of the registry. "See, we'd rented out eleven

  rooms by the time they closed the interstate that night. But nobody

  paid for the rooms because nobody stayed. They were evacuated."

  "There's your name, seventh on the list," Ernie said.

  Dom stared at his signature and at the Mountainview, Utah, address to

  which he had been moving at the time. He could remember checking in,

  but he sure as hell could not remember climbing back into his car and

  driving out the same night in response to an evacuation order. He said,

  "Did you actually see the accident, the tanker truck?"

  Ernie shook his head. "No, the truck overturned a couple miles from

  here." He spoke in that by-rote tone that had marked Faye's speech. "The

  Army experts from Shenkfield were concerned the chemicals would be

  dispersed by the wind, so the quarantine zone was very large."

  Chilled by the unconscious artificiality in Ernie's voice, Dom looked at

  Faye and saw that she too had noticed her husband's unnatural tone. He

  said, "That's what you sounded like a moment ago, Faye." He looked at

  Ernie. "You two have been programmed with the same script."

  Faye frowned. "Are you saying the spill never happened?"

  "It happened, all right." Ernie told Dom. "For a while we saved a bunch

  of newspaper clippings about it from the Elko Sentinel. But I think we

  eventually threw them out. Anyway, people around these parts still

  wonder what might've happened if we'd gotten big winds and been

  contaminated with that top-secret stuff before the evacuation order was

  even given. No, it's not just some delusion of Faye's and mine."

  "You can ask Elroy and Nancy Jamison," Faye said. "They were here that

  night, visiting. When we had to evacuate, they offered to take us back

  to their place and put us up for the duration."

  Dom smiled sourly. "I wouldn't put much credence in their recall of

  events. If they were here, then they saw what the rest of us saw, and

  it was scrubbed from their minds. They remember taking you back to

  their place because that's what they were told to remember. In fact

  they were probably right here, being brainwashed with the rest of us."

  "My head's swimming," Faye said. "This is positively Byzantine."

  "But, damn it, the toxic spill and evacuation happened," Ernie said.

  "It was in the newspapers."

  Dom thought of a disturbing explanation that made his scalp crawl. "What

  if everyone here at the motel that night was contaminated with some

  chemical or biological weapon headed for Shenkfield? And what if the

  Army and the government covered it up to avoid bad press, millions of

  dollars in law
suits, and the disclosure of top-secret information? Maybe

  they closed the highway and announced that everyone was safely

  evacuated, when in fact we had not been gotten out in time. Then they

  used the motel as a clinic, decontaminated us as much as they could,

  scrubbed the memory of the incident out of our minds, and reprogrammed

  us with false memories, so we'd never know what had happened to us."

  They stared at one another in shocked silence for a moment. Not because

  the scenario sounded entirely right, which it did not. But because it

  was the first scenario they'd come up with that made sense of the

  psychological problems they had been having and explained the drugged

  people in those Polaroid snapshots.

  Then Ernie and Faye began to think of objections. Ernie voiced the

  first: "In that case, the logical thing for them to've done was to make

  our false memories tie in closely with their cover story about the toxic

  spill and evacuation. That's exactly what they did with Faye and me,

  with the Jamisons, Ned and Sandy Sarver. So why didn't they do the same

  with you?

  Why'd they program you with different memories that didn't have anything

  to do with the evacuation? That was irrational and risky. I mean, the

  radical differences between our memories is virtually proof that you or

  we or all of us-were brainwashed.

  "Don't know," Dom said. "That's just one more mystery to unravel."

  "And here's another flaw in that theory," Ernie said. "If we'd been

  contaminated by a biological weapon, they wouldn't have let us go in

  just three days. They'd have been afraid of contagion, epidemic." Dom

  said, "All right. So it was a chemical agent, not a virus or bacterium.

  Something they could wash off or flush out of our systems."

  "That doesn't make sense, either," Faye said. "Because the things they

  test at Shenkfield are meant to be deadly. Poison gas. Nerve gas.

  Hideous damn stuff. If we'd got caught in a cloud like that, we'd have

  been dead on the spot or braindamaged or crippled."

  "Maybe it was a slow-acting agent," Dom said. "Something that generates

  tumors, leukemia, or other conditions that only begin to show up two or

  three or five years from the date of contamination."

  That thought also shocked them into silence. They listened to the

  ticking of the kitchen clock, to the mournful fluting of the wind at the

  windows, wondering if malignancies were even now sprouting within them.

  Finally, Ernie said, "Maybe we were contaminated, and maybe we're all

  slowly rotting inside, but I don't think so. After all, they test

  potential weapons at Shenkfield. And what use would a weapon be that

  didn't kill the enemy for years and years?"

  "Virtually no use at all," Dom acknowledged.

  "And," Ernie said, "how could chemical contamination explain that

  bizarre experience you had in Lomack's house in Reno?"

  "I've no idea," Dom said. "But now that we know they cordoned off this

  whole area using the excuse of a toxic spillwhether it was a real spill

  or not-my theory that we were brainwashed is a lot more credible.

  Because, see, before this I wasn't able to explain how someone could've

  rounded us up at will and held us long enough to make us forget the

  thing we saw. But the quarantine gave them the time they needed, and it

  also kept away prying eyes. So . . . at least now we have a good

  idea who we're up against. The United States Army, maybe acting in

  collusion with the government, maybe acting alone, has been trying to

  hide something that happened here, something it did but shouldn't have

  done. I don't know ' about you, but the thought of being up against an

  enemy that big and that potentially ruthless scares the hell out of me."

  "An old Leatherneck like me is bound to be scornful of the Army," Ernie

  said. "But they're not devils, you know. We can't leap to the

  conclusion we're victims of a wicked right-wing conspiracy. That

  crackpot stuff makes millions for paranoid novelists and for Hollywood,

  but in the real world, evil is more subtle, less identifiable. If Army

  and government officials are behind what happened to us, they don't

  necessarily have immoral motives. They probably think they did the only

  wise thing they could've done in the circumstances."

  "But whether or not it's wise," Faye said, "we've got to dig into this

  situation. If we don't, Ernie's nyctophobia will surely get worse. And

  your sleepwalking will also get worse, Dom. And what then?"

  They all knew "what then."

  "What then" was a shotgun barrel jammed in the mouth, the route to peace

  that Zebediah Lomack had taken.

  Dom looked down at the motel registry on the table before him. Four

  spaces above his own name, he saw another entry that electrified him.

  Dr. Ginger Weiss. Her address was in Boston.

  "Ginger," he said. "The fourth name on those moon posters."

  Furthermore, Cal Sharkle, the Blocks' trucker-friend from Chicago, the

  zombie-eyed subject of one of the Polaroid snapshots, had checked into

  the motel just before Dr. Weiss. The first guests to sign in that day

  were Mr. and Mrs. Alan Rykoff and daughter, of Las Vegas. Dom was

  willing to bet that they were the young family photographed in front of

  the door to Room 9. Zebediah Lomack's name was not in the registry, so

  he had probably just been unlucky enough to stop at the Grille for

  dinner that night, on his way between Reno and Elko. One of the other

  names might have been that of the young priest in the other Polaroid,

  but if so, he had signed without appending his title.

  "We'll have to talk to all these people," Dom said excitedly. "We can

  start calling them first thing tomorrow and see what they remember about

  those days in July."

  Chicago, Illinois.

  By allowing no slightest hairline crack to appear in his resolve, by

  showing no equivocation whatsoever, Brendan managed to obtain Father

  Wycazik's permission to go to Nevada alone on Monday, without Monsignor

  Janney trailing him in expectation of miracles.

  By ten-ten, he was in bed with the lights out, lying on his side in

  blackness, staring at the window, where the palest light glistered

  softly in the frost that skinned the pane. The window looked out upon

  the courtyard, where no lights burned at this hour, so Brendan knew that

  he was seeing indirect moonglow refracted by the thin layer of ice that

  had welded itself to the glass. It had to be indirect light because the

  moon was traversing the sky on a course that had made it visible from

  the study windows earlier in the evening, and the study was on the other

  side of the rectory; the moon could not now be over the courtyard unless

  it had made a sudden ninetydegree turn in the path it had previously

  been following, which was not possible. As he patiently lay waiting for

  sleep, he became increasingly intrigued by the subtle patterns made by

  the second-hand moonbeams that had been trapped in the frost; light

  splintered at every point where one ice crystal interfaced with another,

  each beam shattering into a hundred beams, a hundred more.

  "The moon," he whispered, su
rprised by his voice. "The moon."

  Gradually, Brendan realized that something uncanny was happening.

  At first he was merely fascinated by the harmonious interaction of frost

  and moonlight, but soon fascination evolved into a more intense

  attraction. He could not look away from the pearly window. It offered

  an indefinable promise, and he was drawn as a sailor by a siren's song.

  Before he knew what he intended, he had slipped one arm out from beneath

  the blankets and was reaching toward the window, though it was ten feet

  away and could not be touched from where he lay. The black silhouette of

  his spread-fingered hand was clearly defined against the niveous pane of

  glass that glowed softly beyond, and his futile straining was the

  essence of yearning. Brendan longed to be within the light, not the

  light that lived in the frost but that other golden light of his dreams.

  "The moon," he whispered, again surprised that he had spoken.

  His heartbeat accelerated. He began to tremble.

  Suddenly, upon the glass, the sugary-looking frost underwent an

  inexplicable change. As Brendan watched, the thin timemelted away from

  the edges of the pane, toward the center. In a few seconds, when the

  melting stopped, there remained only a perfect circle of ice, about ten

  inches in diameter, glowing eerily in the middle of an otherwise clear,

  dry, dark rectangle of glass.

  The moon.

  Brendan knew it was a sign, though he did not know from whom or what or

  where it came, nor did he understand it.