Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  On Christmas night, when he had stayed at his parents' house in

  Bridgeport, Brendan had apparently had a dream featuring the moon, for

  he had awakened his mother and father with his loud and panicky cries.

  But he could remember nothing of the dream. Since then, as far as he

  knew, none of his dreams had involved the moon, but were concerned

  exclusively with that mysterious place full of dazzling golden light,

  where he felt himself called toward some incredible revelation.

  Now, as he still reached with one hand toward the glimmering frost on

  the window, the vaguely phosphorescent time grew brighter, as if some

  peculiar chemical reaction was at work within the ice crystals. The

  moon-image changed from a milky hue to the crisper white of sun-dappled

  snow, then grew even brighter, until it was a scintillant circle of

  silver blazing on the glass.

  Heart pounding furiously, certain he was teetering on the edge of some

  astounding epiphany, Brendan continued to hold his hand toward the

  window, and he gasped in shock as a shaft of light leapt out from the

  frost-moon and fell across the bed. It was like the beam of a spotlight

  and every bit as brilliant. As he squinted into the glare, trying to

  see how such fierce incandescence could possibly originate from ordinary

  hoarfrost and glass, the light changed to pale red, to darker red, to

  crimson, to scarlet. Around him, the rumpled blankets shone like molten

  steel, and his outstretched hand appeared to be wet with blood.

  He was gripped by diji vu, absolutely convinced that he had once really

  stood under a scarlet moon, bathed in its bloody glow.

  Although he wanted to understand how this strange red light related to

  the wondrous golden light of his dreams, although he still felt himself

  being called by something unknown that waited in that radiance, he was

  suddenly afraid. As the scarlet beams intensified, as his room became a

  caldron of heatless red fire and red shadows, his fear grew into terror

  of such power that it made him shake and sweat.

  He pulled his hand back, and the scarlet light rapidly faded to silver,

  and the silver dimmed as well, until the circle of frost on the window

  shone with only a natural reflection of the January moon.

  As darkness laid claim to his room once more, Brendan sat up and hastily

  switched on the lamp. Damp with sweat, as full of the night-shakes as

  any child frightened by fantasies of carnivorous goblins, he went to the

  window. The icy circle was still there, a moon image in the center of

  the otherwise unfrosted pane of glass.

  He had wondered if the light had been but a dream or hallucination. In

  a way, he almost wished it had been only that. But the frost-moon was

  still there, proof that what he had seen was real, not a delusion.

  Hesitantly, he touched the glass. He felt nothing unusual. Just the

  bitter cold of winter pressing against the other side of the pane.

  With a start, he realized that he felt the swollen rings in his palms.

  He turned his hands over and watched as the stigmata faded.

  He returned to bed. For a long while he sat with his back against the

  headboard, with his eyes open and the light on, waiting for the courage

  to lie down in darkness.

  Elko County, Nevada.

  Ernie stood by the tub in the bathroom, trying to recall precisely what

  he had thought and felt in the early hours of Saturday, December 14,

  when he had been driven by some strange impulse to open the window and

  had suffered that frightening hallucination. The writer, Dominick

  Corvaisis, stood by the sink, and Faye watched from the doorway.

  Reflections of the ceiling light and the light above the mirror imparted

  a warmth to the ceramic-tile floor, glimmered in the chrome faucets and

  shower rod, gave a bright flat sheen to the plastic shower curtain, and

  gradually illuminated the memories that Ernie sought.

  "Light. I came in here for the light. My fear of the dark was at a

  peak then, and I was trying to hide it from Faye. Couldn't sleep, so I

  slipped out of bed, came here, closed the door, and just . . . just

  sort of reveled in the light." He told how his gaze was drawn to the

  window above the tub and how he was overcome by an irrational and urgent

  need to escape. "It's hard to explain. But suddenly crazy thoughts . .

  . whirled into my head. For some reason, I panicked. I thought, This

  is my one chance to escape, so I'd better take it, go through that

  window, head up into the hills . . . get to a ranch, get help."

  "help for what?" Cor-vaisis asked. "Why did you need help? Why did you

  feel you needed to escape from your own home?"

  Ernie frowned. "Don't have the foggiest notion. He remembered the way

  he had felt that night-the eeriness, urgency strangely mixed with

  dreaminess. He pointed to the window. "I actually slid back the bolt.

  Opened it. Might've crawled out, too, except I saw someone outside. On

  the roof of the utility room."

  "Who?" Corvaisis asked.

  "Sounds silly. It was a guy in motorcycle gear. White crash helmet.

  Dark visor over his face. Black gloves. In fact, he reached one hand

  through the window, as if making a grab for me, and I stepped backward,

  fell over the edge of the tub.

  "That's when I came running," Faye said.

  "I got off the floor," Ernie said, "went back to the window, looked out

  on the roof. No one there. It'd- been just . . . hallucination."

  Faye said, "In extreme cases of phobia, when the sufferer is in almost

  constant anxiety, hallucinations sometimes occur."

  The writer stared at the opaque window above the tub, as if hoping to

  find some vital secret revealed in the uneven milky texture of the

  glass. At last he said, "It wasn't exactly a hallucination. I have a

  hunch that what you saw, Ernie, was a . . . well, call it a

  memory-flash. From the summer

  before last. From the lost days. For a moment, back on December

  fourteenth, your repressed memories surged toward the surface. You had

  a flashback to a time when you really were a prisoner in your own home,

  when you really did try to escape."

  "And I was stopped by that guy on the roof of the utility room? But

  what was he doing there in a motorcycle helmet?

  Strange, isn't it'?"

  Dom said, "A man in a decontamination suit, sent to deal with a spill of

  chemicals or biological toxins, would wear an airtight helmet."

  "Decontamination," Ernie said. "But if they were actually here in suits

  like that, then there must've really been a spill."

  "Maybe," Dom said. "We still don't know enough to decide."

  Faye said, "But listen, if we all went through this experience, like you

  think we did, then how come only you and Ernie and that Mr. Lomack are

  suffering repercussions? How come I'm not having bad dreams and

  psychological problems?"

  The writer's gaze drifted back to the window. "I don't know. But those

  are some of the questions we've got to answer if we've any hope of

  relieving the subconscious anxiety that this experience left in us, if

  we've any hope of getting on with normal lives."

&nbs
p; Connecticut to New York City.

  After the money had been removed from the armored car, Jack and his men

  drove only nine miles and parked the two phony Department of Highway

  vans in a four-stall rented garage leased with fake IDs, where they had

  left their cars. The garage was one of a long row that faced both sides

  of a litter-strewn alley in a shabby neighborhood, where relaxed zoning

  laws permitted intermingling of commercial and industrial facilities

  with residences. The area was characterized by peeling paint, grime,

  broken streetlamps, empty storefronts, and mean-looking mongrel dogs on

  the loose.

  They emptied the contents of the canvas bags on the oily concrete floor

  of the garage and did a hasty count of the cash. They split it quickly

  into five shares of approximately three hundred fifty thousand dollars

  each, all in used bills that could never be traced.

  Jack felt no triumph, no thrill. Nothing.

  In five minutes, the gang had dispersed like dandelion fluff on a brisk

  wind. Clockwork.

  As Jack headed home to Manhattan, spits of snow fell in brief squalls,

  though not enough to dust the highway or interfere with travel.

  During the drive from Connecticut, in a strange mood, he underwent a

  change he could not have anticipated. Minute by minute and mile by

  mile, the grayness in him began at last to be colored by emotion; his

  ennui gave way to feelings that surprised him. He would not have been

  surprised by a new welling-up of grief or loneliness, for Jenny had been

  dead only seventeen days. But the emotion that steadily tightened its

  grip on him was guilt. The stolen money in the trunk of the car began

  to weigh on his conscience as heavily as if it were the first ill-gotten

  goods ever to fall into his hands.

  Through eight busy years of meticulously planned and triumphantly

  executed larcenies, several on an even grander scale than the armored

  car, he had never experienced the mildest quiver of guilt. Until now.

  He had seen himself as a just avenger. Until now.

  Cruising to Manhattan. through the blustery winter night, he began to

  see himself as little more than a common thief. Guilt wrapped him like

  flypaper. He tried repeatedly to shake it off. It clung.

  Sudden as it seemed, the guilt had actually been building for a long

  time; that was where his growing dissatisfaction had been leading for

  months. Disillusionment had set in noticeably with the jewelry-store

  job last October, and he'd thought the changes had begun then. But now,

  forced into self-analysis, he realized he had stopped getting a full

  measure of pleasure from his work long ago. As he scrolled backward in

  his memory, seeking the most recent job that had left him fulfilled, he

  was startled to discover it was the McAllister burglary in Marin County,

  north of San Francisco, the summer before last.

  Ordinarily, he worked only in the East near Jenny, but Branch

  Pollard-with whom he had pulled off the just-completed Guardmaster

  heist-had settled in California for a while, and during that Pacific

  sojourn he had spotted Avril McAllister, a sheep waiting to be sheared.

  McAllister, an industrialist worth two hundred million, lived on an

  eightacre estate in Marin County, protected by stone walls, a complex

  electronic security system, and guard dogs. With information developed

  from a half-dozen sources, Branch had determined that McAllister was a

  collector of rare stamps and coins, two eminently fenceable commodities.

  Besides, the industrialist was a gambler who went to Vegas three times a

  year, usually dropping a quarter of a million each visit, but sometimes

  winning big; he always took his winnings in cash to avoid the taxman,

  and some of that cash was surely in the mansion. Branch needed Jack's

  sense of strategy and expertise in electronics, and Jack needed a change

  of scenery, so they pulled it off with the help of a third man.

  After considerable planning, getting onto the estate and into the house

  went smoothly. They were prepared with an electronic listening device

  that could detect the soft tick of a safe's tumblers and amplify them,

  which made deducing the combination mere child's play, but as insurance

  they also took a full set of safe-cracking tools and a plastic

  explosive. The problem was that Avril McAllister had no mere safe. He

  had a damn vault. The industrialist was so certain of the vault door's

  inviolability that he'd made no effort to conceal it with a sliding

  partition or tapestry; it was in one wall of the immense game room, a

  massive stainless-steel portal as big as anything in a first-class bank.

  The listening device Jack had brought was not sensitive enough to detect

  the movement of tumblers through twenty inches of stainless steel. The

  plastic explosive would have peeled any safe, but the vault was

  blastproof. The set of safecracker's tools was a joke.

  They left the estate with no stamps or coins, but with sterling silver,

  a complete collection of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett first

  editions, a few jewels that Mrs. McAllister carelessly left out of the

  vault, and a handful of other items, which they fenced for only sixty

  thousand dollars, split three ways. The take was by no means a

  pittance, but it was far less than anticipated, insufficient to cover

  their expenses and to make their time, planning, and risks worthwhile.

  In spite of this debacle, Jack had gotten a kick out of the job. Once

  they had safely fled the McAllister estate, he and Branch had seen the

  humor in the catastrophe and had been able to laugh about it. They

  spent two days relaxing in the California sun; then, on a whim, Jack

  took his twenty thousand to Reno to see if he could do better at craps

  and blackjack than he had done at burglary. Twenty-four hours after

  checking into Harrah's, he checked out, the twenty thousand having grown

  to an amazing $107,455. The exquisite symmetry of bad-luck money

  bringing good luck was enormously appealing. Deciding to extend his

  vacation, he rented a car and drove back to New York, all the way across

  the country, in a splendid mood, eager to see Jenny.

  Now, more than eighteen months later, as he entered Manhattan on his

  return trip from Connecticut, Jack realized that, curiously, the fiasco

  at the McAllister estate had been the last enterprise to provide

  untainted satisfaction. At that point he had begun a long journey from

  dead-end amorality all the way across the moral spectrum until he had

  become, once more, capable of guilt.

  But why? What had initiated the change in him? What continued to power

  it? He had no answers.

  All he knew was that he was no longer able to think of himself as a

  melancholy and romantic bandit with a just mission to redress the wrongs

  done to him and to his beloved wife. He was merely a thief. For eight

  years he had been deluding himself. Now he saw himself for what he

  really was, and the sudden insight was devastating.

  He had not merely become a man without purpose. Worse, without

  realizing it, he had been lacking a worthwhile purpose for eight years.

&
nbsp; He drove aimlessly through the streets of Manhattan, going nowhere in

  particular, unwilling to return straightaway to the apartment.

  He soon found himself on Fifth Avenue, approaching St. Patrick's, and on

  impulse he pulled to the curb, parked illegally before the main doors of

  the immense cathedral. He got out of the car, went around to the trunk,

  opened it, and pulled half a dozen banded stacks of twenty-dollar bills

  from the plastic garbage bag.

  It was foolhardy to leave the car illegally parked in so prominent a

  location when its trunk contained more than a third of a million dollars

  in stolen money, an illegally obtained device like SLICKS, and guns. If

  a cop stopped to give him a ticket and became suspicious and demanded to

  search the car, Jack would be finished. But he had ceased to care. In

  some ways, he was a dead man who still walked, just as Jenny had been a

  dead woman who still breathed.

  Though not a Catholic, he pulled open one of the sculpted bronze doors

  of St. Patrick's, went inside, into the nave, where a handful of people

  knelt in the front pews, praying or saying the rosary, and where an old

  man was lighting a votive candle even at this hour. Jack stood for a

  moment looking up at the elegant baldachin above the main altar. Then he

  located the poor-boxes, removed the bundles of twenty-dollar bills from

  inside his winter jacket, broke the paper bands that bound them, and

  stuffed the money into the containers as if he were jamming garbage into

  trash receptacles.

  Outside again, as he was descending the granite steps, he stopped

  abruptly and blinked at the night-draped cityscape, for something was