Strangers

by Mort Castle

  No! The thought was there and she did not want to think of it, did not want it to emerge because that would give it a touch of credence, bring it into the realm of possibility, and it was the out-and-out craziest (and so terrifying!) thought she had ever had, would ever have…

  And vowing she would not think it, she of course did think it, the horrifying totality of it expressed in a single word hiss—whispered in her mind:

  Michael!

  She recalled when she was a child, maybe five, perhaps not that old. Late one winter night, a terrifying idea had jerked her from sleep, led her to walk down the hall to her parents’ room. She silently stood at the door, studying them, wondering Can I be sure they are really Mom and Dad? Illuminated only by the soft silver of the moon that seeped in through the west window, the two people in bed—Mom and Dad?—did not look right, did not seem to be the same people they were during the day. For weeks after that, she stared at them when she thought they weren’t noticing, trying to be sure they were not the pretenders that sleep and moonlight had made them seem.

  Oh, she had been one silly kid!

  And wasn’t she still the same silly kid, thinking that Michael…

  She welcomed the question that came to her mind in response to the classroom discussion she was only half-hearing. If she were seriously thinking about this question, focusing her entire mind on it, then she could not be considering anything else—Michael! MichaelTheStranger!—and she was not thinking about anything else. She had something to ask Kevin, and only after she had done so did she feel the embarrassment that came from not having first raised her hand and being recognized.

  “But all that psychology knows about the psychopathic personality,” she said, “comes from studying the psychopaths who have been caught. Isn’t that right?”

  “True enough,” Kevin nodded. “And all we know about any of the individual mental illnesses comes from studying those who have been identified as being mentally ill. So… I’m not sure I get your point.”

  Beth’s mind was racing. So was her heart. She felt the heady elation of intellectual discovery and challenge, one that she had experienced so many years ago in college and then had not known again during her brain’s “dormant years.” She stammered, striving to express herself clearly.

  “Isn’t it possible that there are psychopaths who are not detected and might never be found out? They’d be even smarter and shrewder than the others, real super-geniuses. They…”

  She paused. She wasn’t sure where her ideas were going and she feared following it to a dead end or a corner, a corner where the dunce would have to—stand with her back to the class.

  Kevin Bollender frowned, his brow wrinkling. He smoothed his moustache, first the left side then the right. Then he said, “That’s very good.” He smiled, and when he spoke his tone was jocular but genuinely complimentary. “What you’ve given us, Beth, is what psychologists love: a theory. We can call it Beth Louden’s Theory of the Unknown Psychopath.”

  For the remainder of the class session, “The Unknown Psychopath” was the topic of conversation. Could he exist? Did he? What possible evidence might be found throughout history? In philosophical works? (Rob Gretsch mentioned Nietzsche and his Ubermensch, the Superman who was above “the law” that governed the masses. No wonder the Nazis had made Nietzsche their philosophical justification.) In today’s news paper headlines and 10 o’clock TV newscasts?

  When the class ended, Kevin Bollender asked Beth if she would wait just a moment. “I want to thank you,” Kevin Bollender said. “I mean because of your sharp question, there was a lively discussion tonight instead of a lecture, one of my patented ‘Bollender’s Boring Bombasts.’”

  “I…I just had something to ask,” Beth said. She realized she was blushing, felt a flare of heat on her cheeks that reminded her of schoolgirl days. It was embarrassing, she thought, to be praised for having an idea, especially when you were not exactly accustomed to having your intellect complimented. Beth felt uneasy—Actually, excited—happy uneasy talking to Kevin Bollender, listening to him commend her for her question and then say, “We could talk about this some more if you’d join me for a drink. say, in the cocktail lounge just down…”

  Because she was taken aback, without time to think it over—Beth said what she really wanted to say.

  “Yes.”

  — | — | —

  THIRTEEN

  CLAIRE WYNKOOP was nestled comfortably in her living room’s upholstered wing chair. A book lay open on her lap, but she had read no more than a few pages when the words ran together. Claire’s head was bowed. She thought she really should remove her bifocals before they fell off but somehow it didn’t seem worth the bother. She was pleasantly warm, as though the chair were an enfolding cloud, and she could feel the regular beat of her heart throughout her arms and legs. She was not asleep but she knew she wasn’t far from it.

  Across the room, atop the antique sideboard, the compact phono-radio that Beth and Michael had given her for Christmas five years ago, was tuned to an easy-listening FM station. Claire thought that every song, whether performed by the twin pianos of Ferrante and Teicher, the 101 Strings, or the Johnny Mann singers, had a lulling sameness. It would be perfect music to doze off by, music that might give her good dreams.

  It was 8:30 Friday evening, and for the first time all day, Claire Wynkoop relaxed. She’d awakened that morning with a headache that was not really a headache. At the library, she had listened to that sound, the vibrating tuning fork in the center of her brain.

  It had been a day that promised premonition, a tense, uneasy, and just out-and-out bad day. Why did the future insist on forcing glimpses of itself on her? she’d asked herself today as she had so many times previously. She was quite content to live in the here and now. There should be impregnable territorial lines separating past, present, and future.

  She wondered if she were asleep yet. No, she couldn’t be. She could still hear the music…

  Music that grew louder, then louder still. It filled the room, reverberated in her mind. Gone now was the soothing, floating lyricism, the gently rippling stream rhythm. The music was fiercely, unrelentingly atonal: blaring horns, strings pain-screeching beyond the highest notes of the octave. There was a chorus, voices that yowled fury, unreasoning anger, and hate.

  Claire’s head flew back. Her glasses had slipped to the very end of her nose and she peered over the top of them. She gripped the arms of the chair.

  She saw the future.

  Michael! He was standing still. His hazel eyes stared at her, but his face was otherwise utterly expressionless, a blank.

  She waited for him to speak. She felt he had something to say, something to tell her.

  Her son-in-law, this Michael-in-the-future, said nothing. Then, the crinkles around his eyes deepened and he smiled.

  That smile! That is—I do not understand—not the way Michael smiles. I’ve never seen him took this way!

  Michael lifted his hand. He slowly waved.

  Then Michael changed. His face, the face of the son-in-law she loved as dearly as a son, was gone. She was no longer seeing Michael. She was looking at…

  I am Death!

  Death was not a skeleton brandishing a scythe. He rode no ghostly steed. Death occupied Michael Louden’s body, but Death’s head…

  Death’s head was hellfire, a lunatic pinwheel of pulsing red. It was the writhing, black-scarlet flame of a great infernal candle. It was an evil blazing ruby, the color of the blood of victims, martyrs, innocents.

  Though he had no eyes, Death’s gaze fell on her. Though he had no mouth, Death spoke to her:

  Soon! My time is soon!

  Then Death and the future were gone. The FM station was quietly serenading its listeners with the Andre Kostelanetz version of The Beatles’ “Yesterday.” The slowed chirping of end-of-summer crickets flitered in through the window.

  Claire’s head ached. Her heart literally felt as though it were within her mouth.
She did not fully understand what she had seen but she fully believed it. She knew better than to doubt the miserable gift of second sight that was hers.

  She pondered her presentiment of what would be. Michael. Michael and Death. She had seen Michael become Death. No, that wasn’t right. She had watched as Michael had been blotted out, taken over by Death!

  That was it! Michael was going to die, and Death had even revealed when: Soon!

  “Forewarned is forearmed.” Like all clichés, that was good common sense. Claire couldn’t allow herself to believe that what she discerned in her intuitive flashes was an inevitability. Couldn’t she have seen—and God, she prayed it were so!—merely a possibility, an event that did not have to occur if precautions were taken?

  There were people who had testified that they had a “feeling” and so cancelled their passage on The Titanic, The Lusitania, The Hindenburg. Who knew how many lives had been saved by a wife’s saying to her husband, “I want you to drive to work instead of taking the train,” on the very day the 8:05 commuter derailed; by an intuitive mother’s deciding to let her child skip school on the day a school fire claimed hundreds of lives?

  She had to warn Michael. Oh, her son-in-law had always pooh-poohed her premonitions. He no more accepted her psychic ability than he did the Flat Earth Theory.

  But Beth… Beth did not want to believe, tried like anything to make light of “Mom’s crystal ball gazing,” but Beth did know. In her heart of hearts, against her will Beth believed.

  She would call right now and talk to Beth.

  Claire took the book from her lap and placed in on the drum table alongside the chair. She stood up and the room whirled. Her blood pressure must have shot right up into the stratosphere during her vision, she thought. The dizziness would pass in a moment.

  The floor rose up. It was like… She remembered being a youthful visitor to the carnival funhouse, the “topsy-turvy” room. She dropped back into the chair.

  She felt strange. She looked around the living room. There was a heightened vividness to everything: the chandelier, the couch with the tired middle cushion, the sentimental knick-knacks in the shadow-box… She saw it all with an increased acuity. It was as though she could perceive the faint, ghostly traces of another dimension that lay beneath reality. There was an actual thickness to the distance between the sideboard and her wing chair. The room was crowded with depths of air.

  Claire tried to rise. God! She was weak! Just sitting upright required so much of her strength. Indeed, her head was tipping to the right and it took her all her effort to keep it level.

  Bracing herself with the heels of her hands on the chair’s arms, locking her elbows at the right moment, she managed to stand. She took a step.

  As a child in grade school, she had learned about gravity. Now, for the first time, she actually understood gravity; it was an overwhelming force working to yank her down.

  All around her was a hissing-popping noise, as though she were staggering through a sea of champagne. The giant bubbles of carbonation touched her, burst against her.

  The right corner of Claire Wynkoop’s mouth drooped, dribbling saliva. Bent at the elbow, her right arm was pressed to her side, the hand turned up, fingers curled in a rigid talon.

  Her numb right leg trailing as though it wanted nothing to do with her, Claire reeled into the kitchen. She had to call Beth, to warn her about Michael…

  But she couldn’t, not yet. Suddenly—right now—death was reaching out for her. She had to get help.

  She used her left hand to take the wall phone from its cradle. She locked the receiver between shoulder and her cheek and awkwardly dialed the “Emergency” number.

  When she tried to speak, her tongue filled her entire mouth. That is funny, she thought; I know good and well what I want to say but it’s coming out lumpy blocks of noise!

  She tried once more. She focused all her concentration. The words were halting and thick but coherent. “My name… is Claire Wynkoop.” She had to search her mind for her address but at last she had it. Then she explained the problem. “I think I am having a stroke.”

  She managed to hang up the phone and unlock the back door so that when help arrived there’d be no problem getting in. She tried to get to the kitchen table to sit down but weakness—not at all unpleasant, actually just a warm weariness radiating from her bones—hit her and she sank down onto the linoleum floor, her right leg stuck out before her.

  She wondered if she were dying. She did not think so. Though she had virtually no strength, she did not feel bad so much as different. She sensed changes within her mind, profound changes. The way she viewed the world was being transformed. She had the impression that for the very first time in her life she was seeing; the “scales were removed from her eyes.” She understood the meaning of what she saw. On the wall, the ill-sewn sampler that Beth had made when she was in third grade, GOD BLESS OUR HAPPY HOME, was vibrating with a child’s love and the joy of creating and the determination to make something “nice.”

  When the paramedics arrived, Claire Wynkoop was unable to answer any of their questions. She was conscious, but could not speak. Yet her glazed eyes were seeing, seeing not only what existed but the essence of it that transcended mere existence. Her brain, in which millions of cells were dying, was interpreting what she saw.

  “Don’t worry, ma’am. You’re going to be all right.”

  Claire heard what was said, but more than that, she heard the concern and sincerity in the paramedic’s voice.

  Her head lolling, she studied the two men.

  They shine! I can see the light. I understand their natures. The glow around their heads… They have auras, bright golden, and that means they are kind and caring…and good.

  Claire Wynkoop’s self-diagnosis was correct. She had had a massive stroke.

  But now she could see.

  She could see human auras.

  And she could understand them.

  It was five-thirty Saturday morning when the telephone rang. Michael sat up in bed, his heart racing. The call? At last, the call? Since seeing Jan Pretre at the Engelkings, hearing the renewal of the promise of the Time of The Strangers—Soon!—the ringing of the telephone sent an anticipatory tingle down his spine.

  But, shit, he should have known. A predawn call was probably a dumbass playing a prank or…

  Beth had the telephone. She wasn’t saying much. “Oh,” mostly, but every “Oh” was more worried than the one before and she was crying.

  “Beth, what is it?”

  Even as Beth said “Mother,” he realized what the call had to be. So good old, dear old, sweet old Moms had bought the big farm, over and out and call it a wrap, huh? Hypertension had finally popped the cork in her brain and bye-bye!

  He slipped an arm around Beth’s shoulder. He said, “She isn’t…” then paused as though he couldn’t bear to face the possibility that Claire was dead.

  But goddamnit, and how about that? Claire was not dead after all! The old broad clung to life like gum stuck to your shoe in a fleabag movie house.

  After she’d hung up the telephone, Beth, sobbing, gave him the details. Mother had suffered a major stroke, and, by the time she got to the hospital, she had yet another—not so severe, that one, the doctors thought—on the other side of the brain. She was paralyzed. Right now, they had her in intensive care. She was drifting in and out of consciousness and, while her condition was serious, they called it stable, not critical.

  “We have to…”

  “Of course,” Michael said. “We’ll get right down there.”

  “The children, I…I don’t want them to see Mom when she’s like…like she is.”

  Right, Michael thought, have to spare the impressionable wee ones any nastiness, don’t we? “Okay,” he said, “You start getting ready and I’ll wake the kids in a few minutes. I’ll give the Engelkings a call. Vern’s an early riser, even on weekends. I’ll ask if they would keep Marcy and Kim until tomorrow evening. I’m
sure it will be okay. You know how they feel about the girls.”

  “Yes,” Beth said. “Laura and Vern are like family, Michael”—Beth choked—“Mom…”

  Of course the Engelkings would look after the children for the weekend. No problem. So sorry to hear what had happened and if there were anything at all they could do…

  An hour later, the kids dropped off at the Engelkings’, Michael and Beth were on the road to Belford. Beth had hurriedly packed, taking a week’s clothing for herself. That way she could be with her mother—“I keep praying she’ll be all right, Michael, but that’s not what I feel”—and Michael could probably—“If only Mom is…”—return home Sunday evening. The girls, of course, had school on Monday and he had to work. It would be better not to upset the children’s routine any more than necessary. once they knew what was what, that Mom would be okay, they’d figure out what had to be done.

  And just how the hell “okay” was the old lady likely to be? Michael wondered. She was probably going to wind up a vegetable, and a goddamned vegetable belonged in the ground.

  “I’m sure things will be all right, Beth,” Michael said. “People can make remarkable recoveries from strokes. Your mother is a strong-willed woman; that will help. I’ll bet a year from now, you won’t even know she had a stroke.” To himself, Michael added, A year from now, you won’t know anything!

  Beth did not answer.

  Overhead, the sun was a hazy blob in the sky. There were few cars heading south. The highway markers ticked off Monee, Kankakee, Chebanse, the exotic Illinois place names of small towns that had little more to offer a visitor than, as the signs promised, “Food,” guaranteed bad, and “Gas,” definitely over-priced.

  Michael glanced at Beth. She was sitting as far as possible from him, pressed to the car door. He said, “Try to think positively, honey.”

  “Please be quiet, Michael,” Beth said. She turned her head, not looking at him.