Strangers (20 page)

Brendan took the paper from him. “Listen, is there any chance I might pass on an infection to the kids or anything like that?”

“Oh, no. If I thought there was the slightest chance, I’d have told you,” Heeton said. “Now, let me have one last look.”

Brendan turned his hands palms-up for examination.

“What the devil?” Dr. Heeton said, surprised.

The rings were gone.

•

That night, in his room at the Holiday Inn, Brendan again endured the by-now familiar nightmare about which he had spoken with Father Wycazik. It had disturbed his sleep twice before in the past week.

He dreamed he was lying in a strange place, with his arms and legs restrained by straps or braces. From out of a haze, a pair of hands reached for him. Hands encased in shiny black gloves.

He woke in knots of sweat-soaked sheets, sat up in bed, and leaned back against the headboard, letting the dream evaporate as sweat dried on his forehead. In the dark he brought his hands to his face to blot it—
and went rigid when his palms touched his cheeks. He switched on the lamp. The swollen, inflamed rings had returned to his palms. But as he watched, they faded.

It was Thursday, December 12.

9

Laguna Beach, California

Dom Corvaisis thought he had slept Wednesday night straight through in peace. He woke in bed, in precisely the same position in which he had gone to sleep, as if he had not moved an inch during the night.

But when he went to work at his Displaywriter, he was dismayed to find proof of his somnambulistic wandering on the current work diskette. As on a few other occasions, he apparently had gone to the Displaywriter in his night trance and had repeatedly typed two words. Previously, he had typed, “I’m scared,” but this time there were two different words:

There were hundreds of repetitions of those seven letters, and he was at once reminded that he had heard himself murmuring the same words in a state of drowsy disorientation, just as he had fallen asleep last Sunday. Dominick stared at the screen for a long time, chilled, but he had no idea what special meaning “the moon” held for him, if any.

The Valium and Dalmane therapy was working well. Until now, there had been no new episodes of sleepwalking and no dreams since last weekend, when he’d had that nasty nightmare about being forced facedown into a sink. He had seen Dr. Cobletz again, and the physician had been pleased by his swift progress.

Cobletz had said, “I’m going to extend your prescriptions, but be sure not to take the Valium more than once—or at most, twice—a day.”

“I never do,” Dom had lied.

“And only one Dalmane a night. I don’t want you becoming drug-dependent. I’m sure we’ll beat this thing by the first of the year.”

Dom believed Cobletz was correct, which was why he did not want to worry the doctor by confessing that there were days when he only made it through with the aid of Valium and nights when he took two or even three Dalmane tablets, washing some of them down with beer or Scotch. But in a couple of weeks he could stop taking them without fear that the somnambulism would get a new grip on him. The treatment was
working. That was the important thing. The treatment was, thank God, working.

Until now.

The moon.

Frustrated and angry, he deleted the words from the diskette, a hundred lines of them, four repetitions to the line.

He stared at the screen a long time, growing increasingly nervous.

Finally he took a Valium.

•

That morning Dom got no work done, and at eleven-thirty he and Parker Faine picked up Denny Ulmes and Nyugen Kao Tran, the two boys assigned to them by the Orange County chapter of Big Brothers of America. They had planned a lazy afternoon at the beach, dinner at Hamburger Hamlet, and a movie, and Dominick had been looking forward to the outing.

He had become involved in the Big Brothers program years earlier in Portland, Oregon. It had been his only community involvement, the only thing that had been able to bring him out of his rabbit hole.

He had spent his own childhood in a series of foster homes, lonely and increasingly withdrawn. Some day, when he finally got married, he hoped to adopt kids. In the meantime, when he spent time with these kids, he was not only helping them but was also comforting the lonely child within himself.

Nyugen Kao Tran preferred to be called “Duke,” in imitation of John Wayne, whose movies he loved. Duke was thirteen, the youngest son of boat people who had fled the horrors of “peacetime” Vietnam. He was bright, quick-witted, as startlingly agile as he was thin. His father—after surviving a brutal war, a concentration camp, and two weeks in a flimsy boat on the open sea—had been killed three years ago in a holdup while working at his second job as a night-shift clerk at a Seven-Eleven store in sunny southern California.

Denny Ulmes, the twelve-year-old who was Parker’s little brother, lost his father to cancer. He was more reticent than Duke, but the two got along famously, so Dom and Parker frequently combined their outings.

Parker became a Big Brother at Dom’s insistence, with curmudgeonly reluctance. “Me?
Me?
I’m not father material—or surrogate father material,” Parker had said. “Never was and never will be. I drink too much, womanize too much. It’d be downright criminal for any kid to turn to me for advice. I’m a procrastinator, a dreamer, and a self-centered egomaniac. And I
like
me that way! What in God’s name would I have to offer a kid? I don’t even like dogs. Kids like dogs, but I hate ’em. Damn dirty
flea-bitten things. Me, a Big Brother? Friend, you have lost your marbles for sure.”

But Thursday afternoon at the beach, when the water proved too cold for swimming, Parker organized a volleyball game and surfside races. He got Dom and the boys involved in a complicated game of his own devising, involving two frisbees, a beach ball, and an empty soda can. Under his direction they also built a sandcastle complete with a menacing dragon.

Later, during an early dinner at Hamburger Hamlet in Costa Mesa, while the kids were in the bathroom, Parker said, “Dom, good buddy, this Big Brother thing was sure one of the best ideas I’ve ever had.”

“
Your
idea?” Dominick said, shaking his head. “I had to drag you into it kicking and screaming.”

“Nonsense,” Parker said. “I’ve always had a way with kids. Every artist is a bit of a kid at heart. We have to stay young to create. I find kids invigorate me, keep my mind fresh.”

“Next, you’ll be getting a dog,” Dom said.

Parker laughed. He finished his beer, leaned forward. “You okay? At times today, you seemed…distracted. A little out of it.”

“Lot on my mind,” Dom said. “But I’m fine. The sleep-walking’s pretty much stopped. And the dreams. Cobletz knows what he’s doing.”

“Is the new book going well? Don’t shit me, now.”

“It’s going well,” Dom lied.

“At times you have that look,” Parker said, watching him intently. “That…doped up. Following the prescribed dosage, I assume?”

The painter’s perspicacity disconcerted Dom. “I’d have to be an idiot to snack on Valium as if it was candy. Of course, I follow the prescribed dosage.”

Parker stared hard at him, then apparently decided not to push it.

The movie was good, but during the first thirty minutes Dom grew nervous without reason. When he felt the nervousness building toward an anxiety attack, he slipped out to the men’s room. He’d brought another Valium for just such an emergency.

The important thing was that he was winning. He was getting well. The somnambulism was losing its grip on him. It really was.

Beneath a strong pine-scented disinfectant, there was an acrid stench from the urinals. Dom felt slightly nauseous. He swallowed the Valium without water.

That night, in spite of the pills, he had the dream again, and he remembered more of it than just the part where people were forcing his head into a sink.

In the nightmare, he was in a bed in an unknown room, where there
seemed to be an oily saffron mist in the air. Or perhaps the amber fog was only in his eyes, for he could not see anything clearly. Furniture loomed beyond the bed, and at least two people were present. But those shapes rippled and writhed as if this were purely a realm of smoke and fluid, where nothing had a fixed appearance.

He almost felt as if he were underwater, very deep underneath the surface of some mysterious cold sea. The atmosphere in the dream-place had more weight than mere air. He could barely draw breath. Each inhalation and exhalation was agony. He sensed that he was dying.

The two blurred figures came close. They seemed concerned about his condition. They spoke urgently to each other. Although he knew they were speaking English, he could not understand them. A cold hand touched him. He heard the clink of glass. Somewhere a door shut.

With the flash-cut suddenness of a scene transition in a film, the dream shifted to a bathroom or kitchen. Someone was forcing his face down into the sink. Breathing became even more difficult. The air was like mud: with each inhalation it clogged his nostrils. He choked and gasped and tried to blow out the mud-thick air, and the two people with him were shouting at him, and as before he could not understand what they were saying, and they pressed his face down into the sink—

Dom woke and was still in bed. Last weekend he had been flung free of the dream only to discover that he had walked in his sleep and had been acting out the nightmare at his own bathroom sink. This time, he was relieved to find himself beneath the sheets.

I
am
getting better, he thought.

Trembling, he sat up and switched on the light.

No barricades. No signs of somnambulistic panic.

He looked at the digital clock: two-oh-nine
A.M.
A half-empty can of warm beer stood on the nightstand. He washed down another Dalmane tablet.

I am getting better.

It was Friday the thirteenth.

10

Elko County, Nevada

Friday night, three days after his weird experience on the I-80, Ernie Block couldn’t sleep at all. As darkness embraced him, his nerves wound tighter, tighter, until he thought he would start screaming and be unable to stop.

Slipping out of bed as soundlessly as he could, pausing to make sure
that Faye’s slow and even breathing had not changed, he went into the bathroom, closed the door, turned on the light. Wonderful light. He reveled in the light. He put down the lid of the commode and sat for fifteen minutes in his underwear, just letting the brightness sear him, as mindlessly happy as a lizard on a sun-washed rock.

Finally he knew he must return to the bedroom. If Faye woke, and if he remained in here too long, she would begin to think something was wrong. He was determined to do nothing that would make her suspicious.

Although he had not used the toilet, he flushed it for cover, and went to the sink to wash his hands. He had just finished rinsing off the soap and had plucked the towel off the rack when his eyes were drawn to the only window in the room. It was above the bathtub, a rectangle about three feet wide and two feet high, which opened outward on an overhead piano hinge. Although the glass was frosted and provided no view of the night beyond, a shiver passed through Ernie as he stared at the opaque pane. More disturbing than the shiver was the sudden rush of peculiar, urgent thoughts that came with it:

The window’s big enough to get through, I could get away, escape, and the roof of the utility room is under the window, so there’s not a long drop, and I could be off, into the arroyo behind the motel, up into the hills, make my way east, get to a ranch somewhere and get help….

Blinking furiously as that swift train of thoughts flashed through his mind and faded away, Ernie discovered that he had stepped from the sink to the bathtub. He did not remember moving.

He was bewildered by the urge to escape. From whom? From what? Why? This was his own home. He had nothing to fear within these walls.

Yet he could not take his gaze from the milky window. A dreaminess had come over him. He was aware of it but unable to cast it off.

Got to get out, get away, there won’t be another chance, not another chance like this, now, go now, go, go….

Unwittingly, he had stepped into the tub and was directly in front of the window, which was set in the wall at face-level. The porcelain coating of the tub was cold against his bare feet.

Slide back the latch, push up the window, stand on the rim of the tub, pull yourself up onto the sill, out and away, a three-or four-minute headstart before you’re missed, not much but enough….

Panic rose in him without reason. There was a fluttering in his guts, a tightness in his chest.

Without knowing why he was doing it, yet unable to stop himself, he
slid the bolt from the latch on the bottom of the window. He pushed out. The window swung up.

He was not alone.

Something was at the other side of the window, out there on the roof, something with a dark, featureless, shiny face. Even as Ernie recoiled in surprise, he realized it was a man in a white helmet with a tinted visor that came all the way down over his face, so darkly tinted that it was virtually black.

A black-gloved hand reached through the window, as if to grab him, and Ernie cried out and took a step backward and fell over the edge of the tub. Toppling out of the tub, he grabbed wildly at the shower curtain, tore it loose from several of its rings, but could not arrest his fall. He hit the bathroom floor with a crash. Pain flashed through his right hip.

“Ernie!”
Faye cried, and a moment later she pushed open the door. “Ernie, my God, what’s wrong, what happened?”

“Stay back.” He got up painfully. “Someone’s out there.”

Cold night air poured through the open window, rustling the half-wrecked, bunched-up shower curtain.

Faye shivered, for she slept in only a pajama shirt and panties.

Ernie shivered, too, though partly for different reasons. The moment the pain had throbbed through his hip, the dreaminess had left him. In the sudden rush of clear-mindedness, he wondered if the helmeted figure had been imaginary, a hallucination.