Strangers (58 page)

“What the hell?” Corvaisis said again.

Sandy was standing in the open door of the diner, backlit by the fluorescent glow from inside, and Ned went to her, embraced her. He felt one shudder after another passing through her. But he did not realize how badly
he
was trembling until she said, “You’re shaking like a leaf.”

Ned Sarver was scared sick. With an almost clairvoyant vividness, he sensed that they were involved in something of monumental importance, something unimaginably dangerous, and that it was likely to end in death for some or all of them. He was a natural-born fixer of both inanimate objects and people, a damned good repairman. But this time he was up against a force with which he did not know how to tinker. What if Sandy were killed? He took pride in his talents, but even the best fixer in the whole damned world could not undo the wreckage wrought by Death.

For the first time since meeting her in Tucson, Ned felt powerless to protect his wife.

At the horizon, the moon had begun to rise.

JANUARY 12–JANUARY 14

1
Sunday, January 12

Air as dense as molten iron.

In the nightmare, Dom could not draw breath. A tremendous pressure bore down on him. He was choking violently. He was dying.

He could not see much; his vision was clouded. Then two men came close, both wearing white vinyl decontamination suits with dark-visored helmets similar to those of astronauts. One man was at Dom’s right, frantically disconnecting the IV line, withdrawing the intravenous spike from his arm. The other man, on the left, was cursing the cardiological data on the video readout of the EKG machine. One of them unbuckled the straps and tore off the electrodes connecting Dom to the EKG, and the other lifted him into a sitting position. They pressed a glass to his lips, but he could not drink, so they tipped his head back and forced his mouth open and poured some noxious stuff down his throat.

The men communicated with each other via radios built into their helmets, but they were leaning so close to Dom that he could hear their voices clearly even through the muffling Plexiglas of their dark visors. One of them said, “How many detainees were poisoned?” And the other said, “Nobody’s sure yet. Looks like at least a dozen.” The first said, “But who’d want to poison them?” And the second said, “One guess.” The first said, “Colonel Falkirk. Colonel fucking Falkirk.” The second man said, “But we’ll never prove it, never nail the bastard.”

Flash-cut. The motel bathroom. The men were holding Dom on his feet, forcing his face down into the sink. This time, he understood what they were saying to him. With growing urgency, they were insisting that he vomit. Colonel fucking Falkirk had somehow had him poisoned, and these guys had made him drink a foul-tasting emetic, and now he was supposed to purge himself of the poison that was killing him. But even as sick as he was, he still could not puke. He gagged, retched; his stomach roiled; sweat poured off him like melting fat off a broiling chicken; but he could not rid himself of the poison. The first man said, “We need a stomach pump.” And the second said, “We don’t
have
a stomach pump.” They pressed Dom’s face deeper into the porcelain bowl. The crushing pressure grew worse, and Dom could hardly breathe at all now, and hot greasy waves of nausea washed through him, and sweat
gushed
from him, but he could not puke, could not, could not. And then he did.

Flash-cut. In bed again. Weak, kitten-weak. But able to breathe, thank God. The men in the decontamination suits had cleaned him up and strapped him to the mattress once more. The one on the right prepared a hypodermic and administered an injection of something apparently meant to counteract the remaining effects of the poison. The one on the left reconnected him to the intravenous drip from which he was receiving drugs, not nourishment. Dom was woozy, holding on to consciousness only with considerable effort. They hooked him to the EKG again, and as they worked, they talked. “Falkirk’s an idiot. We can keep a lid on this, given half a chance.” “He’s afraid the memory block will wear off. He’s afraid that some of them will eventually remember what they saw.” “Well, he may be right. But if the asshole kills them all, how’s he going to explain the bodies?
That’s
going to draw reporters like raw meat draws jackals, and then there’ll be no way to keep the lid on. A nice memory wipe—that’s the only sensible answer.” “You don’t have to convince me. Go burn Falkirk’s ear about it.”

The dream-figures faded away, as did their voices, and Dom passed into a different nightmare country. He no longer felt weak, no longer sick, but his fear exploded into stark terror, and he began to run with that maddening slow-motion panic indigenous to nightmares. He did not know what he was running from, but he was certain that something was pursuing him, something threatening and inhuman, he could sense it right behind him, closer, reaching for him, closer, and finally he knew he could not outrun it, knew he must face it, so he stopped and turned and looked up and cried out in surprise:
“The moon!”

Dom was awakened by his own cry. He was in Room 20, on the floor beside the bed, kicking, flailing. He got up and sat on the bed.

He looked at his travel clock. Three-oh-seven
A.M.

Shivering, he blotted his damp palms on the sheets.

Room 20 was having precisely the effect on him that he had thought it would. The bad vibrations of the place stimulated his memory, made his nightmares more vivid and more detailed than ever.

These dreams were radically different from all others he had ever known, for they were not fantasies but glimpses of a past reality seen through a distorting lens. They were not dreams as much as they were memories, forbidden recollections that had been weighted and dropped into the black sea of his subconscious, like dead bodies encumbered with cement shoes and thrown from a bridge into the deeps. Finally, the memories had slipped out of the cement and were surging to the surface.

He really
had
been imprisoned here, drugged, brainwashed. And during that ordeal, someone named Colonel Falkirk had actually poisoned him to prevent him from talking about whatever he had seen.

Falkirk was right, Dom thought. Eventually, we’ll overcome the brainwashing and remember the truth. He
should
have killed us all.

•

Sunday morning, Ernie purchased panels of plyboard from a friend in Elko who owned a building supply. With his portable tablesaw, he cut the panels to fit the busted-out diner windows. Ned and Dom helped nail the plyboard in place, and by noon they had completed the job.

Ernie did not want to call a glazier and have the windows replaced because last night’s phenomena might recur. Until they knew what had caused the thunderous noise and shaking, installing new glass seemed foolhardy. In the interim, the Tranquility Grille would not be open.

The Tranquility Motel also would be closed. Ernie did not want business to distract him from helping Dom and the others probe into the mystery of the “toxic spill.” When the last of yesterday’s check-ins departed later today, the motel would house only Ernie, Faye, Dom, and any other victims who, when contacted, might decide to journey to Elko County to participate in the investigation. He did not know how many rooms he might need for those fellow-sufferers, so he decided to reserve all twenty. For the time being, the Tranquility was less a motel than a barracks, where the troops would be quartered until this war with an unknown enemy was finally brought to a conclusion.

•

When the diner was boarded up, they all got into the motel’s Dodge van, and Faye drove them down to the interstate and just over a quarter of a mile east, where she parked on the shoulder of the highway near the place that had a special attraction for Ernie and Sandy. The five of them
stood along the guardrail, staring south, seeking a communion with the landscape that might illuminate the past. The winter solstice was three weeks behind them, so the sunlight was almost as hard and flat and cold as fluorescent light. In the grip of January, the scrub-and grass-covered plains, rugged hills, arroyos and gnarled rock formations were basically trichromatic, rendered in browns and grays and deep reds, with only an occasional patch of white sand, snow, or vein of borax. The scene was stark and dreary under a sky that grew more clouded and gray by the hour, but it also possessed an undeniable austere grandeur.

Faye wanted very much to feel something special about this place, for if she felt nothing, that would mean the people who brainwashed her had totally controlled her, totally
violated
her. She allowed no room in her self-image for the concept of absolute submission. She was a proud, capable woman. But she felt nothing other than the winter wind.

Ned and Dom appeared to be no more moved than Faye was, but she could see that Ernie and Sandy were receiving some cryptic message from the vista before them. Sandy was smiling beatifically. But Ernie had that look he got when night fell: pale, drawn, with haunted eyes.

“Let’s go closer,” Sandy said. “Let’s go right down there.”

All five climbed over the guardrail and plunged down the steep embankment of the elevated road. They moved across the plain—fifty yards, a hundred—carefully avoiding the cold-weather prickly pear which grew in profusion near the foot of the interstate but soon disappeared in favor of sagebrush and bunch-grass, which in turn gave way to another kind of grass which was also brown but thicker, silkier. Portions of the plain were rocky and sandy and in the grip of worthless bristly scrub, while other portions were almost like small lush meadows, for this was a land in transition from the semidesert of the south to the rich mountain pastures of the north. More than two hundred yards from the interstate, they stopped on a patch of ground not appreciably different from surrounding territory.

“Here,” Ernie said with a shudder, jamming his hands in his pockets and pulling his neck down into the rolled sheepskin collar of his coat.

Sandy smiled and said, “Yes. Here.”

They spread out and moved back and forth across the ground. Here and there, in one shadowed niche or another, meager patches of snow lay hidden from the evaporating effect of the dry wind and from the cold winter sun. Those traces of winter, plus the lack of green grass and scattered late-blooming wildflowers, were the only things that made the landscape different from the way it had looked two summers ago. After a minute or two, Ned announced that he did, indeed, feel an inexplicable connection with the place, though it did not bring him peace as it did his wife. His fear became so acute that, expressing surprise and embarrassment
at his reaction, he turned and walked away. As Sandy hurried after Ned, Dom Corvaisis admitted that he was strangely affected by the place, too. However, he was not merely frightened, like Ned; Dom’s fear, like Ernie’s, was spiced by an unexplained awe and a sense of impending epiphany. Only Faye remained unaffected, unmoved.

Standing in the middle of the area in question, Dom turned slowly in a circle. “What was it? What the hell happened here?”

The sky had turned to gray slate.

The blunt wind became sharp. Faye shivered.

She remained unable to feel what Ernie and the others felt, and that inability increased her sense of violation. She hoped she would one day meet the people who had messed with her mind. She wanted to look in their eyes and ask them how they could have so little respect for the personal integrity of another human being. Now that she knew she had been manipulated, she would never again feel entirely secure.

Stirred by the wind, the dry sagebrush made a scraping-rustling noise. Ice-crusted twigs clicked against one another with a sound that, fancifully, made Faye think of small, scurrying skeletons of little animals long-dead but somehow reanimated.

•

Back at the motel, in the Blocks’ apartment, Ernie and Sandy and Ned sat at the kitchen table, while Faye made coffee and hot chocolate.

Dom perched on a stool by the wall phone. On the counter in front of him lay the Tranquility Motel’s registration book that had been in use the year before last. Referring to the page for Friday, July 6, he began to call those who must have shared the unremembered but important experiences of that faraway summer night.

In addition to his own name and that of Ginger Weiss, there were eight on the list. One of them, Gerald Salcoe of Monterey, California, had rented two rooms for himself, his wife, and two daughters. He had entered an address but no telephone. When Dom tried to get it from the Area Code 408 Information Operator, he was told the number was unlisted.

Disappointed, he moved on to Cal Sharkle, the long-haul trucker, a repeat customer known to Faye and Ernie. Sharkle lived in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He had included his telephone number in the motel registry. Dom dialed it but discovered that the telephone had been disconnected and that no new number was listed.

“We can check his more recent entries on the current registry,” Ernie said. “Maybe he’s moved to another town. Maybe we have his new address somewhere.”

Faye put a cup of coffee on the counter where Dom could reach it, then joined the others at the table.

Dom had better luck on his third attempt, when he dialed Alan Rykoff in Las Vegas. A woman answered, and he said, “Mrs. Rykoff?”

She hesitated. “I was Mrs. Rykoff. My name’s Monatella now, since the divorce.”

“Oh. I see. Well, my name’s Dominick Corvaisis. I’m calling from the Tranquility Motel up here in Elko County. You, your former husband, and your daughter stayed here for a few days in July, two summers ago?”

“Uh…yes, we did.”

“Miss Monatella, are either you or your daughter or your ex-husband having…difficulties—frightening and extraordinary problems?”

This time her hesitation was pregnant with meaning. “Is this some sick joke? Obviously, you know what happened to Alan.”

“Please, Miss Monatella, believe me: I don’t know what happened to your ex-husband. But I do know there’s a good chance that you or him or your daughter—or all of you—are suffering from inexplicable psychological problems, that you’re having frightening and repetitive nightmares you can’t remember, and that some of these nightmares involve the moon.”