Strangers (72 page)

In light of what Ernie had said, everyone was looking at Brendan and Dom with a new appreciation composed equally of awe, uneasiness, wonder, respect, and fear. Ginger saw both the priest and the writer squirm with the exhilarating yet frightening realization that they might have within them the potential for superhuman power, a potential that, if fulfilled, would forever separate them from the rest of mankind.

“No,” Dom said, starting to get up in protest, then sitting back down as if he did not think his legs would support him. “No, no. You’re not right, Ginger. I’m no superman, no wizard, no damn…freak. If you were right, I’d feel it. I’d
know
it, Ginger.”

Brendan Cronin, equally shaken, said, “I’ve thought that somehow I’ve been the
vehicle
for the healing of Emmy and Winton. I’ve thought
that something—not God, perhaps, but something—is working through me. I never thought of
myself
as the actual healer. Listen, I was under the impression we’d already decided the toxic-spill story was entirely a fake, a cover, that what happened to us wasn’t an accident of any kind, neither chemical nor biological, but something altogether different.”

Jack and Jorja and Faye and Ned started talking at the same time. The noise level rose so loud that little Marcie frowned in her sleep, and Ginger said, “Wait, wait, wait a minute. There’s no point discussing it because we can’t prove there was such a virus any more than we can prove there wasn’t one. Not yet. But maybe we can prove the other part.”

“What do you mean?” Sandy Sarver asked.

Ginger said, “Maybe we can prove Dom and Brendan have the power. Not how they got it, but just that they have it.”

Dom was incredulous. “How?”

“We’ll set up a test,” Ginger said.

•

Dom was absolutely certain that it would not work, that they were wasting time, that the whole idea was foolish.

Yet he was also scared that it
would
work, and that the proof of his power would condemn him to the condition of a freak or at least to a life forever closed to ordinary human relationships. If he possessed godlike power, no one would ever regard him without wonder and fear. In even the most relaxed or intimate moments with friends or lovers, their awareness of his extraordinary gifts would intrude, either overtly or in an unspoken subtext. Others, perhaps most, would envy or hate him.

The unfairness of his predicament grated on him. For most of his thirty-five years, he had been shy and ineffectual, condemned to a drab existence by his timidity. Then he had changed, and for fifteen months, until his sleepwalking began last October, he’d been outgoing. Now, that brief, wonderful season of normality might be passing. If the test that Ginger outlined were to prove Dom had somehow acquired psychic powers, he would be isolated again, not by his own sense of inferiority, as before, but by everyone else’s uneasy awareness of his superiority.

The test. Dom hoped to God he failed.

He and Brendan Cronin were sitting by themselves at the long table, one at each end. Jorja Monatella had put her slumbering daughter in a booth, and the girl had not awakened. The adults—all seven, including Jorja—stood in a semicircle around the table, back a couple of paces, giving Dom and Brendan space to concentrate free of distraction.

A salt shaker stood on the table in front of Dom. Ginger’s test required that he concentrate on moving the object without touching it.
“Just an inch,” she had said. “If you can evoke just the slightest perceptible motion in the shaker, we’ll know you’ve got the power.”

At the far end of the three joined tables, a pepper shaker stood in front of Brendan Cronin. The priest was staring at the small glass cylinder as intently as Dom was staring at his own shaker, and his round freckled face was filled with a foreboding only marginally less grim than Dom’s. Although Brendan had denied that the hand of God lay behind the miraculous cures and apparitional lights, it was clear to Dom that the priest secretly and deeply hoped to discover that, in fact, a divine Presence was at work. He wanted to be drawn back into his faith, into the bosom of the Church. If the miracles proved to be his own work, accomplished by the exertion of heretofore unrecognized psychic powers, and if those powers proved to have been conferred by a mere
germ,
as Ginger’s crazy-but-canny theory would have it, Brendan’s yearning for spiritual elevation and holy guidance would be unfulfilled.

The salt shaker.

Dom fixed his eyes on it and tried to clear every thought from his mind except the determined intention to move the shaker. Although he did not want to discover that he had these strange talents, he had to make a sincere attempt to employ them. He had to know if it were true.

If the power existed, neither Ginger nor any of the others could suggest techniques for tapping it. “But,” Ginger had said, “if it can explode spontaneously and spectacularly in moments of stress, surely you can learn to call upon it and control it whenever and however you desire…just as a musician can apply his
musical
talent any time he pleases. Or just as you apply your writing talent to the blank page.”

The salt shaker remained motionless, unaffected.

Dom strove to narrow his attention until that humble glass cylinder—with its perforated stainless-steel cap and grainy white contents—was the only thing in his universe. He brought all his mind to bear upon it, every speck of his will, and tried to push it along the table, strained until he realized he was gritting his teeth, fisting his hands.

Nothing.

He changed tack. Instead of mentally assaulting the shaker as if he were blasting away with a cannon at the mighty walls of a fortress, he relaxed and studied the object to get an intimate sense of its size, shape, and texture. Perhaps the key was to develop an empathy for the shaker. “Empathy” was the word that seemed right to him, though he was relating to an inanimate and inorganic object; instead of battling it, perhaps he could empathize and somehow…induce it to cooperate in a short telekinetic journey. Only an inch. He leaned forward slightly to better examine the functional simplicity of its design: five beveled facets to make it
easy to grip and hold; a thick glass bottom to provide balance and reduce the frequency of spills; a shiny metal cap….

Nothing. Standing unaffected on the table before him, the shaker seemed like the mythical immovable object, heavy beyond weighing, welded forever to this spot in space and time.

But of course, like all forms of matter in the universe, it was not immovable, and in some ways it was
always
moving, never still. After all, it was composed of billions of ceaselessly moving atoms, the outer parts of which orbited, planetlike, around the billions of sunlike nuclei. The salt shaker was engaged in uninterrupted motion on a subatomic level, frantically moving
within
its structure, so it should not be difficult to induce it to make one additional movement, one little jaunt on the macrocosmic level of human perception, just one little hop and skip, just one—

Dom felt a sudden buoyancy, almost as if he himself were going to be moved by some arcane force, but instead—and at last—the salt shaker moved. He had become so deeply involved with that homely object that he had actually forgotten Ginger and the others; he was reminded of their presence when, as one, they gasped and exclaimed softly. The shaker did not simply slide one inch along the table—or two or ten or twenty. It rose into the air instead, as if gravity had ceased to have a claim on it. Like a tiny glass balloon, it floated upward: one foot, two, three, and stopped four feet above the surface on which, only seconds ago, it had appeared immovable. It remained suspended several inches above the eye-level of those who were standing, and they stared up at it in awe.

At the far end of the table, Brendan’s pepper shaker rose, too. Mouth open, eyes wide, Brendan stared at the rising cylinder. When it stopped at precisely the same height as the salt shaker, Brendan finally dared to take his eyes from it. He looked at Dom, glanced nervously at the pepper shaker again, as if certain it would crash down the moment he shifted his gaze, then looked at Dom once more when he realized that eye-contact was not required to maintain levitation. Several sentiments were apparent in the priest’s eyes: wonder, amazement, puzzlement, fear, and an emotional acknowledgment of the profound brotherhood that existed between him and Dom by virtue of the strange power they shared.

Dom was intrigued that he did not need to strain to keep the salt shaker aloft. In fact, it seemed hard to believe that he was actually responsible for its magical performance. He was not conscious of either possessing or exerting control of the object. He felt no power surging in him. Evidently, his telekinetic ability functioned automatically, in a fashion similar to respiration and heartbeat.

Brendan raised his hands. The red rings had reappeared on them.

Dom looked at his own hands and saw the same inscrutable stigmata burning brightly.

What did they mean?

Looming overhead, the salt and pepper shakers generated a sense of expectancy in Dom even greater than he had felt at the beginning of this test. Apparently, the others felt it as well, for they began to urge Dom and Brendan to perform additional feats.

“Incredible,” Ginger said breathlessly. “You’ve shown us vertical movement, levitation. Can you also move them horizontally?”

“Can you lift something heavier?” Sandy Sarver asked.

“The light,” Ernie said. “Can you generate the red light?”

Seeking first to accomplish a more modest task than any they had proposed, Dom thought about giving the salt shaker a slight spin, and immediately it began to twirl in midair, eliciting another gasp from the onlookers. A moment later, Brendan’s pepper shaker began to spin, too. Reflections of the overhead lights glimmered liquidly across the shiny metal caps of the spinning dispensers, flashed off the facets of the glass, traveled scintillatingly along the edges where one facet met another, so the shakers looked like glittery Christmas-tree ornaments.

Simultaneously, the two small dispensers began drifting toward one another, the horizontal movement Ginger had requested, though Dom was not aware of consciously directing the salt shaker on this course. He supposed Ginger’s suggestion was accepted by his subconscious, which now employed psychic energy to accomplish the task, without waiting for him to make a conscious effort. It was eerie—the way he controlled the shaker yet was unaware of how that control was exerted.

Above the centermost point of the three joined tables, the salt and pepper shakers stopped moving horizontally when they were about ten inches apart. They hung side by side, spinning a bit faster than before, throwing off spangles of reflected light. Then they began to revolve around each other in perfectly circular synchronized orbits. But that lasted only a few seconds. Suddenly, the shakers were spinning faster than before, and swinging around each other much faster as well, and in much more complex, parabolic counterorbits.

Captivated and delighted, the onlookers laughed, applauded. Dom looked at Ginger. Her radiant face shone with an expression of pure, spiritual uplift that made her more beautiful than ever. She lowered her gaze from the salt and pepper shakers to Dom, grinning with wild excitement, and gave him a thumbs-up sign. Ernie Block and Jack Twist watched the aerobatics with open-mouthed wonder that made them look not like hard-bitten ex-soldiers but like two small boys seeing fireworks for the first time in their lives. Laughing, Faye stood with her hands raised
toward the shakers, as if she were trying to feel the miraculous field of power in which they were suspended. Ned Sarver was laughing, too, but Sandy was crying, a sight that startled Dom until he realized she was also smiling and that the tears on her cheeks were tears of joy.

“Oh,” Sandy said, turning to Dom as if she had sensed that he was looking at her, “isn’t it wonderful? Whatever it means, isn’t it just wonderful? The freedom…the freedom of it…the breaking away of all the bonds…the rising up and above and away…”

Dom knew precisely what she was feeling and trying to say, because he felt it, too. For the moment, he forgot that possession of these abilities would forever alienate him from people who were without the talent, and he was filled with a rapturous sense of transcendence, with an appreciation for what it might mean to take a giant leap up the ladder of evolution, breaking away from the chains of human limitations. In the Tranquility Grille tonight, there was a sense of history being made, a sense that nothing in the world would ever be the same again.

“Do something else,” Ginger said.

“Yes!” Sandy said. “Show us more. Show us more.”

In other parts of the room, other salt shakers flew up from the tables on which they had been standing: six, eight, ten in all. They hung motionless for a moment, then began to spin like the first shaker.

Instantly, an equal number of pepper shakers took flight and began spinning as well.

Dom still did not know how he was doing these things; he made no effort to perform each new trick; the thought merely became fact, as if wishes could come true. He suspected that Brendan was equally baffled.

The jukebox had been silent. Now it began to play a Dolly Parton tune, though no one had punched the programming buttons.

Did I do that, Dom wondered, or was it Brendan?

Ginger said, “My God, I’m so excited I’m going to
plotz!
”

Laughing, Dom said, “
Plotz
? What’s
that
one mean?”

“Bust, explode,” Ginger said. “I’m so excited I’m going to bust!”

Every salt and pepper shaker spun, and the halves of every pair orbited each other, and now all eleven sets began moving around the room in a train, faster, faster, making a soft
whoosh
as they cut the air, casting off sparks of reflected light.

Abruptly, a dozen chairs rose off the floor, not in the controlled and playful manner in which the salt and pepper shakers had risen from the tables, but with such violence and momentum that they shot instantly to the ceiling, smashing against that barrier with a deafening clatter. One of the wagon-wheel lighting fixtures was struck by two chairs; its lightbulbs burst, and the room was only three-quarters as brightly illuminated as
it had been. That wagon wheel broke loose of its anchor brackets and wires, crashing to the floor a few feet behind Dom. The chairs remained against the ceiling, vibrating as if they were a flock of enormous bats hovering on dark wings. Most of the salt and pepper shakers were still whirling maniacally around the room above everyone’s head, though a few had been brought down by the upflung chairs. Now, a few more stopped spinning, swung erratically out of their orbits, out of the train as well, wobbled, and shot to the floor. One of them struck Ernie’s shoulder, and he cried out in pain.