Strangers

Therefore, Dom would stay in his own house, alone, take the Valium and Dalmane as Dr. Cobletz had prescribed them,

and tough this thing out.

That was what he had decided in the Volvo, on Monday morning, and by Saturday, the seventh of December, it seemed that he had made the correct decision. Some days he needed a Valium and some days he did not. Every evening he took a Dalmane tablet with milk or hot chocolate. Somnambulism disturbed his nights less frequently. Before beginning drug therapy, he walked in his sleep every night, but in the past five nights he journeyed just twice, leaving his bed only in the predawn hours of Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Furthermore, his activities in his sleep were far less bizarre and less disturbing than they had been. He no longer gathered up weapons, built barricades, or tried to nail the windows shut. On both occasions, he merely left his Beauty rest for a makeshift bed in the back of the closet, where he woke stiff and sore and frightened by some unknown and nameless threat that had pursued him in dreams he could not recall.

Thank God, the worst seemed past.

By Thursday he had begun to write again. He worked on the new novel, picking up where he left off weeks ago.

On Friday, Tabitha Wycombe, his editor in New York, called with good news. Two prepublication reviews of Twilight in Babylon had just come in, and both were excellent. She read them to him, then revealed even better news: Bookseller excitement, aroused by industry publicity and by the distribution of several hundred advance reading copies, continued to grow, and the first printing, which had already been raised once, was now being raised again. They talked for almost half an hour, and when Dom hung up, he felt that his life was back on the rails.

But Saturday night brought a new development, which might have been either a turn for the better or the worse. Every night that he had gone walking in his sleep, he had been unable to recall even the smallest detail of the nightmares that drove him from his bed. Then, Saturday, he was plagued by an uncannily vivid, terrifying dream that sent him fleeing through the house in somnambulistic panic, but this time he remembered part of it when he woke, not most of it, but at least the end.

In the last minute or two of the dream, he was standing in a halfglimpsed bathroom, everything blurred. An unseen man shoved him against a sink, and Dom bent over it, his face thrust down into the porcelain bowl. Someone had an arm around him and was holding him on his feet, for he was too weak to stand on his own. He felt raglimp, and his knees were quivering, and his stomach was twisting and rolling. A second unseen person had two hands on his head, forcing his head into the sink. He could not speak. He could not draw breath. He knew he was dying. He had to get away from these people, out of this room, but he did not have the physical resources to take flight. Though his vision remained bleary, he could see the smooth porcelain and the chromeplated rim of the drain in detail, for his face was only inches from the bottom of the sink. It was an oldfashioned drain without a mechanically operated stopper. The rubber plug had been removed and set aside, somewhere out of sight. The water was running, spewing out of a faucet, past his face, splattering against the bottom of the basin, whirling around and around, down into the drain, around and down. The two people pouring him into the sink were shouting, though he could not understand them. Around and down ... around.... Staring hypnotically into the miniature whirlpool, he grew terrified of the gaping drain, which was like a sucking orifice intent upon drawing him into its reeking depths. Suddenly he was aware they wanted to stuff him down into the drain, dispose of him. Might be a garbage disposal in there, something that would chop him to pieces and flush him away He woke, screaming. He was in his bathroom. He had walked in his sleep. He was at the sink, bent over, screaming into the drain. He leapt back from that gaping hole, stumbled, nearly fell over the edge of the bathtub. He grabbed a towel rack to steady himself.

Gasping for breath, shaking, he finally got up enough nerve to return to the sink and look into it. Glossy white porcelain. A brass drain rim and a domeshaped brass stopper. Nothing else, nothing worse.

The room in his nightmare had not been this room. Dominick washed his face and returned to the bedroom. According to the clock on the nightstand, it was only twotwentyfive A. M.

Though it made no sense at all and seemed to have no symbolic or real connection with his life, the nightmare was profoundly disturbing. However, he had not nailed windows shut or gathered up weapons in his sleep, so it seemed that this was only a minor setback.

In fact, it might be a sign of improvement. If he remembered his dreams, not just pieces but all of them from beginning to end, he might discover the source of the anxiety that had made a night rambler of him. Then he would be better able to deal with it.

Nevertheless, he did not want to go back to bed and risk returning to that strange place in his dream. The bottle of Dalmane was in the top drawer of the nightstand. He was not supposed to take more than one tablet each evening, but surely one indulgence couldn't hurt.

He went out to the bar cabinet in the living room, poured some Chivas Regal. With a shaky hand, he popped the pill in his mouth, drank the Chivas, and returned to bed.

He was improving. Soon, the sleepwalking would stop. A week from now, he'd be back to normal. In a month, this would seem like a curious aberration, and he'd wonder how he'd allowed it to get the better of him.

Precariously prone upon the trembling wire of consciousness above the gulf of sleep, he began to lose his balance. It was a pleasant feeling, a soft slipping away. But as he floated down into sleep, he heard himself murmuring in the darkness of the bedroom, and what he heard himself saying was so strange it startled him and piqued his interest even as the Dalmane and whiskey inexorably had their way with him.

“The moon,” he whispered thickly. “The moon, the moon.”

He wondered what he could possibly mean by that, and he tried to push sleep away at least long enough to ponder his own words. The moon? "The moon," he whispered again, and then he was gone.

It was threeeleven A. M., Sunday, December 8.

6.

New York, New York

Five days after stealing more than three million dollars from the fratellanza, Jack Twist went to see a dead woman who still breathed.

At one o'clock Sunday afternoon, in a respectable neighborhood on the East Side, he parked his Camaro in the underground garage beneath the private sanitarium and took the elevator up to the lobby. He signed in with the receptionist and was given a visitor's pass.

One would not think the place was a hospital. The public area was tastefully decorated in Art Deco style suited to the building's period. There were two small Ertd originals, sofas, one armchair, tables with neatly arranged magazines, and all the furniture had a 1920s' look.

It was too damn luxurious. The Ends were unnecessary. A hundred other economies were obvious. But the management felt that image was important in order to continue to attract uppercrust clientele and keep the annual profit around the hundred percent mark. The patients were of all typesmiddleaged catatonic schizophrenics, autistic children, the longterm comatose both young and oldbut they all had two things in common: Their conditions were all chronic rather than acute, and they were from welltodo families who could afford the best care.

Thinking about the situation, Jack invariably became angry that no place in the city provided fine custodial care for the catastrophically braininjured or mentally ill at a reasonable price. In spite of huge expenditures of tax money, New York's institutions, like public institutions everywhere, were a grim joke that the average citizen had to accept for a lack of alternatives.

If he had not been a skilled and highly successful thief, he would not have been able to pay the sanitarium's exorbitant monthly charges. Fortunately, he had a talent for larceny.

Carrying his visitor's pass, he went to another elevator and rode up to the fourth of six floors. The hallways in the upper levels were more reminiscent of a hospital than the lobby had been. Fluorescent lights. White walls. The clean, crisp, minty smell of disinfectant.

At the far end of the fourthfloor hall, in the last room on the right, lived the dead woman who still breathed. Jack hesitated with his hand on the pushplate of the heavy swinging door, swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and finally went inside.

The room was not as sumptuous as the lobby, and it was not Art Deco, either, but it was very nice, resembling a mediumpriced room at the Plaza: a high ceiling and white molding; a fireplace with a white mantel; a deep huntergreen carpet; pale green drapes; a green leafpatterned sofa and a pair of chairs. The theory was that a patient would be happier in a room like this than in a clinical room. Although many patients were oblivious of their surroundings, the cozier atmosphere at least made visiting friends and relatives feel less bleak.

The hospital bed was the only concession to utilitarian design, a dramatic contrast to everything else. But even that was dressed up with greenpatterned designer sheets.

Only the patient spoiled the lovely mood of the chamber.

Jack lowered the safety railing on the bed, leaned over, and kissed his wife's cheek. She did not stir. He took one of her hands and held it in both of his. Her hand did not grip him in return, did not flex, remained slack, limp, senseless, but at least it was warm.

"Jenny? It's me, Jenny. How are you feeling today?

Hmmmmm? You look good. You look lovely. You always look lovely."

In fact, for someone who had spent eight years in a coma, for someone who had not taken a single step and had not felt sunshine or fresh air upon her face in all that time, she looked quite good indeed. Perhaps only Jack could say that she was still lovelyand mean it. She was not the beauty she had once been, but she certainly did not look as if she had spent almost a decade in solemn flirtation with death.

Her hair was not glossy any more, though still thick and the same rich chestnut shade as when he had first seen her at her job, behind the men's cologne counter in Bloomingdale's, fourteen years ago. The attendants washed her hair twice a week here and brushed it every day.

He could have moved his hand under her hair, along the left side of her skull, to the unnatural depression, the sickening concavity. He could have touched it without disturbing her, for nothing disturbed her any more, but he did not. Because touching it would have disturbed him.

Her brow was uncreased, her face unlined even at the corners of her eyes, which were closed. She was gaunt though not shockingly so. Motionless upon those green designer sheets, she seemed ageless, as if she were an enchanted princess

awaiting the kiss that would wake her from a century of slumber.

The only signs of life were the vague, rhythmic rise and fall of her breast as she breathed, and the soft movement of her throat as she occasionally swallowed saliva. The swallowing was an automatic, involuntary action and not a sign of awareness on any level whatsoever.

The brain damage was extensive and irreparable. The movements she made here and now were virtually the only movements she would ever make until, at last, she gave a dying shudder. There was no hope. He knew there was no hope, and he accepted the permanence of her condition.

She would have looked much worse if she had not received such conscientious care. A team of physical therapists came to her room every day and put her through passive exercise routines. Her muscle tone was not the best, but at least she had muscle tone.

Jack held her hand and stared down at her for a long time. For seven years, he had been coming to see her two nights a week and for five or six hours every Sunday afternoon, sometimes on other afternoons as well. But in spite of the frequency of his visits and in spite of her unchanging condition, he never tired of looking at her.

He pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed, still holding her hand, staring at her face, and for more than an hour he talked to her. He told her about a movie that he had seen since his previous visit, about two books he had read. He spoke of the weather, described the force and bite of the winter wind. He painted colorful word pictures of the prettiest Christmas displays he had seen in shop windows.

She did not reward him with even a sigh or a twitch. She lay as always, unmoving and unmoved.

Nevertheless, he talked to her, for he worried that a fragment of awareness might survive, a gleam of comprehension down in the black well of the coma. Maybe she could hear and understand, in which case the worst thing for her was being trapped in an unresponsive body, desperate even for oneway communication, but receiving none because they thought she could not hear. The doctors assured him that these worries were groundless; she heard nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing, they said, except what images and fantasies might sputter across shortcircuiting synapses of her shattered brain. But if they were wrongif there was only one chance in a million that they were wronghe could not leave her in that perfect and terrible isolation. So he talked to her as the winter day beyond the window changed from one shade of gray to another.

At fivefifteen, he went into the adjoining bathroom and washed his face. He dried off and blinked at his reflection in the mirror. As on countless other occasions, he wondered what Jenny had ever seen in him.

Not one feature or aspect of his face could be called handsome. His forehead was too broad, ears too big. Although he had 20-20 vision, his left eye had a leftward cast, and most people could not talk to him without nervously shifting their attention from one eye to the other, wondering which was looking at them when, in fact, both were. When he smiled he looked clownish, and when he frowned he looked sufficiently threatening to send Jack the Ripper scurrying for home and hearth.

But Jenny had seen something in him. She had wanted, needed, and loved him. In spite of her own good looks, she had not cared about appearances. That was one of the reasons he had loved her so much. One of the reasons he missed her so much. One of a thousand reasons.

He looked away from the mirror. If it was possible to be lonelier than he was now, he hoped to God that he never slipped down that far.

He returned to the other room, said goodbye to his unheeding wife, kissed her, smelled her hair once more, and got out of there at fivethirty.

In the street, behind the wheel of his Camaro, Jack looked at passing pedestrians and other motorists with loathing. His fellow men. The good, kind, gentle, righteous people of the straight world would regard him with disdain and possibly even disgust if they knew he was a professional thief, though it was what they had done to him and to Jenny that had driven him to crime.

He knew anger and bitterness solved nothing, changed nothing, and hurt no one but himself. Bitterness was corrosive. He did not want to be bitter, but there were times when he could not help it.

Later, after dinner alone at a Chinese restaurant, he returned to his apartment. He had a spacious onebedroom coop in a firstclass building on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. Officially, it was owned by a Liechtensteinbased corporation, which had purchased it with a check written on a Swiss bank account, and each month the utilities and the association fees were paid by the Bank of America out of a trust account. Jack Twist lived there under the name “Philippe Delon. ” To the doormen and other building employees, to the few neighbors with whom he spoke, he was known as the odd and slightly disreputable relative of a wealthy French family who had sent him to America ostensibly to scout investments but actually just to get him out of their hair. He spoke French fluently and could speak English with a convincing French accent for hours without slipping up and revealing his deception. Of course, there was no French family, and both the corporation in Liechtenstein and the Swiss bank account were his, and the only wealth he had to invest was that which he had stolen from others. He was not an ordinary thief.