Strangers

Father Wycazik was relieved. He had expected Brendan to express the intention of returning to a secular life. "You're welcome, of course. There's much you can do. I'll keep you busy; no need to worry about that. But tell me, Brendan . . . you do think there's a possibility that you'll find your way back?"

The curate nodded. "I don't feel alienated from God any more. Just empty of Him. As this situation develops, perhaps it'll lead me back to the Church, as you're convinced it will. I just don't know."

Still frustrated and disappointed by Brendan's refusal to see the miraculous presence of God in the healing of Emmy and Winton, Father Wycazik was nonetheless glad that he would have the curate close and be provided the opportunity to continue guiding him back to salvation.

Brendan went downstairs with Father Wycazik, and at the front door the two men embraced in such a way that a stranger, without any knowledge of their occupation, would have thought them father and son.

Accompanying Father Wycazik as far as the front stoop, where a blustery wind gave a howl more suited to Halloween than to Christmas, Brendan said, "I don't know why or how, Father Stefan, but I feel we're about to embark upon an amazing adventure."

"The discoveryor rediscoveryof faith is always an amazing adventure, Brendan," Father Wycazik said. Then, having gotten in the last clean jab, as a good fighter for souls should always do, he left.

Reno, Nevada.

Whimpering, gasping for breath, struggling valiantly against the narcotizing effect of his lunar obsession, Zeb Lomack clambered through the garbage and squirming roaches that carpeted the kitchen, grabbed the shotgun that lay upon the table, jammed the barrel between his teeth and suddenly realized that his arms were not long enough to reach the trigger. The urge to look up at the bewitching moons on the walls was so overpowering that he felt as if someone had hold of him by the hair and was pulling his head back to force his gaze up from the floor. And when he closed his eyes defensively, it seemed as if some invisible adversary began to pry insistently at his. eyelids. In his horror of being committed to a madhouse like his father, he found the strength to resist the mesmeric mooncall. Eyes still closed, he collapsed into a chair, kicked off one shoe, stripped away the sock, braced the shotgun with both hands, put the barrel in his mouth, raised his unshod foot, and touched one bare toe to the cold trigger. Imagined moonlight on his skin and imagined lunar tides in his blood (no less forceful for being imaginary) demanded his attention with such sudden power that he opened his eyes, saw the many moons on the walls, and cried “no!”

into the barrel of the gun. Even as the spellbinding mooncall pulled him back toward a trance, even as he pressed his foot down upon the trigger, the swelling memory balloon at last burst in his mind, and he remembered everything that had been taken away from him: the summer before last, Dom inick, Ginger, Faye, Ernie, the young priest, the others, Interstate 80, the Tranquility Motel, oh, God, the motel, and oh, God, the moon!

Perhaps Zebediah Lomack was unable to check the downward motion of his bare foot or perhaps, instead, the suddenly revealed memory was so terrible that it encouraged suicide. Whichever the case, the .12-gauge went off with a roar, and the back of his head blew out, and for him (though for no one else) the terror ended.

Boston, Massachusetts.

All Christmas afternoon, Ginger Weiss read Twilight in Babylon, and at seven o'clock that evening, when it was time to go downstairs for drinks and dinner with the Hannaby family, she resented the interruption and did not want to put the book aside. She was a willing captive of the engrossing story, but she was more captivated by the photo of the author. Dominick Corvaisis' commanding eyes and dark good looks continued to arouse in her an uneasiness bordering on fear, and she could not overcome the peculiar feeling that she knew him.

Dinner with her hosts, their children and grandchildren, might have been pleasurable if Dominick Corvaisis had not exerted a mysteriously powerful claim on her attention. At ten o'clock, when she could at last gracefully withdraw without offending anyone, she cast out and gathered in a final series of Christmas wishes for happiness and health, then returned to her room.

She began reading where she had left off, and with a minimum of interruptions to scrutinize the author's photograph again, she finished the book at threefortyfive A. M. In the deep postmidnight silence that had settled over Baywatch, Ginger sat with the book in her lap, the jacket photo turned up, her eyes fixed on Dominick Corvaisis' hauntingly familiar face. Minute by minute, as she sat in her strange, silent, onesided communion with the writer's image, Ginger became increasingly convinced that she had met the man somewhere and that he was, in some unimaginable fashion, part of her recent troubles. Although her steadily growing conviction was tempered by the realization that this intuition might be part of the same mental disturbance that generated her fugues, and might therefore be unreliable, her agitation and excitement increased until, shaky and distraught, she was finally driven to action.

Leaving her room with exaggerated stealth, she went downstairs, through the dark and untenanted rooms of the great slumbering house, into the kitchen. She switched on the light and used the wall phone to call information in Laguna Beach. It was one o'clock in the morning in California, too rude an hour to wake Corvaisis. But if she could get a number for him, she would sleep better, knowing that she could get in touch with him in the morning. To her dismay, though not to her surprise, his number was unlisted.

Switching off the kitchen light and creeping quietly back to her room, Ginger made up her mind to write Corvaisis in the morning, care of his publisher. She would dispatch the message by express mail, with an urgent plea to the publisher to forward the letter immediately.

Perhaps attempting to contact him was precipitate and irrational. Perhaps she had never met him, and perhaps he had nothing to do with her bizarre affliction. Perhaps he'd think she was a crackpot. But if this milliontoone shot proved a good bet, the payoff might be her very salvation, which was sufficient reward to risk making a fool of herself.

Laguna Beach, California.

As yet unaware that an advance review copy of his book had made a vital link between himself and a deeply troubled woman in Boston, Dom remained at Parker Faine's house until midnight, discussing the possible nature of the conspiracy that he had theorized. Neither he nor Parker had enough information to put together a detailed or even slightly useful picture of the conspirators, but the very process of sharing and exploring the mystery with a friend made it less frightening.

They agreed that Dom should not fly to Portland and begin his odyssey until he saw how bad his sleepwalking became now that he had thrown away the Valium and Dalmane. Maybe somnambulism would not recur, as he expected it would, in which case he could travel without fear of losing control of himself in a distant place. But if he resumed his night rambling, he would need a couple weeks to decide on the best way of restraining himself during sleep, before heading to Portland.

Besides, by waiting awhile, he might receive additional letters from his unknown correspondent. Those clues might make the trek from Portland to Mountainview unnecessary or might target a specific area along that route as the place where Dom would encounter some sight or experience that would free his imprisoned memories.

By midnight, when Dom rose to leave Parker's hillside house, the artist had become so intrigued by the situation that he looked as if he would be up for hours yet, his mind spinning. "You're sure it's wise to be alone tonight?" he asked at the front door.

Dom stepped outside onto a walkway patterned with spikey geometric forms of darkness and wedgeshaped slices of yellow light, which were formed by the beams of a decorative iron lantern half obscured by shadowcasting palm fronds. Looking back at his friend, he said, "We've been through this before. It might not be wise, but it's the only way."

“You'll call if you need help?”

“I'll call,” Dom said.

,,And take those precautions we talked about."

Dom attended to those precautions a short while later at home. He removed the pistol from his nightstand, locked it in a drawer of his office desk, and buried the desk key under a package of ice cream in the freezer. Better to be unprepared for a burglar than to risk firing the gun while sound asleep. Next, from a coil of rope in the garage, he cut a tenfoot length. After brushing his teeth and undressing, he knotted one end of the line securely around his right wrist in such a way that he could escape only by untying four difficult knots, He secured the other end of the rope to one post of the headboard, taking care to fasten it tightly. With one foot of the line's length used for the knots, he was left with nine feet of play, enough to assure his comfort while keeping him tethered within a safe distance of the bed.

In previous somnambulistic episodes, he had performed complex tasks that had required some concentration, though nothing quite so tedious as the unraveling of wellmade knots, which were often a challenge to him when he was awake. In his sleep, he would surely lack the coordination and mental focus to free himself and the effort to do so would be frustrating enough to wake him.

Being thus hampered involved some danger. If a fire broke out in the night or if the house were damaged in an earthquake, he might be so delayed by the need to untie himself that he would perish in the smoke or beneath a collapsing wall. He had to risk it.

When he turned out the bedside light and slipped under the blanket, trailing the rope from one arm, the glowing red numerals of the digital clock read twelvefiftyeight. Staring at the dark ceiling, wondering what in the name of God he had become involved in out there on the road the summer before last, he waited for sleep to creep upon him.

On the nightstand, the telephone was silent. If his number had not been unlisted, he might have received, at that moment, a longdistance call from a lonely and frightened young woman in Boston, a call that would have radically changed the course of the next few weeks and might have saved lives.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In the guest room of her only daughter's house, where a nightlight burned in consideration of Ernie's phobia, Faye Block listened to her husband as, asleep and dreaming, he mumbled into his pillow. A few minutes ago, she had been awakened when he had let out a soft cry and had thrashed for a moment in the sheets. Now she raised herself on one elbow, cocked her head, and listened intently, trying to decipher his muffled speech. He was saying the same thing again and again into the pillow. The almost panicky urgency in his voice made Faye nervous. She leaned closer to him, straining to understand.

Suddenly he shifted his head just enough to turn his mouth from the pillow, and his words became clear though no less mysterious than when they had been muffled: "The moon, the moon, the moon, the moon .

Las Vegas, Nevada.

Jorja took Marcie into her own bed that night, because it did not seem like a good idea to leave the girl alone after the disturbing events of the day. She did not get much rest because all night Marcie seemed to phase in and out of nightmares, frequently kicking at the sheets, squirming vigorously as if to free herself from restraining hands, and talking in her sleep about doctors and needles. Jorja wondered how long this had been going on. Their bedrooms were separated by backtoback closets insulated by hanging clothes, and the child's sleeptalk was very soft, so it was possible that she had passed a lot of nights in unconscious terror without Jorja being aware of it. Her voice raised gooseflesh on Jorja's arms.

In the morning, she would take Marcie to the doctor. Given her unexplained dread of all physicians, the girl might cause a hell of a scene. But as much as Marcie feared going to a doctor, Jorja feared not going. If it had not been so hard to locate the right physician on Christmas Day, Jorja would have gone for help already. She was scared.

Following Marcie's outburst, when her grandfather's teasing about taking her to a hospital had driven her away from the table in a mad panic, the day had gone downhill. The girl was so overcome by fear that she peed her pants, and for ten or fifteen hideously embarrassing and terrifying minutes, she resisted all Jorja's efforts to get her cleaned up. She screamed, scratched, and kicked. The tantrum passed at last, and she submitted to a bath. But she was like a little zombie, slackfaced and emptyeyed, as if the terror, in passing out of her, had taken with it all her strength and her mind as well.

That quasicatatonic state lasted almost an hour while Jorja made a dozen telephone calls in an attempt to track down Dr. Besancourt, the pediatrician who treated Marcie on those rare occasions when she was sick. As Mary and Pete tried unsuccessfully to get a smile or at least a word of response from the stricken girl, and as Marcie continued to act as if she were deaf and mute, Jorja's mind was increasingly filled with halfremembered magazine articles about autistic children. She couldn't recall whether autism was a condition that began in infancy or whether it was possible for a perfectly normal little girl of seven to suddenly withdraw into a private place and close out the rest of the world forever. Not being able to remember made her a little crazy.

Gradually, however, Marcie came out of her daze. She began to answer Mary and Pete, though in oneword replies delivered in a flat, emotionless voice nearly as unsettling as her screams had been earlier. Sucking on her thumb as she had not done in at least two years, she went into the living room to play with her new toys. Most of the afternoon, she played without any visible pleasure, a faint scowl having taken unchallenged possession of her small face. Jorja was no less worried because of this change, but she was relieved to see that Marcie showed no further interest in the Little Ms. Doctor kit.

By fourthirty, the girl's scowl had faded, and she had become sociable once more. In a good mood again, she was such a natural charmer that she almost made it seem as if her outburst at the table had been no worse than any child's temper tantrum.

In fact, on the outside stairs of the apartment complex, beyond Marcie's hearing, Jorja's mother paused on the way down to the car and said, "She's just trying to let us know that she's hurt and confused. She doesn't understand why her father left, and right now she needs a lot of special attention, Jorja, a lot of love. That's all."

Jorja knew the problem was worse than that. She had no doubt that Marcie was still disturbed by her father's behavior, deeply hurt by his abandonment, and full of unresolved conflicts. But something else was eating the girl, something that seemed disturbingly irrational, and Jorja was scared of it.

Not long after Pete and Mary left, the girl began playing Little Ms. Doctor with the same unnerving intensity she had exhibited earlier, and when bedtime came she wanted to take the kit with her. Now, some of the Little Ms. Doctor things lay on the floor at Marcie's side of the bed, some on the nightstand. And in the dark bedroom the child dreamed and whimpered about doctors, nurses, needles.