Strangers

Page 42

The summer before last . . . The timing uncannily paralleled the changes in Dom's own life.
Second by second, Dom grew more uneasy. He could not understand the insane behavior that had created this eerie display, could not put himself inside the fevered mind of Lomack, but he could empathize with the gambler's terror. Just moving through the mooncrowded house, shining his flashlight on the lunar faces, Dom felt a tingling along the back of his neck. The moons did not mesmerize him as they had evidently mesmerized Lomack, but as he stared at them he sensed instinctively that the impulse that had driven Lomack to paper his house with moon images was the same impulse that drove Dom himself to dream of them.
He and Lomack had shared some experience in which the moon had figured or of which it was an apt and powerful symbol. The summer before last they had been in the same place at the same time. The wrong place at the wrong time.
Lomack had been driven mad by the stress of repressed memories.
Will I be driven mad, too? Dom wondered as he stood in the master bedroom, turning slowly in a circle.
A new and grim thought struck him. Suppose Lomack had not killed himself out of despair over his unshakable obsession but had, instead, been compelled to shove the shotgun barrel into his mouth because he had finally remembered what had happened to him the summer before last. Maybe the memory was far worse than the mystery. Maybe, if the truth were revealed, sleepwalking and nightmares would seem less terrifying than what had happened during that drive from Portland to Mountainview.
Moons . . . The oppressiveness of those pendulant forms drastically increased. The claustrophobic mural made breathing difficult. The moons seemed to portend some unreadable but manifestly evil fate that awaited him, and he stumbled out of the room, suddenly eager to flee from them.
Among a herd of leaping and prancing shadows whipped up by the bobbling beam of the flashlight, he ran down the short hall, into the living room, tripped over a stack of books, and fell with a jarring crash. For a moment he lay stunned. But his senses swiftly cleared, and he was jolted to find himself staring at the word “Dominick,” which was scrawled in felttip pen across the luminous moonface in one of the dozens of identical big posters. He had not noticed it when he had come through from the kitchen earlier, but now he had fallen so that the flash in his right hand was aimed just right.
A chill rippled through Dom. He had read nothing about this in the newspaper, but the handwriting surely belonged to Lomack. To the best of his knowledge, he had not known the gambler. Yet to pretend that this was another Dominick would be to embrace an outrageous coincidence.
He got up from the floor and took a couple of steps toward the poster that bore his name, stopping six feet from it. In the penumbra of the flashlight beam, he saw writing on an adjacent poster. His own name was only one of four that Lomack had scribbled across four lunar images: DOMINICK, GINGER, FAYE, ERNIE. If his name was here because he had shared a forgotten nightmarish experience with Lomack, then the other three must have been fellow sufferers as well, though Dom could remember nothing whatsoever about them.
He thought of the priest in the Polaroid snapshot. Was that Ernie?
And the blond strapped to the bed. Was she Ginger? Or Faye?
As he moved the light from one name to the other and back again, some dark and awesome memory did indeed stir in him. But it remained far down in his subconscious, an amorphous blur like a giant ocean creature swimming past just below the mottled surface of a murky sea, its existence revealed only by the rippled wake of its passage and by the flicker of shadow and light in the water. He tried to reach out for the memory and seize it, but it dove deep and vanished.
From the moment he had come into the Lomack place, Dom had been in the hands of fear, but now frustration took an even tighter grip on him. He shouted in the empty house, and his voice echoed coldly off the moonpapered walls. “Why can't I remember?” He knew why, of course: Someone had mucked with his mind, scrubbing out certain memories. But still he shoutedfearful, furious. "Why can't I remember?
I've got to remember!" He held his left hand toward the poster that featured his name, as if to wrench from its substance the memory that had been in Lomack's mind when he had scrawled “Dominick.” His heart thumped. He roared with hot anger: "Goddamn it, goddamn you whoever you are, I will remember. I will remember you sons of bitches. You bastards! I will."
Suddenly, impossibly, even though he was not touching it, though his hand was still a few feet from it, the poster bearing his name tore loose from the wall. It was fixed in place with four strips of masking tape angled across its corners, but the tape peeled up with the sound of zippers opening, and the poster leapt off the wall as if a wind had blown straight through the lathe and plaster behind it. With a rattle and rustle of paper Vikings, it swooped at him, and he staggered back across the living room in surprise, nearly falling over the books again.
In his unsteady hand, his flashlight revealed that the poster had stopped a few feet from him. It hung at eyelevel, unsupported in thin air, undulating slightly from top to bottom, first bulging out at him and then bending away when the direction of undulation reversed itself. As the pocked surface of that moon rippled, his own handwritten name fluttered and writhed as if it were the legend on a windstirred banner.
Hallucination, he thought desperately.
But he knew it was really happening.
He could not breathe, as if the cold air were so syrupthick with miraculous power that it could not be inhaled.
The poster floated closer.
His hands shook. The flashlight jiggled. Sharp glints of light lanced off the undulant surface of the glossy paper.
After a timeless moment in which the only sound was the crackle of the animated poster, other noise abruptly arose from every part of the room: the zippersound of masking tape being pulled loose. On the ceiling, walls, and windows, the other posters simultaneously disengaged themselves. With a brittle clatterrattlewhoosh, half a hundred moon images exploded toward Dom from every direction, and he cried out in surprise and fear.
The loosed cry was like a blockage expelled from his windpipe, for he was suddenly able to breathe.
The last of the tape pulled loose. Fifty posters hung unmoving in midair, not even rippling, as if pasted firmly to nothing whatsoever. The silence in the dead gambler's house was as profound as in a temple devoid of worshipers, a cold and penetrating silence that seemed to pierce to the core of Dom, seeking to replace even the soft liquid susurration of his blood's movement through his arteries and veins.
Then as if they were fifty parts of a single mechanism brought to life with the flick of a switch, the threebyfivefoot lunar images shivered, rustled, flapped. Although there was not the slightest breeze to propel them, they began to whirl around the room in the orderly manner of horses on a carousel. Dom stood in the middle of that eerie merrygoround, and the moons circled him; they capered and twirled, curled and uncurled, flexed and flapped, here seen as halfmoons and here as crescents and here fullface, and they waxed and waned, ascended and descended, faster, faster, faster still. In the flashlight glow, it seemed like a procession set in motion by the sorcerer's apprentice who, in the old story, had magically imparted life to a bunch of broomsticks.
Dom's fear receded, making room for wonder. At the moment there seemed no threat in the phenomenon. In fact a wild delight burgeoned in him. He could think of no explanation for what he was witnessing, but stood in dumb astonishment, puzzled and amazed. Usually nothing was so terrifying as the unknown, but perhaps he sensed a benign power at work. Wonderstruck, he turned slowly in a circle, watching the moons parade around him, and at last a tremulous laugh escaped him.
In an instant, the mood changed dramatically. In a cacophony of imitation wings, the posters flew at Dom as if they were fifty enormous and furious bats. They swooped and darted over his head, slapped his face, beat against his back. Though they were not alive, he attributed malevolent intent to their assault. He put one arm across his face and flailed at the moons with the hand that held the flashlight, but they did not fall back. The noise grew louder and more frantic as the paper wings beat on the chilly air and on one another.
His previous delight forgotten, -Dom stumbled across the room in a panic, searching for the way out. But he could see nothing but zooming, soaring, spinning moons. No doors. No windows. He staggered one way, then another, disoriented.
The noise grew still worse as, in the hallways and other rooms of the bungalow, a thousand moons began to tear free of their petrified orbits upon the walls. Tape pulled loose, and staples popped out of plaster, and glue suddenly lost its adhesiveness. A thousand cratered moonformsand then a thousand moredetached themselves and rose into suspension with ten thousand rustles, spun and swooped toward the living room with a hundred thousand clicks and crackles and hisses, swinging into orbit around Dom with a steadily swelling roar that sounded as if he were immersed in raging flames. The glossy fullcolor pictures torn from magazines and books now flashed and sparkled and shimmered as they darted through the flashlight beam, contributing to the scintillant illusion of fire, and the blackandwhite pictures cascaded down and spiraled up like bits of ash caught in thermal currents.
Gasping for breath, he sucked in slickpaper and newsprint moons and had to spit them out. Thousands of small paper worlds seethed around him in layer upon layer, and when he hysterically parted one curtain composed of false planetoids, there was only another behind it.
Intuitively, he perceived that this impossible display was meant to help him break through to a full recollection of his unremembered nightmares. He had no idea who or what lay behind the phenomenon, but he sensed the purpose. If he immersed himself in the storm of moons and let them sweep him away, he'd understand his dreams, understand the frightening cause of them, and know what had happened to him on the road eighteen months ago. But he was too scared to let go and be drawn into a trance by the mesmerizing weaveandbobble of the pale spheres. He longed for that revelation but was terrified of it. He said, “No. No.” He pressed his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. "Stop it! Stop it!“ His heart hammered two beats to each exclamation. ”Stop it!" His throat cracked as his cries broke loose: “Stop it!”
He was astonished when the tumult was cut off with the suddenness of a symphony orchestra terminating a thunderous crescendo on one last boneshaking note. He did not expect his shouted commands to be obeyed, and he still did not think his words had done the trick.
He took his hands away from his ears. He opened his eyes.
A galaxy full of moons hung around him.
With a trembling hand, he pfucked one of the pictures from its unsupported perch upon the air. Wonderingly, he turned it over in his hand. Tested its substance between two fingers. There was nothing special about the picture, yet it had been suspended magically before him, just as thousands more were still suspended, motionless.
“How?” he said shakily, as if the moons, being able to levitate, ought also to be able to speak. “How? Why?”
The moons fell as one. As by the breaking of some spell, the thousands of pieces of paper dropped straight to the floor, where they lay in uneven heaps, in a drift over Dom's winter boots, with no lingering trace of the mysterious lifeforce that had possessed them.
Bewildered and half in shock, Dom shuffled toward the doorway that led to the hall. The moons crunched and rustled like dry autumn leaves. At the door he stopped and played his flashlight beam slowly over the short corridor, where not a single lunar image remained moored by staples, tape, or glue. The walls had been stripped bare.
Turning, he took a couple of steps into the center of the living room once more, then knelt among the debris. He put down the glowing flashlight and sifted paper moons through his trembling hands, trying to understand what he had seen.
Within him, fear fought delighted amazement and terror battled awe. But in truth he could not decide how he ought to feel, because there was no precedent for what he had experienced. One moment a giddy laugh began to build, but then joy was frozen by a breath of cold horror. Now he felt he'd been in the presence of something unspeakably evil, but now he was just as convinced it had been something good and pure. Evil. Good. Perhaps both . . . or neither. Just ...
well something. Some mysterious thing beyond the descriptive, definitive power of words.
He knew one thing only: Whatever had happened to him the summer before last was far stranger than he had realized heretofore.
Still sifting paper moons through his fingers, he noticed something unusual on his hands. He brought them palmsup into the direct beam of the flashlight. Rings. On each palm blazed a ring of swollen red skin, each as perfect as if the inflamed tissues had conformed to a pattern drawn with a draftsman's compass.
Even as he watched, the stigmata faded, vanished.
It was Tuesday, January 7.
6.
Chicago, Illinois
In his bedroom on the second floor of St. Bernadette's rectory, Father Stefan Wycazik woke to the thump of a drum. The beat had the deep boom of a bass drum and the hollow reverberation of tympani. It sounded like the pounding of an enormous heart, although it embellished the simple twostroke rhythm of the heart with an extra beat: LUBDUBdub . . . LUBDUBdub . . . LUBDUBdub . . .
Bewildered and still half asleep, Stefan switched on the lamp, squinted in the blaze of light, and looked at his alarm clock. It was twoohseven, Thursday morning, certainly not a reasonable hour for a parade.
LUBDUBdub ... LUBDUB_dub ...
After each triad of thumps, there was a threesecond pause, then a set of beats identical to all the others, then another threesecond pause. The precise timing and unfaltering repetition of the noise began to seem less like the work of a drummer and more like the laborious pistonstroke of an enormous machine.
Father Wycazik threw back the covers and padded barefoot to the window that looked out on the courtyard between the rectory and the church. He saw only snow and barelimbed trees in the backwash of the carriage lamp above the sacristy door.
The beats grew louder, and the pause between the groups shortened to about two seconds. He took his robe from the back of a chair and slipped it on over his pajamas. The sonorous pounding was so loud now that it was no longer merely an annoyance and puzzlement. It had begun to frighten Stefan. Each burst of sound rattled the windowpanes and shook the door in its frame.
He hurried into the upstairs hall. He fumbled in the dark for the wall switch and finally turned on the overhead light.
Farther along the short hall, on the right, another door opened, and Father Michael Gerrano, Stefan's other curate, dashed out of his room, struggling into his own robe. “What is that?”
“Don't know,” Stefan said.
The next triplethud was twice as loud as the group preceding it, and the entire house reverberated as if it had been struck by three! gigantic hammers. It was not a hard sharp sound, but mufflid'in spite of its loudnessas if the hammers were thinly padded yet swung with tremendous force. The lights flickered. Now the thumps were separated by no more than a second of silence, not long enough for the echo of the previous fulminations to fade away. And with each powerful hammering, the lights flickered again and the floor under Stefan trembled.