Strangers

Page 49

When Faye spoke, she sounded stiffer than before, and Dom saw a strangeness in her eyes, a slightly glazed look. "Until the allclear was given, Ernie and I stayed with friends who have a small ranch in the mountains ten miles northeast of hereEiroy and Nancy Jamison. It was a difficult spill to clean up. The Army needed more than three days to do the job. They wouldn't let us back here until Tuesday morning."
“What's wrong with you, Faye?” Dom asked.
She blinked. “Huh? What do you mean?”
"You sound as if you'd been . . . programmed with that little speech."
She seemed genuinely baffled. “What're you talking about?”
Frowning, Ernie said, “Faye, your voice went . . . flat.”
“Well, I was only explaining what happened.” She leaned over and put one finger on Friday's page of the registry. "See, we'd rented out eleven rooms by the time they closed the interstate that night. But nobody paid for the rooms because nobody stayed. They were evacuated."
“There's your name, seventh on the list,” Ernie said.
Dom stared at his signature and at the Mountainview, Utah, address to which he had been moving at the time. He could remember checking in, but he sure as hell could not remember climbing back into his car and driving out the same night in response to an evacuation order. He said, “Did you actually see the accident, the tanker truck?”
Ernie shook his head. "No, the truck overturned a couple miles from here.“ He spoke in that byrote tone that had marked Faye's speech. ”The Army experts from Shenkfield were concerned the chemicals would be dispersed by the wind, so the quarantine zone was very large."
Chilled by the unconscious artificiality in Ernie's voice, Dom looked at Faye and saw that she too had noticed her husband's unnatural tone. He said, “That's what you sounded like a moment ago, Faye.” He looked at Ernie. “You two have been programmed with the same script.”
Faye frowned. “Are you saying the spill never happened?”
“It happened, all right.” Ernie told Dom. "For a while we saved a bunch of newspaper clippings about it from the Elko Sentinel. But I think we eventually threw them out. Anyway, people around these parts still wonder what might've happened if we'd gotten big winds and been contaminated with that topsecret stuff before the evacuation order was even given. No, it's not just some delusion of Faye's and mine."
“You can ask Elroy and Nancy Jamison,” Faye said. "They were here that night, visiting. When we had to evacuate, they offered to take us back to their place and put us up for the duration."
Dom smiled sourly. "I wouldn't put much credence in their recall of events. If they were here, then they saw what the rest of us saw, and it was scrubbed from their minds. They remember taking you back to their place because that's what they were told to remember. In fact they were probably right here, being brainwashed with the rest of us."
“My head's swimming,” Faye said. “This is positively Byzantine.”
“But, damn it, the toxic spill and evacuation happened,” Ernie said. “It was in the newspapers.”
Dom thought of a disturbing explanation that made his scalp crawl. "What if everyone here at the motel that night was contaminated with some chemical or biological weapon headed for Shenkfield? And what if the Army and the government covered it up to avoid bad press, millions of dollars in lawsuits, and the disclosure of topsecret information? Maybe they closed the highway and announced that everyone was safely evacuated, when in fact we had not been gotten out in time. Then they used the motel as a clinic, decontaminated us as much as they could, scrubbed the memory of the incident out of our minds, and reprogrammed us with false memories, so we'd never know what had happened to us."
They stared at one another in shocked silence for a moment. Not because the scenario sounded entirely right, which it did not. But because it was the first scenario they'd come up with that made sense of the psychological problems they had been having and explained the drugged people in those Polaroid snapshots.
Then Ernie and Faye began to think of objections. Ernie voiced the first: "In that case, the logical thing for them to've done was to make our false memories tie in closely with their cover story about the toxic spill and evacuation. That's exactly what they did with Faye and me, with the Jamisons, Ned and Sandy Sarver. So why didn't they do the same with you?
Why'd they program you with different memories that didn't have anything to do with the evacuation? That was irrational and risky. I mean, the radical differences between our memories is virtually proof that you or we or all of uswere brainwashed.
“Don't know,” Dom said. “That's just one more mystery to unravel.”
“And here's another flaw in that theory,” Ernie said. "If we'd been contaminated by a biological weapon, they wouldn't have let us go in just three days. They'd have been afraid of contagion, epidemic." Dom said, "All right. So it was a chemical agent, not a virus or bacterium. Something they could wash off or flush out of our systems."
“That doesn't make sense, either,” Faye said. "Because the things they test at Shenkfield are meant to be deadly. Poison gas. Nerve gas. Hideous damn stuff. If we'd got caught in a cloud like that, we'd have been dead on the spot or braindamaged or crippled."
“Maybe it was a slowacting agent,” Dom said. "Something that generates tumors, leukemia, or other conditions that only begin to show up two or three or five years from the date of contamination."
That thought also shocked them into silence. They listened to the ticking of the kitchen clock, to the mournful fluting of the wind at the windows, wondering if malignancies were even now sprouting within them.
Finally, Ernie said, "Maybe we were contaminated, and maybe we're all slowly rotting inside, but I don't think so. After all, they test potential weapons at Shenkfield. And what use would a weapon be that didn't kill the enemy for years and years?"
“Virtually no use at all,” Dom acknowledged.
“And,” Ernie said, "how could chemical contamination explain that bizarre experience you had in Lomack's house in Reno?"
“I've no idea,” Dom said. "But now that we know they cordoned off this whole area using the excuse of a toxic spillwhether it was a real spill or notmy theory that we were brainwashed is a lot more credible. Because, see, before this I wasn't able to explain how someone could've rounded us up at will and held us long enough to make us forget the thing we saw. But the quarantine gave them the time they needed, and it also kept away prying eyes. So . . . at least now we have a good idea who we're up against. The United States Army, maybe acting in collusion with the government, maybe acting alone, has been trying to hide something that happened here, something it did but shouldn't have done. I don't know ' about you, but the thought of being up against an enemy that big and that potentially ruthless scares the hell out of me."
“An old Leatherneck like me is bound to be scornful of the Army,” Ernie said. "But they're not devils, you know. We can't leap to the conclusion we're victims of a wicked rightwing conspiracy. That crackpot stuff makes millions for paranoid novelists and for Hollywood, but in the real world, evil is more subtle, less identifiable. If Army and government officials are behind what happened to us, they don't necessarily have immoral motives. They probably think they did the only wise thing they could've done in the circumstances."
“But whether or not it's wise,” Faye said, "we've got to dig into this situation. If we don't, Ernie's nyctophobia will surely get worse. And your sleepwalking will also get worse, Dom. And what then?"
They all knew “what then.”
“What then” was a shotgun barrel jammed in the mouth, the route to peace that Zebediah Lomack had taken.
Dom looked down at the motel registry on the table before him. Four spaces above his own name, he saw another entry that electrified him. Dr. Ginger Weiss. Her address was in Boston.
“Ginger,” he said. “The fourth name on those moon posters.”
Furthermore, Cal Sharkle, the Blocks' truckerfriend from Chicago, the zombieeyed subject of one of the Polaroid snapshots, had checked into the motel just before Dr. Weiss. The first guests to sign in that day were Mr. and Mrs. Alan Rykoff and daughter, of Las Vegas. Dom was willing to bet that they were the young family photographed in front of the door to Room 9. Zebediah Lomack's name was not in the registry, so he had probably just been unlucky enough to stop at the Grille for dinner that night, on his way between Reno and Elko. One of the other names might have been that of the young priest in the other Polaroid, but if so, he had signed without appending his title.
“We'll have to talk to all these people,” Dom said excitedly. "We can start calling them first thing tomorrow and see what they remember about those days in July."
Chicago, Illinois.
By allowing no slightest hairline crack to appear in his resolve, by showing no equivocation whatsoever, Brendan managed to obtain Father Wycazik's permission to go to Nevada alone on Monday, without Monsignor Janney trailing him in expectation of miracles.
By tenten, he was in bed with the lights out, lying on his side in blackness, staring at the window, where the palest light glistered softly in the frost that skinned the pane. The window looked out upon the courtyard, where no lights burned at this hour, so Brendan knew that he was seeing indirect moonglow refracted by the thin layer of ice that had welded itself to the glass. It had to be indirect light because the moon was traversing the sky on a course that had made it visible from the study windows earlier in the evening, and the study was on the other side of the rectory; the moon could not now be over the courtyard unless it had made a sudden ninetydegree turn in the path it had previously been following, which was not possible. As he patiently lay waiting for sleep, he became increasingly intrigued by the subtle patterns made by the secondhand moonbeams that had been trapped in the frost; light splintered at every point where one ice crystal interfaced with another, each beam shattering into a hundred beams, a hundred more.
“The moon,” he whispered, surprised by his voice. “The moon.”
Gradually, Brendan realized that something uncanny was happening.
At first he was merely fascinated by the harmonious interaction of frost and moonlight, but soon fascination evolved into a more intense attraction. He could not look away from the pearly window. It offered an indefinable promise, and he was drawn as a sailor by a siren's song. Before he knew what he intended, he had slipped one arm out from beneath the blankets and was reaching toward the window, though it was ten feet away and could not be touched from where he lay. The black silhouette of his spreadfingered hand was clearly defined against the niveous pane of glass that glowed softly beyond, and his futile straining was the essence of yearning. Brendan longed to be within the light, not the light that lived in the frost but that other golden light of his dreams.
“The moon,” he whispered, again surprised that he had spoken.
His heartbeat accelerated. He began to tremble.
Suddenly, upon the glass, the sugarylooking frost underwent an inexplicable change. As Brendan watched, the thin timemelted away from the edges of the pane, toward the center. In a few seconds, when the melting stopped, there remained only a perfect circle of ice, about ten inches in diameter, glowing eerily in the middle of an otherwise clear, dry, dark rectangle of glass.
The moon.
Brendan knew it was a sign, though he did not know from whom or what or where it came, nor did he understand it.
On Christmas night, when he had stayed at his parents' house in Bridgeport, Brendan had apparently had a dream featuring the moon, for he had awakened his mother and father with his loud and panicky cries. But he could remember nothing of the dream. Since then, as far as he knew, none of his dreams had involved the moon, but were concerned exclusively with that mysterious place full of dazzling golden light, where he felt himself called toward some incredible revelation.
Now, as he still reached with one hand toward the glimmering frost on the window, the vaguely phosphorescent time grew brighter, as if some peculiar chemical reaction was at work within the ice crystals. The moonimage changed from a milky hue to the crisper white of sundappled snow, then grew even brighter, until it was a scintillant circle of silver blazing on the glass.
Heart pounding furiously, certain he was teetering on the edge of some astounding epiphany, Brendan continued to hold his hand toward the window, and he gasped in shock as a shaft of light leapt out from the frostmoon and fell across the bed. It was like the beam of a spotlight and every bit as brilliant. As he squinted into the glare, trying to see how such fierce incandescence could possibly originate from ordinary hoarfrost and glass, the light changed to pale red, to darker red, to crimson, to scarlet. Around him, the rumpled blankets shone like molten steel, and his outstretched hand appeared to be wet with blood.
He was gripped by diji vu, absolutely convinced that he had once really stood under a scarlet moon, bathed in its bloody glow.
Although he wanted to understand how this strange red light related to the wondrous golden light of his dreams, although he still felt himself being called by something unknown that waited in that radiance, he was suddenly afraid. As the scarlet beams intensified, as his room became a caldron of heatless red fire and red shadows, his fear grew into terror of such power that it made him shake and sweat.
He pulled his hand back, and the scarlet light rapidly faded to silver, and the silver dimmed as well, until the circle of frost on the window shone with only a natural reflection of the January moon.
As darkness laid claim to his room once more, Brendan sat up and hastily switched on the lamp. Damp with sweat, as full of the nightshakes as any child frightened by fantasies of carnivorous goblins, he went to the window. The icy circle was still there, a moon image in the center of the otherwise unfrosted pane of glass.
He had wondered if the light had been but a dream or hallucination. In a way, he almost wished it had been only that. But the frostmoon was still there, proof that what he had seen was real, not a delusion.
Hesitantly, he touched the glass. He felt nothing unusual. Just the bitter cold of winter pressing against the other side of the pane.
With a start, he realized that he felt the swollen rings in his palms. He turned his hands over and watched as the stigmata faded.
He returned to bed. For a long while he sat with his back against the headboard, with his eyes open and the light on, waiting for the courage to lie down in darkness.