Strangers

Page 60

While Faye and Ernie worked in the firstfloor office, Ned and Sandy Sarver were already preparing dinner in the kitchen upstairs. This evening, after Brendan Cronin arrived from Chicago, after Jorja Monatelia and her little girl flew in from Vegas, there would be nine for dinner, and Ned did not want to leave preparations until the last minute. Yesterday, when all six of them joined forces to prepare and serve the evening meal, Ginger Weiss had observed that the occasion was almost like a family holiday gathering; and indeed, they felt an extraordinary closeness though they hardly knew one another. With the idea that reinforcement of their special affection and camaraderie might give them strength to face whatever lay ahead of them, Ned and Sandy had decided that tonight's meal ought to be like a Thanksgiving feast. Therefore, they were preparing a sixteenpound turkey, pecan stuffing, scalloped potatoes, baked corn, carrots with tarragon, pepper slaw, pumpkin pie, and madefromscratch crescent rolls.
As they chopped celery, diced onions, cubed bread, and grated cabbage, Ned occasionally wondered if what they were cooking was not only a family feast but also the last hearty meal of the condemned. Each time that morbid thought rose, he chased it away by pausing to watch Sandy as she worked. She smiled almost constantly, and sometimes softly hummed a song. Surely, an event that had induced this radical and wonderful change in Sandy could not ultimately culminate in their deaths. Surely, they had nothing to worry about. Surely.
After three hours at the Elko Sentinel, Ginger and Dom ate a light lunchchef's saladsat a restaurant on Idaho Street, then returned to the Tranquility Motel at twothirty. Faye and Ernie were still in the office, which was filled with appetizing aromas drifting down from the apartment upstairs: pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg, onions fried lightly in butter, the yeasty odor of baking bread dough.
“And you can't smell the turkey yet,” Faye said. "Ned just put that in the oven half an hour ago."
“He says dinner's at eight,” Ernie told them, "but I suspect the odors'll drive us mad and force us to storm the kitchen before then."
Faye said, “Learn anything at the Sentinel?”
Before Ginger could tell them what she and Dom had uncovered, the front door of the motel office opened, and a slightly pudgy man entered in a burst of cold whirling wind. He had hurried from his car without bothering to put on a topcoat; although he wore gray slacks, a dark blue blazer, a light blue sweater, and an ordinary white shirt, rather than a black suit and Roman collar, his identity was not for a moment in doubt. He was the auburnhaired, greeneyed, roundfaced young priest in the Polaroid snapshot that the unknown correspondent had sent to Dom.
“Father Cronin,” Ginger said.
She was as immediately and powerfully drawn to him as she'd been to Dominick Corvaisis. With the priest as with Dom, Ginger sensed a shared experience even more shattering than the one which she had shared with the Blocks and Servers. Within The Event that they had all witnessed that Friday in July, there had been a Second Event experienced by only some of them. Although it was a frightfully improper way to greet a man who was a virtual stranger and a priest, Ginger rushed to Father Cronin and threw her arms around him.
But apologies were not required, for Father Cronin evidently sensed the same thing she did. Without hesitation, he returned her hug, and for a moment they clung to each other, not as if they were strangers but brother and sister greeting each other after a long separation.
Then Ginger stepped back as Dom said, “Father Cronin,” and came forward to embrace the priest.
“There's no need to call me 'Father.” At the moment I neither want nor deserve to be considered a priest. Please just call me Brendan."
Ernie shouted upstairs to Ned and Sandy, then followed Faye out from behind the checkin counter. Brendan shook Ernie's hand and embraced Faye, obviously feeling great affection for them, though not a closeness as powerful and inexplicable as the tremendous emotional magnetism that pulled him toward Dom and Ginger. When Ned and Sandy came downstairs, he greeted them the same as he had Ernie and Faye.
Just as Ginger had done last night,- Brendan said, "I have a truly wonderful sense of . . . being among family. You all feel it, don't you? As if we've shared the most important moments of our lives . . . went through something that'll always make us different from everyone else."
In spite of his insistence that he did not deserve the deference accorded a priest, Brendan Cronin had a profoundly spiritual air about him. His somewhat pudgy face, sparkling eyes, and broad warm smile conveyed joy; and he moved among them, touched them, and spoke with an ebullience that was infectious and that somehow lifted Ginger's soul.
Brendan said, "What I feel in this room only reassures me that I've made the right decision in coming. I'm meant to be with you. Something will happen here that'll transform us, that's already begun to transform us. Do you feel it? Do you feel it?"
The priest's soft voice sent a pleasant shiver up Ginger's spine, filled her with an indescribable sense of wonder reminiscent of what she'd felt the first time that, as a medical student, she had stood in an operating room and had seen a patient's thorax held open by surgical retractors to reveal the pulsing, mysterious complexity of the human heart in all its crimson grandeur.
“Called,” Brendan said. The softly spoken word echoed eerily around the room. “All of us. Called back to this place.”
“Look, ” Dom said, packing a paragraph of amazement into that one syllable, raising his arms and holding his hands out to show them the red rings of swollen flesh that had appeared in his palms.
Surprised, Brendan raised his hands, which were also branded by the strange stigmata. As the men faced each other, the air thickened with unknown power. Yesterday, on the telephone, Father Wycazik had told Dom that Brendan was relatively certain no religious element was involved in the miraculous cures and other events that had recently transformed the young priest's life. Yet the motel office seemed, to Ginger, to be filled with a force that, if not supernatural, was certainly beyond the ken of any man or woman.
“Called,” Brendan said again.
Ginger was gripped by breathless expectancy. She looked at Ernie, who stood behind Faye with his hands on her shoulders, and both their faces were full of tremulous suspense. Ned and Sandy, who were by the rack of postcards, holding hands, were wideeyed.
Ginger felt the flesh prickling on the back of her neck. She thought, Something's going to happen, and even as the thought took form, something did.
Every lamp in the motel office was aglow in deference to Ernie's uneasiness in the presence of deep shadows, but abruptly the place was even brighter than it had been. A milkywhite light filled the room, springing magically from molecules of air. It shimmered on all sides but rained mostly from overhead, a silvery mist of luminosity. She realized this was the same light that featured in her unremembered lunar dreams. She turned in a circle, looking around and up through spangled curtains of brilliant yet soft radiance, not in search of the source but with the hope of remembering her dreams and, ultimately, the events of that longlost summer night that had inspired the dreams.
Ginger saw Sandy reach into the glowing air with one hand, as if to grasp a fistful of the miraculous light. A tentative smile pulled at Ned's mouth. Faye smiled, too, and Ernie's expression of childlike wonder was almost laughably out of place on his ruggedly hewn face.
“The moon,” Ernie said.
“The moon,” Dom echoed, the stigmata still blazing on his hands.
For one thrilling moment, Ginger Weiss was poised on the brink of complete understanding. The black, blank membrane of her memory block trembled; revelation pressed strenuously against the far side, and that membrane seemed certain to split and spill forth everything that had been dammed beyond it.
Then the light changed from moonwhite to bloodred, and with it the mood changed from wonder and growing delight to fear. She no longer sought revelation but dreaded it, no longer welcomed understanding but withdrew from it in terror and revulsion.
Ginger stumbled back through the bloody glow, bumped against the front door. Across the room, beyond Dom and Brendan, Sandy Sarver had ceased reaching up to seize a handful of light; she was holding tightly to Ned, whose smile had become a rictus of repulsion. Faye and Ernie were pressing back against the checkin counter.
As scarlet incandescence welled like fluid into the room and filled it from corner to corner, the stunning visual phenomena were augmented by sound. Ginger jumped in surprise as a loud threepart crash shook the sanguineous air, jumped once more as it repeated, then flinched but did not jump when it came again. It had a cardiac quality, like the thunderous beating of a great heart, though it featured one more stroke than a usual heartbeat: LUBDUBdub, LUBDUBdub, LUBDUBdub.... She knew at once that it was the apparitional noise of which Father Wycazik had spoken in his telephone conversation with Dom, the noise that had arisen in Brendan Cronin's bedroom and had shaken St. Bernadette's.
But she also knew that she had heard this very thing before. This entire displaythe moonlike light, the bloodred radiance, the noisewas part of something that had happened the summer before last.
LUBDUBdub ... LUBDUBdub ...
The window frames rattled. The walls shook..The bloody light and the lamplight began to pulse in time with the pounding.
LUBDUBdub ... LUBDUBdub ...
Again, Ginger was approaching a shocking recollection. With each crash of sound and throb of light, longburied memories surged nearer.
However, her inhibiting fear grew; a towering black wave of terror bore down on her. The Azrael Block was doing what it was designed to do; rather than let remembrance have its way with her, she would plunge into a fugue state, as she had not done since the day Pablo Jackson had been killed, one week ago. The familiar signs of oncoming blackout were present: She was having difficulty breathing; she trembled with a sense of mortal danger so strong it was palpable; the world around her began to fade; an oily darkness seeped in at the edges of her vision.
Run or die.
Ginger turned her back on the phenomenal events transpiring in the office. With both hands, she gripped the frame of the front door, as if to anchor herself to consciousness and thwart the black wave that sought to sweep her away. In desperation, she looked through the glass at the vast Nevada landscape, at the somber winter sky, trying to block out the stimulithe impossible light and soundthat pushed her toward a dark fugue. Terror and mindless panic grew so unbearable that escape into a hateful fugue seemed almost preferable, yet she somehow held fast to the doorframe, held tight, held on, shaking and gasping, held on, terrified not so much by the strange events occurring behind her but by the unremembered events of that summer of which these phenomena were only dim echoes, and still she held on, held on ... until the threestroke thunder faded, until the red light paled, until the room was silent, and until the only light was that coming through the windows or from ordinary lighting fixtures.
She was all right now. She was not going to black out.
For the first time, she had successfully resisted a seizure. Maybe her ordeal of the past few months had toughened her. Maybe just being here, within reach of all the answers to the mystery, had given her the heart to resist. Or maybe she had drawn strength from her new “family.” Whatever the reason, she was confident that, having once fended off a fugue, she would find it easier to deal with future attacks. Her memory blocks were crumbling. And her fear of facing up to what had happened that July 6 was now far outweighed by the fear of never knowing.
Shaky, Ginger turned toward the others again.
Brendan Cronin tottered to the sofa and sat, trembling visibly. The rings were no longer visible in either his hands or Dom's.
To the priest, Ernie said, "Did I understand you? That same light sometimes fills your room at night?"
“Yes,” Brendan acknowledged. “Twice before.”
“But you told us it was a lovely light,” Faye said.
“Yeah,” Ned agreed. “You made it sound . . . wonderful.”
“It is,” Brendan said. "Partly, it is. But when it turns red . . . well, then it scares the hell out of me. But when it first starts . . . oh, it uplifts me and fills me with the strangest joy."
The ominous scarlet light and the frightening threepart hammering had generated such terror in Ginger that she had temporarily forgotten the exhilarating moonwhite glow that had preceded it and that had filled her with wonder.
Wiping his palms on his shirt, as if the vanished rings had left an unwanted residue upon his hands, Dom said, "There was both a good and evil aspect to the events of that night. We long to relive a part of what happened to us, yet at the same time it scares us . . . scares us .
“Scares us shitless,” Ernie said.
Ginger noticed that even Sandy Sarver, who heretofore had perceived only a benign shape to the mystery, was frowning.
When Jorja Monatella buried her exhusband, Alan Rykoff, at eleven o'clock Monday morning, the Las Vegas sun beamed down between scattered irongray clouds. A hundred shafts of golden sunshine, some half a mile across, some only a few yards wide, like cosmic spotlights, left many buildings in winter shadows while highlighting others. Several shafts of sunshine moved across the cemetery, harried by the rushing clouds, sweeping eastward across the barren floor of the desert. As the portly funeral director concluded a nondenominational prayer, as the casket was lowered into the waiting grave, a particularly bright beam illuminated the scene, and color burst from the flowers.
In addition to Jorja and Paul RykoffAlan's father, who had flown in from Floridaonly five people had shown up. Even Jorja's parents had not come. By his selfishness, Alan had assured an exit from life accompanied by a minimum of grieving. Paul Rykoff, too like his son in some respects, blamed Jorja for everything. He had been barely civil since his arrival yesterday. Now that his only child was in the ground, he turned from Jorja, stonefaced, and she knew she would meet him again only if his stubbornness and anger eventually were outweighed by a desire to see his grandchild.
She drove only a mile before she pulled to the side of the road, stopped, and finally wept. She wept neither for Alan's suffering nor for the loss of him, but for the final destruction of all the hope with which their relationship had begun, the burntout hopes for love, family, friendship, mutual goals, and shared lives. She had not wished Alan dead. But now that he was dead, she knew it would be easier to make the new beginning toward which she had been planning and working, and that realization made her feel neither guilty nor cruel; it was just sad.
Last night, Jorja told Marcie her father was dead, though not that he'd committed suicide. Initially, Jorja had not intended to tell her until this afternoon, in the presence of Dr. Coverly, the psychologist. But the appointment with Coverly had to be canceled because, later today, Jorja and Marcie were flying to Elko to join Dominick Corvaisis, Ginger Weiss, and the others. Marcie took the news of Alan's death surprisingly well. She cried, but not hard or long. At seven, she was old enough to understand death, but still too young to grasp the cruel finality of it. Besides, by his abandonment of Marcie, Alan unwittingly had done the girl a favor; in a sense, for her, he had died more than a year ago, and her mourning had already been done.