Strangers (65 page)

“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 moon-white to blood-red, 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 check-in 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 three-part 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:
LUB-DUB-dub, LUB-DUB-dub, LUB-DUB-dub…
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 display—the moonlike light, the blood-red radiance, the noise—was part of something that had happened the summer before last.

LUB-DUB-dub…LUB-DUB-dub…

The window frames rattled. The walls shook. The bloody light and the lamplight began to pulse in time with the pounding.

LUB-DUB-dub…LUB-DUB-dub…

Again, Ginger was approaching a shocking recollection. With each crash of sound and throb of light, long-buried 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 stimuli—the
impossible light and sound—that 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 door frame, 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 three-stroke 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 three-part hammering had generated such terror in Ginger that she had temporarily forgotten the exhilarating moon-white 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 ex-husband, Alan Rykoff, at eleven o’clock Monday morning, the Las Vegas sun beamed down between scattered iron-gray 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 Rykoff—Alan’s father, who had flown in from Florida—only 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, stone-faced, 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 burnt-out 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.

One other thing had helped Marcie overcome her grief: her obsession with the collection of moon pictures. Only an hour after she learned of her father’s death, the child was sitting at the dining room table, eyes dry, small pink tongue poked between her teeth in total concentration,
a crayon stub in one hand. She’d begun the moon-coloring project on Friday evening and pursued it through the weekend. By breakfast this morning, every one of the photographs and all but fifty of the hundreds of hand-drawn moons had been transformed into fiery globes.

Marcie’s obsession would have disturbed Jorja even if she had not known others shared it and that two had killed themselves. The moon was not yet the focus of the girl’s every waking hour. However, Jorja required little imagination to see that, if the obsession progressed, Marcie might travel irretrievably into the land of madness.

Her anxiety about Marcie was so acute that she quickly overcame the tears that had forced her to pull to the side of the road. She put the Chevette in gear and drove to her parents’ house, where Marcie waited.

The girl was at the kitchen table with the ubiquitous album of moons, applying a scarlet crayon. She glanced up when Jorja arrived, smiled weakly, and returned at once to the task before her.

Pete, Jorja’s father, was also at the table, frowning at Marcie. Occasionally, he thought of a stratagem to interest her in some activity less bizarre and more wholesome than the endless coloring of moons, but all his attempts to lure her away from the album failed.

In her parents’ bedroom, Jorja changed from her dress into jeans and a sweater for the trip north, while Mary Monatella badgered her. “When will you take that book away from Marcie? Or let
me
take it away?”

“Mother, I told you before: Dr. Coverly believes taking the book from her right now would only reinforce her obsession.”

“That doesn’t make any sense to me,” Jorja’s mother said.

“Dr. Coverly says if we make an issue of the moon collection at this early stage, we’ll be emphasizing its importance and—”

“Nonsense. Does this Coverly have kids of his own?”

“I don’t know, Mom.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t have kids of his own. If he did, he wouldn’t be giving you such dumb advice.”

Having put her dress on a hanger, having stripped down to bra and panties, Jorja felt naked and vulnerable, for this situation reminded her of when her mother used to watch her dress for dates with boys who did not meet approval. No boy ever met Mary’s approval. In fact, Jorja married Alan in part because Mary disapproved of him. Matrimony as rebellion. Stupid, but she had done it and paid dearly. Mary had driven her to it—Mary’s suffocating and authoritarian brand of love. Now, Jorja grabbed the jeans that were laid out on the bed and slipped into them, dressing fast.

Mary said, “She won’t even say why she’s collecting those things.”

“Because she doesn’t know why. It’s a compulsion. An irrational obsession,
and if there’s a reason for it, the reason is buried down in her subconscious, where even she can’t get a look at it.”

Mary said, “That book should be taken away from her.”

“Eventually,” Jorja said. “One step at a time, Mom.”

“If it was up to me, I’d do it right now.”

Jorja had packed two big suitcases and had left them here earlier. Now, when it was time to go to the airport, Pete drove, and Mary went along for the opportunity to engage in more nagging.

Jorja and Marcie shared the back seat. On the way to the airport, the girl paged continuously, silently back and forth through her album.

Between Jorja and Mary, the subject of conversation had changed from the best way to deal with Marcie’s obsession to the imminent trip to Elko. Mary had doubts about this expedition and did not hesitate to express them. Was the plane just a twelve-seater? Wasn’t it dangerous to go up in a bucket of bolts owned by a small-time outfit that was probably short of cash and skimped on maintenance? What was the purpose of going, anyway? Even if some people in Elko were having problems like Marcie’s, how could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that they’d all stayed at the same motel?

“This Corvaisis guy bothers me,” Pete said as he braked for a red traffic light. “I don’t like you getting involved with his kind.”

“What do you mean? You don’t even know him.”

“I know enough,” Pete said. “He’s a writer, and you know what they’re like. I read once that Norman Mailer hung his wife out a high window by her heels. And isn’t it Hemingway who’s always getting into fist-fights?”

Jorja said, “Daddy, Hemingway’s dead.”

“
See
? Always getting in fights, drunk, using drugs. Writers are a flaky bunch. I don’t like you being involved with writers.”

“This trip is a big mistake,” Mary said flatly.

It never ended.

At the airport, when she kissed them goodbye, they told her they loved her, and she told them the same, and the strange thing was that they were all telling the truth. Though they continuously sniped at her and though she had been deeply wounded by their sniping, they loved one another. Without love, they would have stopped speaking long ago. The parent-child relationship was sometimes even more perplexing than the mystery of what had happened at the Tranquility Motel two summers ago.

The feeder line’s bucket of bolts was more comfortable than Mary would have believed, with six well-padded seats on each side of a narrow aisle, free headphones providing bland but mellowing Muzak tapes,
and a pilot who handled his craft as gently as a new mother carried her baby.

Thirty minutes out of Las Vegas, Marcie closed the album and, in spite of the daylight streaming through the portholes, she drifted off to sleep, lulled by the loud but hypnotic droning of the engines.

During the flight, Jorja thought about her future: the business degree toward which she was working, her hope of owning a dress shop, the hard work ahead—and loneliness, which was already a problem for her. She wanted a man. Not sexually. Although
that
would be welcome, too! She had dated a few times since the divorce but had been to bed with no one. She was no female eunuch. Sex was important to her, and she missed it. But sex was not the main reason she wanted a man, one special man, a mate. She needed someone to share her dreams, triumphs, and failures. She had Marcie, but that was not the same. The human species seemed genetically compelled to make life’s journey two-by-two, and the need was particularly strong in Jorja.