Strangers (37 page)

“Maybe I didn’t forget it. Maybe the memory was
taken
from me.”

Leaving that possibility for later exploration, Parker said, “Whoever the hell this guy is—what reasons would he have for sending these notes? I mean, you’ve imagined a situation where it’s you against Them, some unknown
Them,
and so this guy is on their side, not yours.”

“Maybe he doesn’t agree with everything that’s been done to me—whatever it is that I’ve forgotten was done to me.”

“Done to you? What’re we talking about here?”

Dom nervously turned his glass of eggnog around and around in his hands. “I don’t know. But this correspondent…he obviously wants me to know my problem’s not psychological, that there’s something more behind it. I think maybe he wants to help me find the truth.”

“So why doesn’t he just call you up and tell you the truth?”

“The only thing I can figure is that he doesn’t dare
risk
telling me. He must be part of some conspiracy, God knows what, but part of some group that doesn’t want the truth to come out. If he approaches me directly, the others will know, and he’ll be in deep shit.”

As if it helped him think, Parker ran one hand through his hair several times, mussing it badly. “You make this sound like some all-knowing secret society is on your ass—like the Illuminatus Society, Rosicrucians, CIA, and the Fraternal Order of Masons all rolled into one! You actually think you’ve been brainwashed?”

“If you want to call it that. Whatever traumatic episode I’ve forgotten, I didn’t forget it without assistance. Whatever I saw or experienced was apparently so shocking, so traumatic, that it’s still festering in my
subconscious, trying to reach me through sleepwalking and through the messages I leave on the Displaywriter. It was so damned big that even brainwashing hasn’t been able to wipe it out, so big that one of the conspirators is risking his own neck to send me hints.”

After reading them one more time, Parker returned the two notes to Dom, chugged down his own eggnog. “Shit. I think you’ve got to be right, which upsets me. I don’t want to believe it. It sounds too much as if you’ve let your novelistic imagination run wild, as if you’re trying out the plot of a new book on me, something a bit more colorful than you should write. But crazy as the whole thing sounds, I can’t think of any other answer.”

Dom realized he was squeezing the eggnog glass so tightly that he was in danger of shattering it. He put it on a small table and blotted his hands on his slacks. “Me neither. There’s nothing else that explains both the crazy damn sleepwalking,
and
my personality change between Portland and Mountainview,
and
those two notes.”

His face lined with worry, Parker said, “What could it have been, Dom? What did you stumble into when you were out there on the road?”

“I don’t have the foggiest.”

“Have you considered that it might be something so bad…so damn dangerous that you’d be better off not knowing?”

Dom nodded. “But if I don’t learn the truth, I won’t be able to stop the sleepwalking for good. In my sleep I’m running from the memory of whatever happened to me out there on the road, the summer before last, and to stop running I’ve got to find out what it was, face up to it. ’Cause if I don’t stop the sleepwalking, it’ll eventually drive me mad. That might sound a bit melodramatic, too, but it’s true. If I don’t learn the truth, then the thing I fear in my dreams is going to start haunting the waking hours as well, and I’m not going to have a moment’s peace, waking or sleeping, and eventually the only solution will be to put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.”

“Jesus.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do. God help you, my friend, I know you do.”

Reno, Nevada

A cloud saved Zeb Lomack. It drifted across the moon before the grip of the lunar obsession had completely reclaimed him. With the empyreal lantern briefly dimmed, Zebediah abruptly became aware that he was
standing coatless in the freezing December night, gaping up at the sky, mesmerized by moonbeams. If the cloud had not broken the trance, he might have stood there until the object of his grim fascination had descended past the horizon. Then, having sunk back into his lunacy, he might have returned to one of the rooms papered with the ancient god-face that the Greeks called Cynthia, that the Romans called Diana, there to lie in a stupor until, days hence, he had starved to death.

Reprieved, he let out a wretched cry and ran to the house. He slipped and fell in the snow, fell again on the porch steps, but immediately scrambled up, desperately seeking the safety of the indoors, where the face of the moon could not work its charms on him. But of course there was no safety inside, either. Though he closed his eyes and began at once to tear blindly at the moon pictures, ripping them from the kitchen walls and casting them on the garbage-covered floor, he began to succumb to his obsession yet again. Eyes tightly shut, he could not see the cratered images, but he could
feel
them. He could feel the pale light of a hundred moons upon his face, and he could feel the roundness of the moons in his hands as he tore them off the wall, which was crazy because they were only pictures that could not produce light or warmth and could not convey by touch the roundness of the lunar globe, yet he nevertheless felt those things strongly. He opened his eyes and was instantly captured by the familiar celestial body.

Just like my dad. Asylum-bound.

Like a distant crackle of lightning, that thought flickered through Zeb Lomack’s rapidly dimming mind. It jolted him and allowed him to recover just long enough to turn away from the living room door and fling himself toward the kitchen table, where the loaded shotgun waited.

Chicago, Illinois

Father Stefan Wycazik, descendant of strong-willed Poles, rescuer of troubled priests, was not accustomed to failure, and he did not handle it well. “But after everything I’ve told you, how can you still not believe?” he demanded.

Brendan Cronin said, “Father Stefan, I’m sorry. But I simply don’t feel any stronger about the existence of God than I did yesterday.”

They were in a bedroom on the second floor of Brendan’s parents’ gingersnap brick house in the Irish neighborhood called Bridgeport, where the young priest was spending the holiday according to Father Wycazik’s orders, issued yesterday after the Uptown shootout. Brendan, dressed in gray slacks and a white shirt, was sitting on the edge of a double bed that
was covered by a worn, yellow chenille spread. Stefan, choosing to feel needled by his curate’s stubbornness, moved constantly around the room from dresser to highboy to window to bed to dresser again, as if trying to avoid the prickling pain of his failure.

“Tonight,” Father Wycazik said, “I met an atheist who was half-converted by Tolk’s incredible recovery. But you’re unimpressed.”

“I’m happy for Dr. Sonneford,” Brendan said mildly, “but his renewed belief doesn’t rekindle my own.”

The curate’s refusal to be properly impressed by recent miraculous events was not the only thing that irritated Father Wycazik. The young priest’s pacific demeanor was also bothersome. If he could not find the will to believe in God again, then it seemed he should at least be disheartened and downcast by his continued lack of faith. Instead, Brendan appeared untroubled by his miserable spiritual condition, which was quite different from his attitude when Father Wycazik had seen him last. He had changed dramatically; for reasons that were not at all clear, a great peace seemed to have settled over Brendan.

Still determinedly pressing his argument, Stefan said, “It was
you,
Brendan, who cured Emmy Halbourg and healed Winton Tolk. It was you, through the power of those stigmata on your hands. Stigmata that God visited upon you as a sign.”

Brendan looked at his palms, now unmarked. “I believe…somehow I did heal Emmy and Winton. But it wasn’t God acting through me.”

“Who else but God could’ve granted you such curing power?”

“I don’t know,” Brendan said. “Wish I did. But it wasn’t God. I felt no divine presence, Father.”

“Good grief, how much more strongly do you expect Him to make His presence felt? Do you expect Him to thump you on the head with His great Staff of Justice, tip His diadem to you, and introduce Himself? You’ve got to meet Him halfway, Brendan.”

The curate smiled and shrugged. “Father, I know these amazing events seem to have no explanation other than a religious one. But I feel very strongly that something other than God lies behind it.”

“Like what?” Stefan challenged.

“I don’t know. Something tremendously important, something really wonderful and magnificent…but not God. Look, you’ve said that the rings were stigmata. But if that’s what they were, why wouldn’t they have been in a form that had some Christian significance? Why rings—which seem to have no relation to the message of Christ?”

When Brendan began Stefan’s unconventional course of psychological therapy at St. Joseph’s Hospital for Children three weeks ago, the young priest had been so troubled by his loss of faith that he’d been
growing rapidly thinner. Now he had stopped losing weight. He was still thirty pounds lighter than usual, but he was no longer as wan and haggard as he had been following his shocking outburst during Mass on the first of December. In spite of his spiritual fall, there was a glow to his skin and a light in his eyes that was almost…beatific.

“You feel splendid, don’t you?” Stefan asked.

“Yes, though I’m not sure why.”

“Your soul’s no longer troubled.”

“No.”

“Even though you’ve still not found your way back to God.”

“Even though,” Brendan agreed. “Maybe it has something to do with the dream I had last night.”

“The black gloves again?”

“No. Haven’t had that one in a while,” Brendan said. “Last night I dreamed that I was walking in a place of pure golden light, beautiful light, so bright I could see nothing around me, and yet it didn’t hurt my eyes.” A peculiar note, perhaps of reverence, entered the curate’s voice. “In the dream, I keep walking and walking, not knowing where I am or where I’m going, but with the sense that I’m approaching a thing or a place of monumental importance and unbearable beauty. Not just approaching but…being called to it. Not an audible call but a summons that just…reverberates in me. My heart is pounding, and I’m a little afraid. But it isn’t a bad fear, Father, what I feel in that bright place, not bad at all. So I just keep walking through the light, toward something magnificent that I can’t see but that I
know
is there.”

Drawn by Brendan’s hushed voice as if by a magnet, Father Wycazik moved to the bed and sat upon the corner of it. “But surely this is a spiritual dream, the call of God coming to you in sleep. He’s calling you back to your faith, back to the duties of your office.”

Brendan shook his head. “No. There was no religious quality to the dream, no sense of a divine presence. It was a different kind of awe that filled me, a joy unlike the joy I knew in Christ. I woke up four times during the night, and each time I woke, the rings were on my hands. And each time that I fell back to sleep, I dropped into the same dream again. Something very strange and important is happening, Father, and I’m a part of it; but whatever it is, it’s not anything that my education, experiences, or previous beliefs have prepared me for.”

Father Wycazik wondered if the call that had come to Brendan in the dream had been from Satan instead of God. Perhaps the devil, aware that a priest’s soul was in jeopardy, had dressed his hateful form in this deceptively attractive golden light, the better to lead the curate from the righteous path.

Still firmly determined to bring his curate back into the fold, but temporarily
out of winning strategies, Stefan Wycazik decided to call a truce. He said, “So…what now? You aren’t ready to put on your Roman collar and resume your duties, as I thought you’d be by now. Do you want me to contact Lee Kellog, the Illinois Provincial, and ask him to authorize psychiatric counseling?”

Brendan smiled. “No. That doesn’t appeal to me anymore. I don’t believe it’d do any good. What I’d like to do—if it’s all right with you, Father—is move back into my room in the rectory and wait this out, see what happens. Of course, as I remain a fallen-away priest, I can’t hear confessions or say Mass. But while I’m waiting to see what happens, I could do some cooking, help you catch up on the filing.”

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 discovery—or rediscovery—of 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 moon-call. 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 moon-call 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, Dominick, Ginger, Faye, Ernie, the young priest, the others, Interstate 80, the Tranquility Motel, oh, God, the motel, and oh, God, the moon!