Strangers (46 page)

He was astonished when the tumult was cut off with the suddenness of a symphony orchestra terminating a thunderous crescendo on one last bone-shaking 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 plucked 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 life-force 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 palms-up 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 two-stroke rhythm of the heart with an extra beat:
LUB-DUB-dub…LUB-DUB-dub…LUB-DUB-dub…

Bewildered and still half asleep, Stefan switched on the lamp, squinted in the blaze of light, and looked at his alarm clock. It was two-oh-seven, Thursday morning, certainly not a reasonable hour for a parade.

LUB-DUB-dub…LUB-DUB-dub…

After each triad of thumps, there was a three-second pause, then a set of beats identical to all the others, then another three-second 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 piston-stroke 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 bare-limbed 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 triple-thud 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 muffled in spite of its loudness—as 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.

In the same instant, Father Wycazik and Father Gerrano perceived the locus of the noise: Brendan Cronin’s room. They moved swiftly to that door, which was directly across the hall from Father Gerrano.

Incredibly, Brendan was fast asleep. In spite of the thunderous explosions that made Father Wycazik flash back to the mortar fire of Vietnam, Brendan dreamed on, untroubled. In fact, in the pulsing light, there seemed to be a vague smile tugging at the young priest’s lips.

The windows rattled. Drapery hooks clicked against the rods to which they were attached. On the dresser, a hairbrush bounced up and down, and several coins clinked together, and Brendan’s breviary slid first to the left and then to the right. On the wall above the bed, a crucifix jiggled wildly under the picture hook from which it was hung.

Father Gerrano shouted, but Stefan could not hear what the curate said, for now there were no pauses between muffled detonations. With each tripartite beat, Father Wycazik retreated further from his initial mental image of a huge drum and became increasingly convinced that what he was hearing was the throbbing of some enormous and immeasurably powerful machine. But it seemed as if the sound came from all sides, as if the machinery was hidden within the walls of the house itself, laboring at some mysterious and unknowable task.

As the breviary finally slid off the dresser and the coins began to spill to the floor, Father Gerrano backed to the doorway and stood there wide-eyed, as if he might flee.

But Stefan went to the bed, bent over the dozing priest, and shouted his name. When that had no effect, he grabbed Brendan by the shoulders and shook him.

The auburn-haired curate blinked and opened his eyes.

The hammering stopped abruptly.

The sudden cessation of thunderous noise jolted Father Wycazik as badly as the first boom that had shattered his sleep. He let go of Brendan and looked around the room, disbelieving.

“I was so close,” Brendan said dreamily. “I wish you hadn’t wakened me. I was so close.”

Stefan pulled aside the covers, took hold of the curate’s hands, and turned them palms-up. There was an angry red ring in each palm. Stefan stared at them in fascination, for this was the first time that he had seen the stigmata.

What in God’s name is this all about? he wondered.

Breathing hard, Father Gerrano approached the bed. Staring at the rings, he said, “What’re those from?”

Ignoring the question, Father Wycazik spoke to Brendan: “What was that sound? Where did it come from?”

“Calling,” Brendan said in a voice still thick with sleep—and with a soft, excited pleasure. “Calling me back.”

“What was calling you?” Stefan demanded.

Brendan blinked, sat up, and leaned against the headboard. His eyes had been out of focus. Now his gaze cleared, and he really looked at Father Wycazik for the first time. “What happened? You heard it, too?”

“Somehow, yes,” Stefan said. “It shook the whole house. Amazing. What was it, Brendan?”

“A call. It was calling me, and I was following the call.”

“But what was calling you?”

“I…I don’t know. Something. Calling me back…”

“Back where?”

Brendan frowned. “Back into the light. The golden light of the dream I told you about.”

“What’s this all about?” Father Gerrano persisted. His voice was shaky, for he was not as accustomed to the miraculous as were his rector and his fellow curate. “Will somebody clue me in?”

The other priests continued to ignore him.

To Brendan, Stefan said, “This golden light…what is it? Could it have been God calling you back to His fold?”

“No,” Brendan said. “Just…something. Calling me back. Next time, maybe I’ll get a better look at it.”

Father Wycazik sat on the edge of the bed. “You think this will happen again? You think it’ll keep calling to you?”

“Yes,” Brendan said. “Oh, yes.”

It was Thursday, January 9.

7

Las Vegas, Nevada

Friday afternoon, Jorja Monatella was at the casino, working, when she learned that her ex-husband, Alan Rykoff, had killed himself.

The news came by way of an emergency telephone call from Pepper
Carrafield, the hooker with whom Alan had been living. Jorja took the call on one of the phones in the blackjack pit, cupping a hand over one ear to block out the roar of voices, the click and snap of cards being dealt and shuffled, the ringing of slot machines. When she heard that Alan was dead, she was shocked and sickened, but she felt no grief. By his own selfish and cruel behavior, Alan had ensured she would have no reason to grieve for him. Pity was the only emotion she could summon.

“He shot himself this morning, two hours ago,” Pepper elaborated. “The police are here now. You’ve got to come.”

“The police want to see me?” Jorja said. “But why?”

“No, no. The police don’t want to see you. You got to come and clean his stuff out. I want his stuff out of here as soon as possible.”

“But I don’t want his things,” Jorja said.

“It’s still your job, whether you want them or not.”

“Miss Carrafield, it was a bitter divorce. I neither want nor—”

“He had a will drawn up last week. He named you executor, so you got to come. I want his stuff out of here
now.
It’s your job.”

•

Alan had lived with Pepper Carrafield in a high-rise condominium, a ritzy place called The Pinnacle, on Flamingo Road, where the call-girl owned an apartment. It was a fifteen-story white concrete monolith with bronze windows. Surrounded by undeveloped desert land, it appeared to be even taller than it was. And because it stood alone, it looked oddly like a monument, the world’s largest, swankiest tombstone. The grounds were lushly planted with sprinkler-tended lawns and flowerbeds, but a few dry tumbleweeds had blown in from the bordering plots of sand and scrub. The chill and desolate wind which stirred the tumbleweeds also fluted hollowly under the condominium’s portico.

Two police cars and a morgue wagon stood in front of the building, but no cops were in the lobby: just a young woman on a mauve sofa near the elevators, forty feet away; and at a desk near the entrance, a man in gray slacks and blue blazer, who was security guard and doorman. The travertine marble floor, crystal chandeliers, oriental carpet, Henredon sofas and chairs, and brass elevator doors contributed to a decor that strained too hard to convey class—but conveyed it nonetheless.

As Jorja asked the doorman to announce her, the young woman on the sofa rose and said, “Mrs. Rykoff, I’m Pepper Carrafield. Er…I think you use your maiden name now.”

“Monatella,” Jorja said.

Like the building in which she lived, Pepper strained for Fifth Avenue class, but her efforts were less successful than those of the interior designers
who had worked on The Pinnacle. Her blond hair had been cut in an excessively shaggy carefree style that hookers preferred, perhaps because when you spent your workday in a series of beds, shaggy hair required less grooming. She wore a purple silk blouse that might have been a Halston, but she’d left too many buttons open, revealing a daring amount of cleavage. Her gray slacks were well tailored but too tight. She wore a Cartier watch encrusted with diamonds, but the elegant effect of the watch was spoiled by her indulgence in flashy diamond rings: She wore four of them.

“I couldn’t bear to stay upstairs in the apartment,” Pepper said, motioning for Jorja to join her on the sofa. “I’m not going back up there until they’ve taken the body away.” She shivered. “We can talk right here, just so we keep our voices low.” She nodded toward the doorman at the desk. “But if there’s going to be a scene, I’ll just get up and walk away. You understand? People here don’t know what I do for a living. I intend to keep it that way. I never do business out of my home. I’m strictly out-call.” Her gray-green eyes were flat.

Jorja stared coldly at her. “If you think I’m a scorned, suffering wife, you can relax, Miss Carrafield. Anything I ever felt for Alan is gone now. Even knowing he’s dead, I feel nothing. Nothing much. I’m not proud of it. I was in love with him once, and we created a lovely child together. I should feel
something,
and I’m ashamed that I don’t. But I’m definitely not going to cause a scene.”

“Great,” Pepper said, genuinely pleased, so involved with herself and her own concerns that she was oblivious of the domestic tragedy Jorja had just described. “There’re a lot of high-class people live here, you know. When they hear my boyfriend killed himself, they’re going to be standoffish for a long time. These kind of people don’t like messy scenes. And if they found out what I do for a living…well, there’d be no way I’d ever fit in here again. You know? I’d have to move, and I sure don’t want to. No way, honey. I like it here a lot.”

Jorja looked at Pepper’s ostentatiously diamond-encumbered hands, looked at her plunging neckline, looked into her avaricious eyes, and said, “What do you suppose they think you are—an heiress?”