Strangers (73 page)

Dom and Brendan had lost control. And because they had never known exactly how they had established control in the first place, they did not know how to regain it.

In a blink, the celebratory mood changed to panic. The onlookers scrambled for shelter under the tables, acutely aware that the levitated chairs—rattling ominously against the ceiling—were potentially far more dangerous missiles than the salt and pepper shakers. The noise awakened Marcie. She sat up in the booth where she had been sleeping, crying now and calling for her mother. Jorja pulled the girl off the booth and scrambled under one of the tables with her, hugging her close, and everyone was out of the line of fire except Brendan and Dom.

Dom felt as if this psychic power was a live grenade that had been wired irremovably to his hand.

Overhead, three or four more shakers lost momentum and came down like bullets. The dozen levitated chairs began to bounce against the ceiling more aggressively, shedding small pieces of themselves.

Dom didn’t know if he should dive for cover or attempt to regain control. He looked at Brendan, who was equally paralyzed.

Overhead, the three remaining wagon-wheel lights swayed wildly on their chains, causing goblin shadows to leap across the room.

The battering chairs gouged out small chunks of the ceiling.

A salt shaker dropped in front of Dom, impacting like a tiny meteorite against the table. The glass was too thick to shatter, but the small jar cracked into three or four pieces, flinging up what salt it still contained, and Dom flinched from the white spray.

Remembering the spinning carousel of paper moons in Lomack’s house six days ago, Dom raised both hands toward the rattling chairs and whirling shakers. Clenching his hands into fists, shutting the red-ring stigmata out of sight, he said, “Stop it. Stop it now.
Stop it
!”

Overhead, the chairs ceased vibrating. The salt and pepper shakers halted in midwhirl and hung motionless in the air.

For a second or two, the diner was preternaturally silent.

Then the twelve chairs and the last of the shakers dropped straight down, bouncing off tables and other chairs that had never taken flight. When everything at last came to rest in tangled rubble, Dom and Brendan were as unscathed as those who had taken refuge under the tables. Dom blinked at the priest, and around them all was graveyard-still. This moment of silence was longer than the first. It seemed as if time had stopped, until Marcie’s thin whimpering and her mother’s murmured assurances started the engines of reality purring again, drawing the others from their places of shelter.

Ernie was still massaging his shoulder, where he had been hit by a salt shaker, but he was not seriously hurt. No one else was injured, though everyone was shaken.

Dom saw the way they were looking at him and Brendan. Warily. Just as he had figured they would look at him if he proved to have the power. Just the way he had dreaded being looked at. Damn.

Ginger seemed to be the only one who was not put off by his new status. She enthusiastically embraced Dom and said, “What matters is that you’ve got it. You’ve got it, and eventually you can learn to use it, and that’s wonderful.”

“I’m not so sure,” Dom said, looking at the broken chairs, fallen lighting fixtures. Jack Twist was brushing salt and dry-wall dust off his clothes. Jorja was still comforting her frightened child. Faye and Sandy were picking splinters and other bits of debris out of their hair, and Ned was pondering the danger of the live wires dangling from the ceiling where the chandelier had torn loose. Dom said, “Ginger, even when I was using the power, I didn’t know how I was doing it. And when it ran wild…I didn’t know how to stop it.”

“But you did stop it,” she said. She kept one arm around his waist as if she knew—God bless her—that he needed the reassurance of human contact. “You
did
stop it, Dom.”

“Maybe next time I won’t be able.” He realized he was shivering. “Look at this mess. My God, Ginger, someone could’ve been badly hurt.”

“No one was.”

“Someone could have been killed. Next time—”

“It’ll be better,” she said.

Brendan Cronin came around the long table. “He’ll change his mind, Ginger. Give him time. I know
I’m
going to try again. Alone, next time. In a couple of days, when I’ve had time to think it through, I’ll go out somewhere in an open field, away from people, where no one can be hurt except me, and I’ll give it another try. I think it’s going to be difficult
to control the…energy. It’s going to take a lot of time, a lot of work, maybe years. But I’ll explore, practice. And so will Dom. He’ll realize as much when he’s had a couple of minutes to think about it.”

Dom shook his head. “I don’t want this. I don’t want to be so different from other people.”

“But now you are,” Brendan said. “We both are.”

“That’s damn fatalistic.”

Brendan smiled. “Though I’m having a crisis of faith, I’m still a priest, so I believe in predestination, fate. That’s an article of faith. But we priests are a clever bunch, so we can be fatalistic and believe in free will at the same time!
Both
are articles of faith.” For the priest, the psychological effects of these events were far different from the fear raised in Dom. As he talked, he repeatedly rose onto his toes as if he were nearly buoyant enough to float away.

At a loss to understand the priest’s good humor, Dom changed the subject. “Well, Ginger, if we’ve proved half of your crazy theory, at least we’ve disproved the other half.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“In the midst of all that…uproar,” Dom said, gesturing toward the battered ceiling, “when I saw the rings appear on my hands again, I decided the psychic power wasn’t a side-effect of any strange viral infection. I know the source of it is something else, something even stranger, though I don’t know what it may be.”

“Oh? Well, which is the case?” she asked. “Have you merely decided, or do you really know?”

“I know,” Dom said. “Deep inside, I know.”

“Oh, yes, me too,” Brendan said happily, as Ernie and Faye and the others gathered around. “You were correct, Ginger, when you suggested the power was in Dom and me. And it’s been in us since that July night, like you said. However, you’re not right about the method by which we acquired the gift. Like Dom said…in the middle of all the chaos, I sensed that biological contamination wasn’t the right explanation. I haven’t the foggiest notion what the answer is, but we can rule out that part of your theory.”

Now Dom understood why Brendan was in such good spirits in spite of the frightening exhibition in which they’d just participated. Though he professed to see no religious aspect to recent events, in his heart of hearts, the priest had retained hope that the miraculous cures and apparitional lights were of divine origin. He had been depressed by the dismayingly secular thought that the gift could have been bestowed on him not by his Lord but simply as the chance side-effect of an exotic infection, by the unwitting office of a mindless virus—and a
man-made
virus, as well. He was relieved to be able to dismiss that possibility. His high spirits and
good humor, even amidst the destruction of the diner, arose from the fact that a divine Presence was once again, for Brendan, at least a viable—if still unlikely—explanation.

Dom wished he, too, could find courage and strength in the notion that their troubles were part of a divine scheme. But at the moment, he believed only in danger and death, twin juggernauts that he sensed bearing down on him. The personality changes that had occurred in him during his move from Portland to Mountainview were laughably minor in comparison to the changes that had begun working in him tonight, with the discovery of this unwanted power. He almost felt as if the power was
alive
in him, a parasite that in time would eat away everything that had been Dominick Corvaisis and, having assumed his identity, would stalk the world in his body, masquerading as human.

Crazy.

Nevertheless, he was worried and scared.

He looked at each of the others who were gathered around him. Some met his eyes for a moment, then quickly looked away, just as one might hesitate to meet the gaze of a dangerous—or intimidating—man. Others—most notably Jack Twist, Ernie, and Jorja—met his eyes forthrightly, but were incapable of concealing the uneasiness and even apprehension with which they now regarded him. Only Ginger and Brendan seemed to have suffered no change in their attitude toward him.

“Well,” Jack said, breaking the spell, “we should call it a night, I guess. We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Ginger said, “we’ll have cleared up even more of these mysteries. We’re making progress every day.”

“Tomorrow,” Brendan said softly, happily, “will be a day of great revelation. I feel it somehow.”

Tomorrow, Dom thought, we might all be dead. Or wish we were.

•

Colonel Leland Falkirk still had a splitting headache. With his new talent for introspection—acquired gradually since his involvement in the emotionally and intellectually shattering events of two summers ago—he was able to see that, on one level, he was actually glad that the aspirin had been ineffective. He thrived on the headache in the same way he thrived on other kinds of pain, drawing a perverse strength and energy from the relentless throbbing in his brow and temples.

Lieutenant Horner had gone. Leland was alone once more in his temporary, windowless office beneath the testing grounds of Shenkfield, but he was no longer waiting for the call from Chicago. It had come soon after Horner departed, and the news had been all bad.

The siege at Calvin Sharkle’s house in Evanston, which had begun earlier today, was still under way, and that volatile situation would probably not be brought to an end within the next twelve hours. If possible, the colonel did not want to commit his men to another closure of I-80 and another quarantine of the Tranquility Motel until he could be certain the operation would not be compromised by revelations that Sharkle might make either to Illinois authorities or to the news media. Delay made Leland nervous, especially now that the witnesses at the motel were focused on Thunder Hill and were planning their moves beyond the reach of rifle microphones and infinity transmitters. He figured he could afford to wait, at most, one more day. However, if the dangerous standoff in Illinois was still under way by sunset tomorrow, he would give the order to move on the Tranquility in spite of the risks.

The other news from Chicago was that operatives had discreetly investigated Emmeline Halbourg and Winton Tolk and had found reasons to believe their amazing recoveries could not be adequately explained by current medical knowledge. And a reconstruction of Father Stefan Wycazik’s activities on Christmas Day—including visits to Halbourg and Tolk, and a stop at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory to consult a ballistics expert—confirmed that the priest had been convinced that his curate, Brendan Cronin, had been responsible for those miraculous cures.

Leland had first become aware of Cronin’s healing powers just yesterday, Sunday, when he had monitored a telephone call between Dominick Corvaisis at the Tranquility and Father Wycazik in Chicago. That conversation would have been a real shocker if the events of Saturday night had not prepared him for the unexpected.

Saturday night, when Corvaisis had arrived at the Tranquility, Leland Falkirk and his surveillance experts had monitored the first conversations between the Blocks and the writer with growing disbelief. The outlandish tale of moon photographs animated by a poltergeist in Lomack’s Reno house had sounded like the product of a fevered mind no longer able to distinguish between fiction and reality.

Later, however, after Corvaisis and the Blocks had eaten dinner at the Grille, the writer had attempted to relive the minutes just before the trouble had started on the night of July 6. What happened then was astonishing, confirmed both by the hidden surveillance team watching the Tranquility from a point south of the interstate and by the infinity transmitter tap on the diner’s pay phone. Everything in the Grille had begun to shake, and a strange rumble had filled the place, then an eerie electronic ululation, culminating in the implosion of all the windows.

These phenomena came as a total—and nasty—surprise to Leland and to everyone involved in the cover-up, especially the scientists, who
were electrified. The following day’s discovery of Cronin’s healing power added voltage to the excitement. At first, these developments seemed inexplicable. But after only a little thought, Leland arrived at an explanation that made his blood cold. The scientists had come to similar conclusions. Some of them were as scared as Leland was.

Suddenly, no one knew what to expect. Anything might happen now.

We believed we were in control of the situation that night in July, Leland thought somberly, but perhaps it had escalated beyond our control even before we arrived on the scene.

The single consolation was that, thus far, only Corvaisis and the priest appeared to be…infected. Maybe “infected” wasn’t exactly the right word. Maybe “possessed” was better. Or maybe there wasn’t a word for what had happened to them, because what had happened to them had never happened to anyone else in history, so a specific word for it had not heretofore been required.

Even if the siege at Sharkle’s house ended tomorrow, even if that possibility of media exposure was eliminated, Leland would not be able to strike at the group at the motel with full confidence. Corvaisis and Cronin—and perhaps the others—might be more difficult to apprehend and incarcerate than they’d been two summers ago. If Corvaisis and Cronin weren’t entirely themselves anymore, if they were now someone else—or
something
else—dealing with them might prove downright impossible.

Leland’s headache was worse.

Feed
on it, he told himself, getting up from the desk. Feed on the pain. You’ve been doing that for years, you dumb son of a bitch, so you can feed on it for another day or two, until you’ve dealt with this mess or until you’re dead, whichever comes first.