Strangers (77 page)

Startled, Dom turned and looked through the rear window of the Cherokee. Less than a hundred yards behind was a pickup truck, an all-terrain job, loftily perched on tires twice as wide and more than twice as high as ordinary tires. Spotlights, currently unlit, were mounted on the roof, and a snow-plow, currently raised off the road, was fitted to the front. Although Dom was certain that private citizens living in the mountains might own similar trucks, this one had the look of a military vehicle. The windshield was tinted, the driver unrevealed.

He said, “You sure they’re following us? When did they show up?”

Piloting the Cherokee up the county road, Ernie said, “I noticed them about half a mile after we left the motel. When we slow down, they slow down, too. When we speed up, so do they.”

“You think there’s going to be trouble?”

“There will be if they ask for it. They’re probably only Army pussies,” Ernie said. He grinned.

Dom laughed. “Don’t get me in a war just to prove Leathernecks are tougher than GIs. I’ll happily accept your word for it.”

The road became steeper. The somber ashen sky grew lower. The dark trees drew closer on both sides. The pickup stayed behind them.

•

Mrs. Halbourg, Emmy’s mother, answered the door, letting a puff of warm air out of the house into the frigid Chicago morning.

Father Wycazik said, “Sorry to come unannounced like this, but the most extraordinary thing is happening, and I had to find out if Emmy—”

He stopped in midsentence when he realized that Mrs. Halbourg was in terrible distress. Her eyes were wide with shock—with fear, too.

Before he could ask what was wrong, she said, “My God, it’s you, Father. From the hospital, I remember. But how did you know to come? We haven’t called anyone yet. How’d you know to come?”

“What’s happened?”

Rather than answer, she took him by the arm, ushered him inside, slammed the door, and hurried him upstairs. “This way. Quickly.”

Coming directly from the Mendozas’ apartment Uptown, he expected to find something odd at the Halbourg place, but not this state of crisis. When they reached the second-floor hallway, Mr. Halbourg was there with one of Emmy’s older sisters. They were standing halfway down the hall at an open door, staring into a room at something that seemed equally to attract and repel them. In the room, something thumped, rattled, then thumped twice again, followed by a musical burst of girlish laughter.

Mr. Halbourg turned, a ghastly expression on his face, and blinked in
surprise at Stefan. “Father, thank God you’re here, we didn’t know what to do, didn’t want to make complete fools of ourselves by calling for help and then maybe nothing’s happening when help gets here, you know. But now you’ve come, so it’s settled, and I’m relieved.”

Stefan looked warily through the open doorway and saw the usual accouterments of a bedroom occupied by a girl of ten-going-on-eleven, the changeling age between childhood and adolescence: half a dozen teddy bears; big posters of the current teenage idols, boys utterly unknown to Stefan; a wooden hat rack hung with a collection of exotic chapeaux probably purchased from thrift shops; roller skates; a tape deck; a flute lying in an open case. Emmy’s other sister—in a white sweater, tartan-plaid skirt, and kneesocks—was standing a few feet inside the room, pale and half-paralyzed. Emmy was standing up in bed, pajama-clad, looking even healthier than on Christmas Day. She was hugging a pillow, grinning at the same astonishing performance—a poltergeist at play—that riveted her sister and frightened the rest of her family.

As Father Wycazik stepped into the room, Emmy laughed delightedly at the antics of two small teddy bears waltzing in midair. Their movements were nearly as precise and formal as those of real dancers.

But the bears were not the only inanimate objects infused with magical life. The roller skates were not standing still in a corner but were moving about on separate courses, this one past the foot of the bed and then to the closet door, that one to the desk, this one to the window, moving fast, then slow. The hats jiggled on the rack. A Care Bear on a bookshelf bounced up and down.

Stefan went to the foot of the bed, careful to avoid the roller skates, and looked up at Emmy, who still stood on the mattress. “Emmy?”

The girl glanced down at him. “Pudge’s friend! Hello, Father. Isn’t it terrific? Isn’t it wild?”

“Emmy, is this you?” he asked, gesturing at the capering objects.

“Me?” she said, genuinely surprised. “No. Not me.”

But he noticed that the flying-waltzing bears faltered when she turned her attention away from them. They did not drop to the floor, but bobbled and turned and bumped against one another in a clumsy and aimless manner quite different from their previous measured grace.

He also saw indications that the previous phenomena had not all been this harmless. A ceramic lamp had been knocked to the floor and broken. One of the posters was torn. The dresser mirror was cracked.

Seeing the direction of his gaze, Emmy said, “It was scary at first. But it calmed down, and now it’s just…fun. Isn’t it
fun
?”

As she was speaking, the flute rose out of the open carrying case, up and up, until it was about seven feet off the floor, only a few feet
to the left of the floating teddy bears. Out of the corner of her eye, the girl caught a glimpse of the rising instrument. When she turned to look directly at the flute, sweet music began to issue from it, not just random notes but a well-executed tune. Emmy jumped up and down on the bed excitedly. “That’s
‘Annie’s Song’
! I used to play that.”

“You’re playing it now,” Stefan said.

“Oh, no,” she said, still staring at the flute. “My hands got so bad, my knuckle joints, that I had to give up the flute a year ago. I’m cured now, but my hands still aren’t good enough to play.”

Stefan said, “But you aren’t using your hands to play it, Emmy.”

His meaning finally penetrated. She looked down at him. “Me?”

Deprived of her focused attention, the flute produced only a few more poorly executed notes and fell silent. It still hung in the air, but now it bobbled and dipped erratically. Emmy returned her attention to the instrument. It steadied in the air and began to play again.

“Me,” she said wonderingly. She turned to her sister, who was still paralyzed by fear and amazement. “Me,” Emmy said, then looked at her parents, who were standing in the doorway.
“Me!”

Stefan appreciated what the child must be feeling, and his throat was pinched so tightly with emotion that he had difficulty swallowing. A month ago, she’d been a cripple, unable to dress herself, with nothing to look forward to except further deterioration, pain, and death. Now she was not only cured and her damaged bones reknit, but she was also in possession of this spectacular gift.

Father Wycazik wanted to tell her that somehow this gift had been given to her unwittingly by Brendan Cronin, her Pudge, but then he would have to explain where Brendan had gotten
his
gift, and he could not do that. Besides, he hadn’t time even to tell them what he did know. It was nine-fifteen. He should have been in Evanston by now. Time was of the essence, for Stefan was beginning to suspect that he would be catching a flight for Nevada before the day ended. Whatever was happening in Elko County was bound to be even more incredible than what was happening here, and he was determined to be a part of it.

Emmy looked at the floating bears, and they resumed their formal dance once more. She giggled.

Stefan thought about what Winton Tolk had said only a short while ago in the Mendozas’ Uptown apartment:
The power’s still here, still in me. I know…I feel it. And not just…not just the power to heal. There’s more.
Winton had not known what powers he might possess in addition to the healing touch, but Stefan suspected that the policeman was in for some surprises similar to those that had thrown the Halbourg household into turmoil.

“Father, will you do it yourself?” Mr. Halbourg asked from the doorway, where he stood with his wife, his voice sharp with anxiety.

Mrs. Halbourg said, “Please, we want it to be done as soon as possible. Immediately. Can’t you begin at once?”

Baffled, Stefan said, “I’m sorry…but what is it you want done?”

Mr. Halbourg said, “An exorcism, of course!”

Stefan stared at them incredulously, only now fully realizing why they had been in such distress when he had arrived and why they had greeted him with such relief. He laughed. “There won’t be any need for an exorcism. This isn’t Satan at work. Oh, no. My heavens, no!”

From the corner of his eye, Stefan saw movement on the floor. He looked down at a two-foot-high teddy bear that was tottering past him on stiff little stuffed legs.

Winton Tolk had said that he sensed he would need a long time to learn what his powers were and to be able to control them. Either he was wrong or the task was far easier for Emmy than for him. That might be the case. Children were much more adaptable than adults.

Emmy’s parents and her other sister edged into the room, fascinated but wary.

Stefan understood their wariness. All
seemed
well, the power benign. But the situation was so awesome, so profoundly affecting on a primitive level, that even an unfaltering optimist like Stefan Wycazik felt a tingle of fear.

•

After using a pay phone at a Shell service station in Elko to get in touch with Alexander Christophson in Boston, Ginger accompanied Faye to Elroy and Nancy Jamison’s ranch in the Lemoille Valley, twenty miles from Elko. The Jamisons were the Blocks’ friends who had been visiting on the evening of July 6, the summer before last. They had surely been caught up in the unknown events of that night and had been detained at the motel for brainwashing, with everyone else, though they remembered differently, of course. According to their program of false memories, they had been allowed to evacuate the danger zone, taking Ernie and Faye with them. They believed they had returned to their small ranch, where they and the Blocks had passed the next few days. That was also what Faye and Ernie had believed—until recently.

Ginger and Faye were paying a visit to the Jamisons not to inform them of what had actually happened but to determine, as indirectly as possible, if the Jamisons were having troubles of the kind afflicting Ginger, Ernie, Dom, and some of the others. If they were suffering, they would be brought into the mutually supportive community at the motel—the
members of which had come to think of themselves as the “Tranquility family”—and would join the search for answers.

But if the brainwashing had been effective, the Jamisons would not be told anything. To tell the Jamisons would be to endanger them.

Besides, given the urgent strategy developed last night with Jack Twist, if the Jamisons were not already suffering, there was no point wasting a lot of time convincing them that they’d been brainwashed. Time was precious, and every passing hour carried the Tranquility family deeper into danger. Jack believed—and convinced Ginger—that their enemies would soon move against them.

The drive from Elko in the motel’s van was quick and scenic. The picturesque Lemoille Valley—fifteen miles long, four miles wide—began at the foot of the Ruby Mountains. Wheat, barley, and potato farms occupied the lowlands, though the fields were unplanted now, slumbering under scattered patches of snow.

Between the valley floor and the mountains, the higher lands and foothills offered lush pasturage, and that was where the Jamisons had their ranch. At one time, they owned hundreds of acres on which they raised cattle, but eventually they sold off much of their property, which had risen substantially in value, and got out of the livestock business. Now, in their early sixties and retired, they owned about fifty acres in the foothills, employed no ranch hands, and kept only three horses and a few chickens.

As Faye turned off the main valley road onto a lane leading into the highlands, she said, “I think someone’s following us.”

The back doors of the van had no windows, so Ginger looked at the side-mounted mirror. A nondescript sedan was about a hundred feet behind them. “How do you know?”

“Same car’s been back there since the Union 76 in town.”

“Maybe it’s coincidence,” Ginger said.

When they had followed the lane over halfway up the valley wall, they reached the long narrow driveway to the Jamisons’ ranch, which led half a mile back through deep shadows thrown by flanking rows of big piñons. Faye pulled into the driveway and slowed to see what the other car would do. Instead of going past, farther up into the hills, it pulled to a stop and parked along the outer lane, directly across from the entrance to the Jamisons’ property.

In the sideview mirror, Ginger could see that the car was a late-model Plymouth, painted a flat ugly brown-green.

“Obviously a government heap,” Faye said.

“Pretty bold, aren’t they?”

“Well, if they’ve been eavesdropping on us the way Jack says, through
our own telephones, then they know we’re on to them, so maybe they figure there’s no point in playing coy with us.” Faye took her foot off the brake and headed up the driveway.

Watching the unmarked Plymouth dwindle in the side mirror, Ginger said, “Or maybe they’re getting in position to take us into custody. Maybe they’ve put tails on all of us, and maybe they’re just waiting for the order to snatch us all at the same time.”

On the narrow, gravel driveway, the interlacing shadows of the overarching piñons wove a darkness nearly as deep as night.

•

As they drove up the two-lane road through the broad snow-covered meadow toward the massive blast doors, Colonel Falkirk sat in the front passenger’s seat of the Wagoneer, thinking about the catastrophe that would ensue from the revelation of Thunder Hill’s secret.

From a political perspective, this would make the Watergate mess look like a tea party. An unprecedented number of competing government institutions were involved in the cover-up, organizations that often operated in jealous opposition to one another—the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, the United States Army, the Air Force, and others. It was a testament to the degree of potential danger that these groups could work together with nary a hitch and without a single leak in more than eighteen months. But if the cover-up were uncovered, the scandal would extend throughout so much of the government that the faith of the American people in their leaders would be severely shaken. Of course, very few in any of those organizations knew what had happened, no more than six in the FBI, fewer in the CIA; most of their men involved in the cover-up didn’t know
what
they were covering up, which was why there had been no leaks. But the
número uno
of each organization—the Director of the FBI, the Director of the CIA, the Chief of Staff of the Army—was completely in the know. Not to mention the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the Secretary of State. And the President, his closest advisers, the Vice-President. A lot of prominent men might fall from grace if this affair was not kept under lock and key.