Strangers (8 page)

But Jan Pretre went over to Alvin, sat down next to him, and spent twenty minutes talking with him, an arm draped over the fat boy’s shoulders. Michael could only hear a phrase now and then: “It’s okay. Don’t you
worry.
We’re friends.” Then Jan left and Alvin was grinning, scratching the lumpy birthmark over his ear.

It was not until Sunday that Michael had his talk with Jan Pretre.

It had been easy for Michael to slip away from the church service in Big Hall. There were a lot of kids, so the counselors couldn’t watch everyone. Michael knew how not to be noticed.

Now he was lying down, hands folded under his neck. On the ceiling, in the comer, a spider had nearly completed a web and was shuffling from strand to strand. If Michael watched patiently, he might see a fly fall into the
trap,
see the struggle and the slow, certain conclusion.

Then Michael heard the screen door and the hush and scrape of sneakers. Alongside the bunk, Jan Pretre stood over him.

Michael sat up and scooted back, his spine curved to the wall. “Hi! I was just sitting here and thinking, you know…”

“ Thinking? Shouldn’t you be with the other good boys in Big Hall, singing praise to Him from
Whom
all blessings flow?”

“Sure,” Michael nodded. “I guess so…”

“Oh yes,” Jan Pretre said. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you? That’s what you want
them
to think.”

Michael felt a fluttery palpitation of his heart. He looked at Jan Pretre, wondering just who he was seeing. Then Michael said, “So I guess I better go on over to Big Hall…”

Jan’s heavy hand on his shoulder froze Michael, stopped his flow of words.

“No, you stay here, Michael,” Jan said quietly. “And don’t lie to me. Don’t. You don’t have to, you know.”

Then Jan sat down, turned his head, fixing his serious blue eyes on him. The corner of Jan’s mouth rose but he was not smiling. “You said you were thinking, Michael. What is it you think about?”

Warily, Michael replied, “Oh, you know… Just stuff, I guess.”

“Like who’s going to win the World Series? Maybe a cute girl you’d like to take to the junior high sock hop? Whether a Chevy is better than a Ford?”

“Sure,” Michael said. “Things like that.”

Jan chuckled. “That’s a fucking lie and I told you not to lie to me.”

Michael did not even see it coming. Jan’s slap was an explosion of heat on his cheek and a roar in his ear. He nearly tumbled off the bed, but Jan gripped his upper arm savagely and hauled him back up. He saw Jan through a kaleidoscope of tears.

“What you really think about is how hard it is to fool them day after day, to pretend you’re like they are.”

“Huh?” Michael put on the stupid, big-eyed, mouth hanging face he frequently used at school. “I don’t get you.”

Jan sighed. “You can bullshit them, Michael, but not me. Should I hit you again?”

Michael cowered and waited, but Jan did not slap him. The counselor shifted his gaze to look through the screened window toward Big Hall. “Amazing Grace,” poured from the building, spreading over the camp like sluggish syrup, youthful voices ponderous and discordant.

“They’re making noise so God will watch over them, protect them from the terrors of this universe He created. They live their foolish, frightened lives, praying that God, or the President, or the FBI won’t let anything hurt them. They’re nothing but shit, Michael, animated shit on legs, and they don’t mean any more than shit.”

Jan turned his head. His eyes caught Michael and held him. “You hate them, you hate their fucking guts and you want them dead, all those whimpering, pathetic, nothing people.”

Jan dropped his voice to a whisper. “Michael, you and I, we are the same. Do you understand now?”

Daring to hope, Michael wanted to laugh or even to cry. So long alone, surrounded always by people whom he resembled but with whom he had no more in common than he did an alien from outer space… And now Jan Pretre was telling him…

Wasn’t he?”

He had to be sure, and he had to be cautious. Michael said, “Are you saying we’re friends?”

Jan said, “You don’t want friends, Michael. You don’t need friends.
Allies,
Michael, different than they are, standing outside and above their moronic notions of right and wrong. We are Strangers…”

“Strangers,” Michael said. Saying the word brought him a feeling of both excitement and contentment.
A Stranger—
that
was
what he had always felt himself to be!

“And we are not alone, Michael,” Jan said.

Michael’s heart pounded, speaking in code within his blood.

“There are others, more now than there ‘ever have been. Oh, we’ll hide while we must. We’ll pretend. But the wheel is turning.
And then, our time, the Time of The Strangers.
Our Time!”

“Yes,” Michael said, and he realized he was not using the voice of the one he pretended to be; this was his true voice.

He had a question. “How did you know, Jan?”

Jan barked a quick laugh. “I have eyes,” he said. “I can see.”

Then Jan stood up. “We’ll talk again, Michael. I’ll tell you more, teach you.” He grinned and tousled Michael’s hair. “For now, just you be a good boy, right?”

When Jan left, Michael stretched out on his back. He studied the intricate spider web overhead. He did not see any flies but the flies would come. Flies
were created to be killed
by spiders. The weak and the stupid were always the prey of the strong and the smart…
Our prey. We are Strangers…

And now, twenty-three years later, and The Time of The Strangers was nearer, foreshadowed in newspaper headlines and despairing sociological studies.

Michael Louden anticipated the promised Time with the voracious joy of a shark about to feed, felt it great within him as he parked the LTD in his numbered slot in Superior Chemical Company’s lot.

He took the elevator to Vern Engelking’s office, the office of his ally, his boss, a Stranger.

The green glowing readout of the digital clock radio clicked from 9:30 to 9:31. Lying on his bed in his clothes—he hadn’t bothered to undress last night before passing out—Brad Zeller was
wide awake
. He had been since seven, not moving, eyes open, wondering occasionally where the room’s darkness left off and the ceiling began. He knew the ache in his head would continue until he drank it away.

Dusty’s habit was to wake Brad with a whine and a paw at seven o’clock. That had not happened today.

There was a click-jump at 9:32. Brad Zeller said aloud, “I can’t just lie here all day, can I” No one answered him. It took another five minutes, but he groaned himself into motion and went to the bathroom.

Then, in the kitchen, he drew the tan drapes of the sliding glass patio doors. The glaring sunlight in the back yard increased the intensity of his headache. He squinted, trying to believe the feeling that, any second, Dusty would come around the side of the
house,
press his nose to the window, wanting to come in.

No, that was goddamned stupid. Dusty was gone; he felt that. The cop he’d spoken to when he’d telephoned last night was an okay guy, telling him that most dogs that were lost in Park Estates usually got found, but Brad considered that only official optimism.

Brad decided he ought to eat something. Sure, a hearty breakfast to get the day going—going nowhere, as usual. He thought about a morning eye-opener, but rejected it. Okay, he drank, did some heavy juicing in fact, but that didn’t mean he was a
booze-hound
. Hell, he never touched anything until noon, and then, only beer until evening. Liquor helped him get by—and who didn’t need something in this screwed up day and age?

Brad started a pot of coffee and put cornflakes in a bowl. He poured milk on the cereal, but, sitting at the table, he got a warning from his nose when he raised the spoon; the milk had soured. He dumped the mess down the garbage disposal, spilled the remainder of the milk carton after it, and washed it down with cold water.

He opened the cabinet beneath the sink to throw away the carton. The plastic bag in the trash bucket was nearly full. He stuffed the carton in, squeezed it down, and yanked the white plastic liner from the container.

Carrying the tied trash bag, he stepped onto the patio in his bare feet. The humid heat triggered a wave of nausea. He walked toward the back of his lot where he kept the garbage.

From twenty feet away, he heard the high-pitched drone of the flies. There was a light wind at his back, so the odor did not come to him until he’d gone a bit farther.

He’d never smelled anything quite like it, yet he knew what it was, somehow, knew what it had to be. The smell was of death, death and the aftermath of death as heat speeded the process of putrefaction.

Brad shuffled into the stink. He was close enough now to see—
and he had seen.
The
black and white fur, the precise shape of paw pads. The cover of the garbage can was slightly raised. Between the lid and the can, the dog’s rear leg projected stiffly.

The flies were brazen, clinging to the top of the can when he lifted it; their green-blue bodies were as bright as Depression glass.

If it weren’t for the smell, Brad would have thought the moment unreal.

Dusty lay on mounds of garbage inside the container. The dog’s head was craned impossibly far back as though he’d been frozen while trying to howl the moon out of the sky. Dusty’s tongue protruded, black and swollen.

Brad dropped the bag of kitchen trash. It split open. What a mess, Brad thought; now I’ll have to pick that all up.

Then he thought: Dusty is dead and for more than a minute, that was all he could think.

Then he turned and staggered to the house. He had a quick shot of Imperial, felt its promise and needed more and had another.

He telephoned the Park Estates Police. “I found my dog, Dusty,” he said. “He’s dead.” He felt the sweat like ice on his forehead, the flash of tears that were also so cold. “He’s dead and someone…someone killed him.”

— | — | —

FIVE

SOMETHING WAS going to happen…something wrong. Claire Wynkoop knew that, felt it now as she had all day. Unable to relax, she sat stiffly on the bentwood rocker on the screened-in back porch and tried to ignore the promise of the premonition that teased her mind.

On her lap lay an open book,
I See Tomorrow’s Forevers,
a choice of reading matter that she considered ironically appropriate: an “as told to” autobiography of an alleged psychic. This particular self-proclaimed prophet received her impressions of the future by gazing into a glass doorknob.

Thirty atrociously written pages had convinced Claire Wynkoop, the town of Belford’s librarian, that
Tomorrow’s Forevers
was “Today’s Tripe,” definitely not a book for library purchase; the review copy would be returned. Claire considered most of the “studies” of the paranormal to be sheer nonsense, or worse, malicious frauds to generate new fears for the already fearful.

Claire closed the book. Just above the nape of her neck was a pulsing ball of tension and, in the center of her skull, a feeling she could describe only as “an itch impossible to scratch.” There was, too, the vibrato of a single, high-pitched note ringing in her ears, the constant sound that had been amplified in the
day-long
stillness of the library.

Symptoms of her hypertension or perhaps an adverse reaction to the new prescriptions meant to lower her blood pressure? She could not deceive herself. All the premonitions she’d experienced in her sixty years—
Not that many but every one was one
too
many
!—
had been heralded by her feeling this way, the way she did now.