Read Strangers for Free Online Page B

rank sweat.
    Several lights had been burning in the apartment during the day, but a few were unlit. He hurried from room to room, clicking on every lamp and ceiling fixture. The drapes and shades were all drawn tight from his previous nocturnal ordeal, so he had not a single glimpse of the blackness beyond the windows.
    When he had regained control of himself, he phoned the Tranquility Grille and told Sandy that he was not feeling well, that he had shut down early. He asked them to keep the day’s receipts until tomorrow morning rather than bother him tonight when they closed the restaurant.
    Sickened by his pungent perspiration odor—not so much by the smellitself as by the total loss of control that the smell represented—Ernie showered. After he had toweled himself dry, he put on fresh underwear, belted himself into a thick warm robe, and stepped into slippers.
    Heretofore, in spite of his bewilderingly unfocused apprehension, he had been able to sleep in a dark room, though not without anxiety, and not without the aid of a couple of beers. Then, two nights ago, with Faye in Wisconsin, when he was alone, he was able to nod off only with the constant companionship of the nightstand lamp. He knew he would need that luminous comfort tonight, as well.
    And when Faye returned on Tuesday? Would he be able to go back to sleeping without a light?
    What if Faye turned off the lights…and he started screaming like a badly frightened child?
    The thought of that impending humiliation made him grind his teeth with anger and drove him to the nearest window.
    He put one beefy hand on the tightly drawn drapes. Hesitated. His heart did an imitation of muffled machine-gun fire.
    He had always been strong for Faye, a rock on which she could depend. That was what a man was supposed to be: a rock. He must not let Faye down. He had to overcome this bizarre affliction before she returned from Wisconsin.
    His mouth went dry and a chill returned when he thought about what lay beyond the now-concealed glass, but he knew the only way to beat this thing was to confront it. That was the lesson life had taught him: be bold, confront the enemy, engage in battle. That philosophy of action had always worked for him. It would work again. This window looked out from the back of the motel, across the vast meadows and hills of the uninhabited uplands, and the only light out there was what fell from the stars. He must pull the drapes aside, come face to face with that tenebrous landscape, stand fast, endure it. Confrontation would be a purgative, flushing the poison from his system.
    Ernie pulled open the drapes. He peered out at the night and told himself that this perfect blackness was not so bad—deep and pure, vast and cold, but not malevolent, and in no way a personal threat.
    However, as he watched, unmoving and unmovable, portions of the darkness seemed to…well, to shift, to
coalesce,
forming into not quite visible but nonetheless solid shapes, lumps of pulsing and denser blackness within the greater blackness, lurking phantoms that at any moment might launch themselves toward the fragile window.
    He clenched his jaws, put his forehead against the ice-cold glass.
    The Nevada barrens, a huge emptiness to begin with, now seemed to expand even farther. He could not see the night-cloaked mountains, buthe sensed that they were magically receding, that the plains between him and the mountains were growing larger, extending outward hundreds of miles, thousands, expanding swiftly toward infinity, until suddenly he was at the center of a void so immense that it defied description. On all sides of him, there was emptiness and lightlessness beyond man’s ability to measure, beyond the limits of his own feeble imagination, a terrible emptiness, to the left and right, front and back, above and below, and suddenly he could not
breathe.
    This was considerably worse than anything he had known before. A deeper-reaching fear. Profound. Shocking in its power. And