world. They had worked on her for three days-Saturday, Sunday, and
Monday-releasing her, with sanitized recollections, on Tuesday.
But, in God's name, who were these omnipotent strangers?
And what had she seen?
2.
Portland, Oregon
Sunday, January 5, Dominick Corvaisis flew to Portland and took a hotel
room near the apartment house in which he had once lived. Rain was
falling hard, and the air was cold.
Except for dinner in the hotel restaurant, he spent the remaining hours
of Sunday afternoon and evening at a table by the window of his room,
alternately staring out at the rainlashed city and studying the
roadmaps. Again and again, he mentally reviewed the trip he had taken
the summer before last (and would take again starting tomorrow).
As he had told Parker Faine on Christmas, he was convinced that he had
stumbled into a dangerous situation out there on the road, and that
(paranoid as it sounded) the memory of it had been wiped from his mind.
The mail from his unknown correspondent pointed to no other conclusion.
Two days ago, he had received a third envelope without a return address,
postmarked New York. Now, when Dom tired of looking at the maps and
staring thoughtfully out at the Oregon rain, he picked up that envelope,
shook out the contents, and studied them. This time there had been no
note, just two Polaroid photographs.
The first picture had the least effect on him, although it made him
tense-unaccountably tense, considering that it was a photograph of
someone who, as far as he knew, was a stranger to him. A young, pudgy
priest with unruly auburn hair, freckles, and green eyes. He was facing
the camera, sitting in a chair near a small writing desk, a suitcase at
his side. He was very erect, head up and shoulders squared off, hands
limp in his lap, knees together. The picture disturbed Dom because the
expression on the priest's face was only one step removed from the
lifeless, sightless stare of a corpse. The man was alive; that much was
evident from his rigid posture, yet his eyes were chillingly empty.
The second photograph hit Dom much harder than the first, and its
powerful effect did not diminish with familiarity. A young woman was
the subject of this snapshot, and she was no stranger. Although Dom
could not recall where they had met, he knew they were acquainted. The
sight of her made his heart quicken with a fear similar to that which
filled him when he woke from one of his episodes of sleepwalking. She
was in her late twenties. Blue eyes. Silver-blond hair. Exquisitely
proportioned face. She would have been exceptionally beautiful if her
expression had not been precisely that of the priest: slack, dead,
empty-eyed. She had been photographed from the waist up, lying in a
narrow bed, sheets pulled up chastely to her neck. Restraining straps
held her down. One arm was partially bared to allow clearance for an IV
needle in her wrist vein. She looked small, helpless, oppressed.
The photograph instantly brought to mind his own nightmare in which
unseen men were shouting at him and forcing his face into a sink. A
couple of times, that bad dream had not begun at the sink itself but in
a bed in a strange room, where his vision was blurred by a saffron mist.
Looking at the young woman, Dom was convinced that somewhere there was a
Polaroid shot of him in similar circumstances: strapped to a bed, an IV
needle in his arm, his face without expression.
When he had shown the two photographs to Parker Faine on Friday, the day
they came in the mail, the artist jumped to similar conclusions. "If
I'm wrong, roast me in hell and make sandwiches for the devil, but I
swear this is a snapshot of a woman in a trance or drug-induced stupor,
undergoing the brainwashing that you evidently underwent. Christ, this
situation gets more bizarre and fascinating day by day! It's something
you ought to be able to go to the cops aboutbut you can't, because who's
to say which side they'd be on?
there on the road. Anyway, you weren't the only one who got in trouble,
good buddy. This priest and this woman also stumbled into it. Whoever
went to this much trouble is hiding something damned big, a lot bigger
than I thought before."
Now, sitting at the table by his hotel room window, Dom held one picture
in each hand, side by side, and let his gaze travel back and forth from
the priest to the woman. "Who are you?" he asked aloud. "What're your
names? What happened to us out there?"
Outside, lightning cracked whiplike in the night over Portland, as if a
cosmic coachman were urging the rain to fall faster. Like the drumming
hooves of a thousand harried horses, fat, hard-driven raindrops hammered
against the wall of the hotel and galloped down the window.
Later, Dom fastened himself to the bed with a tether that he had
improved considerably since Christmas. First he wrapped a length of
surgical gauze around his right wrist and secured it with adhesive tape,
a barrier between rope and flesh to prevent abrasion. He was no longer
using an ordinary allpurpose line but a hawser-laid nylon rope, only a
quarterinch in diameter but with a breaking strength of twenty-six
hundred pounds. It was expressly made for rock- and mountain-climbing.
He had switched to the sturdier rope because, on the night of December
28, he had slipped his previous tether by chewing all the way through it
while asleep. The mountaineering rope was fray-resistant and nearly as
impervious to teeth as copper cable would have been.
That night in Portland, he woke three times, wrestling fu riously with
the tether, perspiring, panting, his racing heart's accelerator floored
beneath a heavy weight of fear. "The moon! The moon!"
3.
Las Vegas, Nevada
The day after Christmas, Jorja Monatella took Marcie to Dr. Louis
Besancourt, and the examination turned into an ordeal that frustrated
the physician, frightened Jorja, and embarrassed them both. From the
moment Jorja took her into the doctor's waiting room, the girl screamed,
screeched, wailed, and wept. "No doctors! They'll hurt me!"
On those rare occasions when Marcie misbehaved (and they were rare,
indeed), one hard slap on the bottom was usually all that was required
to restore her senses and induce contrition. But when Jorja tried that
now, it had the opposite effect of what she intended. Marcie screamed
louder, wailed more shrilly, and wept more copiously than before.
The assistance of an understanding nurse was required to convey the
shrieking child from the waiting area into an examination room, by which
time Jorja was not only mortified but worried sick by Marcie's complete
irrationality. Dr. Besancourt's good humor and bedside manner were not
enough to quiet the girl, and in fact she became more frightened and
violent the moment he appeared. Marcie pulled away from him when he
tried to touch her, screamed, struck him, kicked him, until it became
necessary for Jorj
a and a nurse to hold her down. When the doctor used
an ophthalmoscope to examine her eyes, her terror reached a crescendo
indicated by a sudden loosening of her bladder that was dismayingly
reminiscent of the fiasco on Christmas Day.
Her uncontrolled urination marked an abrupt change in her demeanor. She
became sullen, silent, just as she had for a while on Christmas. She
was shockingly pale, and she shivered constantly. She had that eerie
detachment that made Jorja think of autism.
Lou Besancourt had no simple diagnosis with which to comfort Jorja. He
spoke of neurological and brain disorders,
and psychological illness. He wanted Marcie to check into Sunrise
Hospital for a few days of tests.
The ugly scene at Besancourt's office was just a warmup for a series of
fits Marcie threw at the hospital. The mere sight of doctors and nurses
catapulted her into panic, and invariably the panic became outright
hysteria that escalated until, exhausted, the child fell into that
semicatatonic trance from which she needed hours to recover.
Jorja took a week of sick-leave from the casino and virtually lived at
Sunrise for four days, sleeping on a rollaway bed in Marcie's room. She
didn't get much rest. Even in a drugged sleep, Marcie twitched, kicked,
whimpered, and cried out in her dreams: "The moon, the moon . . ." By
the fourth night, Sunday, December 29, worried and weary, Jorja almost
needed medical attention for herself.
Miraculously, on Monday morning, Marcie's irrational terror simply went
away. She still did not like being hospitalized, and she pleaded
aggressively to go home. But she no longer appeared to feel that the
walls were going to close in and crush her. She remained uneasy in the
company of doctors and nurses, but she did not shrink from them in
horror or strike them when they touched her. She was still pale,
nervous, and watchful. But for the first time in days, her appetite was
normal, and she ate everything on her breakfast tray.
Later in the day, after the final testing had been completed, while
Marcie was sitting in bed eating lunch, Dr. Besancourt spoke with Jorja
in the hall. He was a hound-faced man with a bulbous nose and moist,
kind eyes. "Negative, Jorja. Every test, negative. No brain tumors,
no cerebral lesions, no neurological dysfunction."
Jorja almost burst into tears. "Thank God."
"I'm going to refer Marcie to another doctor," Besancourt said. "Ted
Coverly. He's a child psychologist, and a good one. I'm sure he'll
ferret out the cause of this. Funny thing is . . . I have a hunch we
may have cured Marcie without realizing we were doing it."
Jorja blinked. "Cured her? What do you mean?"
"In retrospect I can see that her behavior had all the earmarks of a
phobia. Irrational fear, panic attacks . . . I suspect she'd begun
to develop a severe phobic aversion to all things medical. And there's
a treatment called "flooding," wherein the phobic patient is
purposefully, even ruthlessly exposed to the thing he fears for such a
long time-hours and hoursthat the power of the phobia is shattered.
Which is what we might've inadvertently done to Marcie when we forced
her into the hospital."
"Why would she have developed such a phobia?" Jorja asked. "Where would
it've come from? She's never had a bad experience with doctors or
hospitals. She's never been seriously ill."
Besancourt shrugged, sidled out of the way of some nurses pushing a
patient on a gurney. "We don't know what causes phobias. You don't
have to crash in a plane in order to be afraid of flying. Phobias just
. . . spring up. Even if we accidentally cured her, there'll be a
residual apprehension that Ted Coverly can identify. He'll root out any
remaining traces of phobic anxiety. Don't worry, Jorja."
That afternoon, Monday, December 30, Marcie was released from the
hospital. In the car on the way home, she was almost her old self,
happily pointing out animal shapes in the clouds. At home, she dashed
into the living room and settled down immediately among the piles of new
Christmas toys which she had not yet had much opportunity to enjoy. She
still played with the Little Ms. Doctor kit, though not exclusively or
with that disturbing intensity that she had exhibited on Christmas Day.
Jorja's parents raced over to the apartment. Jorja had kept them away
from the hospital by arguing that they might disturb Marcie's delicate
condition. Marcie remained in a splendid mood at dinner, sweet and
amusing, leaving Jorja's parents disarmed.
For the next three nights, Marcie slept in Jorja's bed in case she
suffered an anxiety attack, but none materialized. The nightmares came
with less frequency and less power than before, and Marcie's sleeptalk
awakened Joria only twice in three nights. "The moon, moon, the moon!"
But now it was a soft and almost forlorn call rather than a shout.
In the morning, at breakfast, she asked Marcie about the dream, but the
girl could not remember it. "The moon?" she said, frowning into her
bowl of Trix. "Didn't dream about the moon. Dreamed about horses. Can
I have a horse someday?"
"Maybe, when we don't live in an apartment any more."
Marcie giggled. "I know that. You can't keep a horse in an apartment.
The neighbors would complain."
Thursday, Marcie saw Dr. Coverly for the first time. She liked him. If
she still had an abnormal fear of doctors, she hid it well.
That night Marcie slept in her own bed, with only the company of a teddy
bear named Murphy. Jorja got up three times between midnight and dawn
to look in on her daughter. Once she heard the now-familiar chant-"moon,
moon, moon"-in a whisper that, because it was an eerie blend of fear and
delight, made the hair prickle on her scalp.
And on Friday, with three days of school vacation still ahead for
Marcie, Jorja put her in Kara Persaghian's care once more and returned
to work. It was almost a relief to get back to the noise and smoke of
the casino. Cigarettes, stale beer, and the occasional blast of
halitosis were infinitely more pleasing than the antiseptic stink of the
hospital.
She picked up Marcie at Kara's place, and on the way home the girl
excitedly showed her the product of a day spent drawing on butcher's
paper: scores of pictures of the moon in every imaginable hue.
On Sunday morning, January 5, when Jorja got out of bed and went to brew
coffee, she found Marcie at the dining room table, engaged in a curious
task. The girl, still in her pajamas, was taking all the photographs
out of their picture album and making neat stacks of them.
"I'm putting the pictures in a shoebox, because I need the . . .
album," the girl said, frowning over the hard word. "I need it for my
moon collection." She held up a picture of the moon clipped from a
magazine. "I'm going to make a big collection."
"Why? Baby, why're you so interested in the moon?"
"It's pretty," Marcie said. She put the picture on a blank page of the
photo album and stared at it. In her fixed gaze, in the intensity of
her fascination with the photograph, there was an echo of the
single-mindedness with which she had played Little Ms. Doctor.
With a quiver of apprehension, Jorja thought, This is how the damn
doctor phobia started. Quietly. Innocently. Has Marcie merely traded
one phobia for another?
She had the urge to run to the telephone and somehow get hold of Dr.
Coverly, even if it was Sunday and his day off.
But as she stood by the table, studying her daughter, Jorja decided she
was overreacting. Marcie certainly had not traded one phobia for
another. After all, the girl wasn't afraid of the moon. Just . . .
well, strangely fascinated by it. A temporary enthusiasm. Any parent
of a bright seven-year-old was accustomed to these short-lived but
fiercely burning fascinations and infatuations.
Nevertheless, Jorja decided she would tell Dr. Coverly about it when
she took Marcie to his office for a second session on Tuesday.
At twelve-twenty A M. Monday, before she turned in for the night, Jorja
looked in on Marcie to see if she was sleeping soundly. The girl was
not in bed. In her dark room, she had drawn a chair up to the window
and was sitting there, staring out.
"Honey? What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong. Come see
Marcie said softly, dream ily.
Heading toward the girl, Jorja said, "What is it, Peanut?"
"The moon," Marcie said, her eyes fixed on the silvery crescent high in
the black vault of the sky. "The moon."
4.