Their mutual unremembered ordeal had affected Jack Twist. But as with
Sandy, the mysterious events of that July night had wrought only
beneficial changes in him.
Ernie Block said, "I think what you've indirectly told us is that you
were a professional thief." When Jack Twist said nothing, Ernie
continued: "It occurs to me that you were almost certainly forced to
reveal your criminal life to the people who brainwashed us. In fact,
from what little you've said, I figure those safe-deposit boxes in which
the postcards turned up were kept under the identities you also used
when committing robberies; therefore, since that July, the Army and
government must've known about your illegal activities."
Jack's silence was confirmation that he had, indeed, been a thief.
Ernie said, "Yet, once they'd blocked your memories of what really
happened here that summer, they turned you loose and let you continue
with what you'd been doing. Why in the hell would they do that? I can
understand the Army and government bending-even breaking-the law to hide
whatever happened at Thunder Hill if it involves national security. But
otherwise, you'd expect them to uphold the law, wouldn't you? So why
wouldn't they at least anonymously inform the New York police or arrange
for you to be caught in the middle of a crime?"
Jorja said, "Because from the start they've not been certain that our
memory blocks would hold up. They've been monitoring us, at least
checking in on us once in awhile, to be sure we don't need a refresher
course in forgetfulness. What happened to Ginger and Pablo Jackson
seems to prove they're watching, all right. And if they decided it was
necessary to grab Jack-or any of us-and put him through another session
with the mind-control doctors, they'd want him where they could reach
him without too much trouble. It'd be a lot easier to snatch Jack out
of his apartment or from his car than to spirit him out of prison."
"Good grief," Jack said, smiling at her, "I think you've hit on it.
Absolutely." Although Jorja had been slightly chilled by his smile the
first time she'd seen it, she perceived it differently now; it was a
warmer smile than it had seemed initially.
Marcie murmured wordlessly in her sleep. Suddenly and curiously shy
about meeting Jack Twist's eyes, Jorja used her daughter's dreamy
mutterings as an excuse to look away from him.
Jack said, "Whatever secret they're protecting is so important they had
to let me carry on with whatever crimes I chose to commit."
Ginger Weiss shook her head. "Maybe not. Maybe they engineered this
guilt. Maybe they planted the seed, so you'd change."
"No," Jack said. "If they didn't have time to weave the story of the
toxic spill into everyone's false memories, they sure wouldn't have had
time to finesse me toward the straightand-narrow path. Besides . . .
this is difficult to explain . . .
but, since coming here tonight, I feel in my heart that I've learned
guilt and found my way back into society because something so important
happened to us two summers ago that it put my own suffering in
perspective and made me see that none of my bad experiences was so bad
as to justify the warping of my entire life."
"Yes!" Sandy said. "I feel that, too. All the hell I went through as a
child . . . none of it matters after what happened that July."
They were silent, trying to imagine what experience could have been so
shattering as to make even the most painful of life's tricks seem of
little consequence. But none of them could puzzle it out.
After he selected more songs on the jukebox, Jack asked a lot of
questions of the others, filling the gaps in his knowledge of their
various ordeals and putting together a complete picture of their
discoveries to date. That done, he guided them through a discussion of
strategy, formulating a set of tasks for tomorrow.
Jorja was again intrigued by Jack's leadership skills. By the time the
group discussed what steps should be taken next and settled on an
agenda, they had agreed to undertake precisely the tasks Jack thought
ought to be accomplished, though there was never a sense that he had
commanded or manipulated them. When he'd first appeared in the Blocks'
apartment, he'd proved he could take control of a situation and, by
sheer force of personality, make people obey him. But now he chose
indirection, and the speed with which everyone came around to his
purposes was proof this was the right tactic.
Jorja realized that he impressed her for many of the same reasons that
Ginger Weiss had impressed her. She saw in him the kind of person she
had been struggling to become since her divorce-and the kind of man that
Alan could never have been.
The final problem the group dealt with was the danger of an attack by
Falkirk's men. Now that there was a real chance their memory blocks
would substantially decay-or crumble completely-in the near future, they
posed a greater threat to their enemy than at any time since July, the
summer before last. Tomorrow, they would be separated most of the day
as they carried out their various tasks and researches, but tonight they
were in danger if they all stayed at the motel, making one easy target.
Therefore, they agreed that most of them would go to bed now, while two
or three drove into Elko and spent part of the night circling through
town, always on the move, alert. Assuming that the Tranquility was
under observation, the enemy would at once realize they could no longer
seize everyone in a clean sweep. At four o'clock in the morning, a
second group of outriders could rendezvous with the first team in Elko
and relieve them, so they could come back here and get some sleep.
"I'll volunteer for the first team," Jack said. "I just have to fetch
my Cherokee from the hills, where I left it. Who'll go with me?"
"I will," Jorja said at once, then became aware of the weight of her
daughter on her lap. "Uh, that is, if someone'll let Marcie sleep in
their room tonight."
"No problem," Faye said. "She can stay with Ernie and me .
Jack said they ought to divide their numbers further, and Brendan Cronin
volunteered to join him and Jorja on the first team. The priest's
response triggered a peculiar feeling in Jorja, a pang she would not
identify as disappointment until much later.
Because everyone else had errands to run early tomorrow, the second team
was composed of only Ned and Sandy. A rendezvous between the teams was
set for four o'clock in the morning at the Arco Mini-Mart.
"If you get there first," Jack said, "for God's sake don't buy a
Hamwich. Okay, I guess that's it. We should get moving."
"Not quite yet," Ginger said. The physician folded her hands and looked
down at her interlaced fingers, collecting her thoughts. "Since this
afternoon, when Brendan first arrived, when the rings appeared on his
and Dom's hands, when the motel office was filled with that strange
noise and the light ... I've been chewing over everything we've been
able to learn, trying to make
those bizarre phenomena fit in somehow.
I've hit on an explanation for some of it; not all, but some of it."
Everyone expressed an eagerness to hear the theory, halfformed though it
might be.
Ginger said, "As different as our dreams are, one element links all of
them: the moon. Okay. Our other dreams-decon suits, IV needles, beds
with restraining straps-proved to be based on real experiences, real
threats. In fact, they weren't dreams but memories surfacing in the
form of dreams. So it seems reasonable to suppose the moon also
featured prominently in whatever happened to us, that the moon, too, is
a memory trying to surface in our dreams. Agreed?"
"Agreed," Dom said, and everyone else nodded.
"We've seen how Marcie's lunar obsession changed to a fascination with a
scarlet moon," Ginger continued. "And Jack's told us that, a couple
nights ago, the ordinary moonlight in his own nightmare turned into a
bloody glow. None of the rest of us has dreamed of a red moon yet, but
I submit that the appearance of this scarlet image in Marcie's and
Jack's dreams is proof that it's also a memory. In other words, on the
night of July 6, we saw something that made the moon turn red. And the
apparitional light, which sometimes fills Brendan's bedroom, which some
of us witnessed today in the motel office, is a strange sort of
reenactment of what happened to the real moon on the night in July. The
apparitional light is a message meant to nudge our memories."
"Message," Jack said. "All right. But who the devil's sending the
message? Where's the light come from? How is it generated?"
"I've got an idea about that," Ginger said. "But let me take this one
step at a time. First, let's consider what might've happened to make
the moon turn red that night."
Jorja listened, as did the others, with interest at first and then with
growing uneasiness, while Ginger got up from her chair and, pacing,
outlined an unnerving explanation.
Ginger Weiss wholeheartedly embraced the scientific worldview. To her,
the universe unfailingly operated by the rules of logic and reason, and
no mystery could long endure once attacked in a logical fashion. But
unlike some in the scientific community-and many in the
medical'community-she did not believe that a vivid imagination was
necessarily a hindrance to logic and reason. Otherwise, she might not
have devised the theory she now conveyed to the others in the
Tranquility Grille.
It was a pretty strange theory, and she was nervous about how the others
would receive it. So she paced to the jukebox, over to the service
counter, back to the table, moving constantly as she talked:
"The men who dealt with us in the first day or two of imprisonment were
wearing decontamination suits designed to handle biological risks. They
must've been worried we were infected with something. So perhaps part
of what we saw was a scarlet cloud of biological contaminant. When it
passed overhead, it turned the moon red."
"And we were all infected with some strange disease," Jorja said.
Ginger said, "That may be why, yesterday at the special place along the
highway, I had the memory-flash of Dom shouting, 'It's inside me. It's
inside me." That would have been a logical thing for him to shout if,
that night, he had found himself caught up in a red cloud of some
contaminant and realized he was breathing it in. And Brendan's told us
that the same words-'It's inside me'-came spontaneously to his lips last
night in Reno, when the red apparitional light filled his room."
"Bacteria? Disease? Then why didn't we get sick?" Brendan said.
"Because they treated us immediately," Dom said. "We've already worked
that one out, Brendan-yesterday, before you got here. But, Ginger, the
light that filled the office this afternoon was too bright to represent
moonlight filtered through a red cloud."
"I know," Ginger said, pacing. "Underdeveloped as it is, my idea
doesn't explain everything-like the rings on your hands. So maybe it's
not the right idea. On the other hand, it does explain some things, and
maybe if we think about it long enough, we'll see how it explains these
other puzzles, as well. And as a theory, it has one big plus."
"What's that?" Ned asked.
"It could explain why Brendan was involved in two miracle cures in
Chicago. It could explain the whirling paper moons in Zebediah Lomack's
house. And the destruction here at the diner on Saturday night, when
Dom was trying to recall what had happened the summer before last. It
could explain the source of the apparitional light."
On the jukebox, the last of a series of songs had faded to its end as
Ginger began to speak. But no one got up to choose more music, for they
were riveted by her promise to explain the inexplicable.
"To this point," Ginger said, "the theory's pretty mundane. A red cloud
got to take a big leap of imagination with me. We've been assuming that
the miraculous healing and certainly the poltergeist phenomena have some
mysterious external source. Father Wycazik, Brendan's rector, thinks
that external source is God. The rest of us don't feel it's exactly
divine. We don't know what the hell it is, but we all assume that it's
an external power, something out there somewhere that's taunting us or
trying to reach us with a message or threatening us. But what if these
wonders have an internal source. Suppose Brendan and Dom really possess
some power, and suppose that they possess it because of what happened
during the night of the red moon. Suppose they have telekinesis-which
is the power to move objects without touching them, which would explain
the whirling paper moons and the destruction in the diner."
Everyone looked at Dom and Brendan in amazement, but no one was more
startled than those two men, who gaped at Ginger, shocked.
Dom said, "But that's ridiculous! I'm no psychic, no sorcerer."
"Me neither," Brendan said.
Ginger shook her head. "Not consciously, no. I'm saying maybe the
power is in you, and you're just not aware of it. Bear with me. Think
about it. The first time the rings appeared on Brendan's hands, the
first time he exercised his healing power, was when he was combing the
hair of the little girl in the hospital. He's said he was overwhelmed
with pity for her and filled with frustration and anger that he couldn't
help her. Maybe it was his intense frustration and anger that freed the
power in him, even though he wasn't aware of it. He couldn't be aware of
it because the acquisition of this power is part of what he's been made
to forget. Okay, the second time, with the wounded policeman, Brendan
found himself in an extreme crisis, which might trigger these powers."
She began pacing and talking more rapidly to prevent debate until she'd
finished. "Now think about Dom's experiences. The first one, in Reno,
at Lomack's house. The way you told it to us, Dom ... as you wandered
through the house, you became so frustrated by the ever-deepening nature
of the mystery that you wanted to rush through those rooms and tear
those paper moons off the walls. Those were your very words. And, of
course, that's what happened: You pulled those moons off the walls, not
with your hands but with this power. And remember, the pictures only
fell to the floor when you shouted, 'Stop it, stop it!" When it did
stop, you thought something had heard you and obeyed or relented, but in
fact you stopped it yourself."
Brendan, Dom, and a couple of the others still looked skeptical.
But Ginger had captured Sandy Server's imagination. "It makes sense! It
makes even more sense if you think about what happened here on Saturday
night, right in this very room. Dom was trying to remember back to that
Friday in July, trying to remember what happened right up to the second
where his memory block took effect. And while he was struggling to
remember . . . all of a sudden this strange noise, this thunder,
started to rumble through the diner, and everything started to shake. He
could've been unconsciously using this power of his to re-create the
effects of whatever happened back then."
"Good!" Ginger said encouragingly. "See? The more you think about it,
the more it hangs together."
"But the strange light," Dom said. "You're saying Brendan and I somehow
manufactured that?"
"Yes, possibly," Ginger said, returning to the table, leaning on her
empty chair. "Pyrokinesis. The ability to spontaneously generate heat
or fire with the power of the mind alone."
"This wasn't fire," Dom said. "It was light."
"So . . . call it 'photokinesis,' " Ginger said. "But I think when