Shattered

how far this previously unknown, even unsuspected, but certainly welcome strength would carry him, how deep this vein which he had tapped.
        He went looking for the stranger.
        
        The vending-machine room at the back of the motel complex did not have any doors on its two entrances. Cold white light fanned out in twin semicircles from both narrow archways, dispelling the sickly purple glow of the mercury-vapor lamps overhead.
        Doyle went to the doorway and peered inside.
        The room was well lighted and appeared untenanted. However, there were a number of blind spots formed by the bulky machines, a dozen places where a man could hide.
        He stepped across the raised threshold.
        The room was about twenty feet by ten feet. It contained twelve machines, which stood against the two longest walls and faced one another like teams of futuristic heavyweight prize fighters waiting for the bell to ring and the match to begin: three humming soda machines that could dispense six different flavors of bottled and canned refreshment; two squat cigarette machines; one cracker and cookie vendor full of stale and half-stale goods; two candy machines with an especially twenty-first-century look about them; a coffee and hot chocolate dispenser with stylized cups of steaming brown liquid painted on the mirrored front along with the bold legend
Sugar Cream Marshmallow
; a vendor of peanuts, potato chips, pretzels, and cheese popcorn; and an ice machine which rattled noisily, continually, spitting newly made cubes into a shiny steel storage bin.
        He walked slowly down the room, flanked by the murmuring dispensers, looking into the niche between each pair of them, expecting someone to jump out at him any second now. His tension and fear were qualitatively different from what he had known in the past; they were almost beneficial, clean, purgative. He felt a great deal like a small boy prowling through a most forbidden -, decaying graveyard on Halloween night, a rag bag of conflicting emotions.
        But the stranger was not in the room.
        Doyle went outside again into the wind and rain, no longer much concerned with the bad weather, a man caught up in his own changes.
        He walked along the parked cars, hoping to find the stranger kneeling between two of them. But he crossed from the end of one north-south wing to the end of the other north-south wing without noticing any movement or unlikely shadows.
        He was just about to call it quits when he saw the weak light spilling out of the half opened maintenance-room door. He had passed this way less than five minutes ago when he had been on his way to the vending machines, and this door had not been open then.
        And it was hardly an hour when the motel janitor would be coming to work Alex put his back to the wet concrete wall, his head resting in the center of the neatly stenciled black-and-white sign which was painted there (Maintenance and Supplies-Motel Employees Only), and listened for movement inside the room.
        A minute passed in silence.
        Cautiously he reached out and pushed the oversized metal door all the way open. It swung inward without a sound, and an equally soundless gray light came out.
        Doyle looked inside. Directly across the large room, a second door, also metal and also oversized, stood wide open to the rain. Beyond it was a section of the amoeboid parking lot. Good enough. The stranger had been here and had already gone.
        He went into the room and looked around. It was slightly larger than the place that contained the vending machines. Toward the back, along the wall, were barrels of industrial cleaning compounds: soaps, abrasives, waxes, furniture polish. There were also electric floor waxers and buffers, a forest of long-handled mops and brooms and window washing sponges. Two riding lawn mowers stood in the middle of the room with a host of gardening tools and huge coils of transparent green plastic hose. At the front, closer to the doors, were the workbenches, carpentry tools, a standing jigsaw, and even a small wood lathe. To Doyle's right, the entire wall was covered with pegboard; the silhouettes of dozens of tools had been painted on the pegboard and the tools themselves hung over their own black outlines. The gardening ax was missing, but everything else was clean and hung neatly in place.
        The barrels of cleaning compounds were too widely