Strangers

week and both go to Milwaukee for Christmas with the kids; but this time Faye had gone by herself.
        Ernie missed her terribly. He missed her because she was his wife of thirty-one years and his best friend. He missed her because he loved her more now than he had on their wedding day. And because… without Faye, the nights alone seemed longer, deeper, darker than ever.
        By two-thirty Friday afternoon he had cleaned all the rooms and changed the linens, and the Tranquility Motel was ready for its next wave of journeyers. It was the only lodging within twelve miles, perched on a knoll north of the superhighway, a neat little way station on a vast expanse of sagebrush-strewn plains that sloped up into grassy meadows. Elko lay over thirty miles to the east, Battle Mountain forty miles to the west. The town of Carlin and the tiny village of Beowawe were closer, though from the Tranquility Motel Ernie had not a glimpse of either settlement. In fact, from the parking lot, no other building was visible in any direction, and there was probably no motel in the world more aptly named than this one.
        Ernie was now in the office, working with a can of wood stain, touching up a few scratches on the oak counter where guests signed in and checked out. The counter was not really in bad shape. He was just keeping busy until customers started pulling in from Interstate 80 in the late afternoon. If he did not keep his mind occupied, he would start thinking about how early dusk arrived in November, and he would begin to worry about nightfall, and then by the time darkness actually came, he would be as jumpy as a cat with a can tied to its tail.
        The motel office was a shrine to light. From the moment he had opened at six-thirty this morning, every lamp had been burning. A squat fluorescent lamp with a flexible neck stood on the oak desk in the work area behind the check-in counter, casting a pale rectangle on the green felt blotter. A brass floor lamp glowed in the corner by the file cabinets. On the public side of the counter was a carousel of postcards, a wall rack holding about forty paperbacks, another rack full of free travel brochures, a single slot machine by the door, and a beige sofa flanked by end tables and ginger-jar lamps equipped with three-way bulbs - 75, 100, and 150 watts - which were turned up all the way. There was a frosted-glass ceiling fixture, too, with two bulbs, and of course most of the front wall of the office featured a large window. The motel faced south-southwest, so at this time of day the declining sun's honey-colored beams angled through the enormous pane, giving an amber tint to the white wall behind the sofa, fracturing into hundreds of bright erratic lines in the crackled glaze of the ginger-jar lamps, and leaving blazing reflections in the brass medallions that ornamented the tables.
        When Faye was here, Ernie left some of the lamps off because she was sure to remark on the waste of electricity and extinguish a few of them. Leaving a lamp unlit made him uneasy, but he endured the sight of dead bulbs in order to keep his secret. As far as he knew, Faye was not aware of the phobia that had been creeping up on him during the past four months, and he did not want her to know because he was ashamed of this sudden strangeness in himself and because he did not want to worry her. He did not know the cause of his irrational fear, but he knew he would conquer it, sooner or later, so there was no sense in humiliating himself and causing Faye unnecessary anxiety over a temporary condition.
        He refused to believe that it was serious. He had been ill only rarely in his fifty-two years. He had only been laid up in the hospital once, after taking a bullet in the butt and another one in the back during his second tour of duty in Vietnam. There had never been mental illness in his family, and Ernest Eugene Block was absolutely sure-as-hell-and-without-a-doubt not going to be the first one of his clan to go crawling and whimpering to a psychiatrist's couch. You could bet your ass on that and never have to worry what you would sit on. He would tough this out, weird as it was, unsettling as it was.
        It had begun in September, a vague uneasiness that built in him as nightfall approached and that remained until dawn. At first he was not troubled every night, but it got steadily worse, and by the middle of October, dusk always brought with it an inexplicable spiritual