Strangers

Faye said.
        Corvaisis needed coaxing, which Ned interpreted as meaning that the experience earlier this evening had been considerably more unnerving than words could express. But at last the writer got up and, carrying his glass of beer, went to the front door of the diner. He stood with his back to the exit, chugged a long swallow of Dos Equis. He looked around the room, trying hard to see the people of that other time.
        He said, "There were three or four men sitting at the counter. Maybe a dozen customers altogether. I can't remember their faces." Moving away from the door, he walked past Ned and the others, to the next table, where he pulled out a chair and sat with his back turned partly toward them. "This is where I sat. Sandy waited on me. I took a bottle of Coors while I looked at the menu. Ordered the ham-and-egg sandwich. French fries, coleslaw. As I was salting the fries, the shaker slipped out of my hand. Salt spilled on the table. I threw a pinch over my shoulder. Silly gesture. Threw it too hard. Dr. Weiss! Ginger Weiss was the woman I threw the salt on. I didn't remember that before, but I can see her clearly now. The blond in the photo."
        Faye tapped the Polaroid snapshot of Dr. Weiss that was on the table in front of Ned.
        Still sitting alone at the other table, Corvaisis said, "Quite a beautiful woman. Pixie-cute yet also sophisticated-looking, a really interesting mix. Could hardly take my eyes off her."
        Ned looked more closely at the photo of Ginger Weiss. He supposed she might, indeed, be unusually attractive when her face was not so pale and slack, when her eyes were not so cold, empty, dead.
        In a voice that had grown odd, as if he were actually speaking to them from out of the past, Corvaisis said, "She sits in the corner booth by the window, facing this way. Sunset is near. The sun's out there on the horizon, balanced like a big red ball, and the diner's filled with orange light slanting in through the windows. Almost like firelight. Ginger Weiss looks especially lovely in that light. I can hardly keep from staring openly at her… Twilight now. I've got a second beer." He sipped some Dos Equis. When he continued, his voice was softer: "The plains are all purple… then black… night…"
        Like Ernie and Faye and Sandy, Ned was spellbound by the writer's struggle to remember, for it stirred in him, at last, faint and shapeless - but compelling - memories of his own. He began to recall that particular evening out of the many he'd spent in the Tranquility Grille. The young priest had been here, the one in the Polaroid snapshot now lying on the table. And the young couple with their little girl.
        "Not long after nightfall… nursing my second beer mainly so I can stare at Ginger Weiss a little longer." Corvaisis looked left, right, raised his right hand to his ear. "An unusual sound of some kind. I remember that much. A distant rumble… getting louder." He was silent for awhile. "Can't remember what happened next. Something… something… but it just won't come."
        As the writer spoke of the rumbling, Ned Sarver experienced the vaguest possible memory of that frightening, swelling sound, but he could not clearly call it to mind. He felt as if Corvaisis had brought him to the edge of a dark chasm into which he was desperately afraid to look but into which he must look, and now they were turning away without shining a light down in those black depths. Heart racing, he said, "Concentrate on remembering the sound, the exact sound, and maybe that'll bring the rest of it back to you."
        Corvaisis pushed his chair back from the table, got up. "Rumbling… like thunder, very distant thunder… but growing closer." He stood beside the table, seeking the direction from which the sound had come, looking left, right, up, down at the floor.
        Suddenly Ned heard the noise, not in memory but in reality, not back there in the past but now. The hollow roll of faraway thunder. But it came in one endless peal, not a series of rising and falling crashes, and it was growing louder, louder…
        Ned looked at the others. They heard it, too.
        Louder. Louder. Now he could feel the vibrations in his bones.
        He could not remember what had happened that night, but he knew the astonishing events they had endured had started with this sound.
        He pushed back his chair and got up. He was awash in a rising tide of fear,