Strangers

and he had to fight against the urge to run.
        Sandy stood, and there was fear in her face, as well. Though the unknown events seemed to have had an entirely positive effect on her, she was frightened now. She put one hand on Ned's arm for reassurance.
        Ernie and Faye were frowning, looking around for the source of the noise, but they did not yet appear frightened. Their memory of the sound was apparently more thoroughly scrubbed away, so they could not as easily connect it with the events of that Friday night in July.
        Another sound arose, underlying the thunderlike rumble: a queer, ululating whistle. That, too, was unpleasantly familiar to Ned.
        It was happening again. Whatever had taken place that night more than eighteen months ago was somehow being repeated. Jesus, happening all over again, and Ned heard himself saying, "No, no. No!"
        Corvaisis backed a couple of steps away from his table, cast a glance at Ned and the others. He was white-faced.
        The growing roar began to resonate in the window glass, behind the closed blinds. A loose pane, unseen, started rattling in its frame.
        The Levolor blinds were vibrating now, adding a jangly chorus.
        Sandy's hold on Ned became a panicky clutch.
        Ernie and Faye were on their feet, and they were no longer merely bewildered but as afraid as everyone else.
        The ululant whistle had grown in volume with the thunder. Now it became piercingly shrill, an oscillating electronic shriek.
        "What is it?" Sandy cried, and the continuous fulminations attained such volume and power that the walls of the Tranquility Grille shook.
        On the table at which Corvaisis had been sitting, the beer glass fell on its side, cracking, spilling what Dos Equis remained in it.
        Ned looked at the table beside him and saw the objects on it - ketchup bottle, mustard dispenser, salt and pepper shakers, ashtray, glasses, plates, and silverware - bouncing, clinking against one another, moving back and forth across the surface. A beer glass toppled, and another, and the ketchup bottle.
        Wide-eyed, Ned and the others turned this way and that, as if in anticipation of the imminent materialization of a demonic entity.
        Throughout the room, objects fell off tables. The clock with the Coors logo leapt from the hook on which it hung, crashed to the floor.
        This very thing had happened that night in July - Ned remembered as much. But he could not remember what had come next.
        "Stop it!" Ernie shouted with the conviction and authority of a Marine officer accustomed to obedience - but without effect.
        Earthquake? Ned wondered. A quake did not explain the electronic shriek that accompanied the thunder.
        The chairs jittered across the floor, bumping against one another. One of them slid into Corvaisis, and the writer jumped in surprise.
        Ned could feel the floor shaking.
        The thunderlike rumble and the accompanying oscillatory shriek rose to an ear-splitting peak, and with the hard flat crash of a bomb blast, the big front windows imploded. Faye screamed and threw her arms up in front of her face, and Ernie stumbled backward and nearly fell over a chair. Sandy buried her face against Ned's chest.
        They might have been badly cut by flying glass if the closed blinds had not imposed a barrier between them and the shattering panes. Even so, the force of the implosion flung the blinds up as a strong wind might blow curtains at an open window, and some glittering shards fell onto the booths, rained over Ned, and smashed on the floor around him.
        Silence. The implosion of the windows was followed by a profound silence disturbed only by a few last, loose, little pieces of glass falling out of window frames, one at a time.
        On that Friday night in July, the summer before last, much more than this had happened, though Ned could not remember what. Tonight, however, the mysterious drama apparently was not going to progress as far as it had gone then. For now, it was over.
        Dom Corvaisis was bleeding lightly from a nick in his cheek, hardly worse than a shaving cut. Ernie's forehead and the back of his right hand had been slightly scratched by splinters of glass.
        When he had determined that Sandy was unhurt, Ned reluctantly left her and rushed to the front door. He went out into the night in search of the cause of the weird noise