Strangers

giant's palm, and can the giant crush us whenever he wants?"
        "Maybe," Ginger Weiss said. "But by God, we can at least give him a couple of nasty bites before he smashes us."
        She spoke with a fierce determination that was convincing but also amusing in the context of a metaphor as basically comic as a giant and a bunch of bugs. Though he was pleased by her fierce resolution in the face of such overwhelmingly poor odds, Dom could not help laughing.
        Blinking at him in surprise, she laughed too. "Hey, am I spunky, or what? Might be smashed by a giant, but I feel triumphant 'cause I'll be able to bite him just before he reduces me to a bloody smear."
        "Spunky should be your middle name," Dom agreed, laughing harder.
        As he watched Ginger laughing at her own expense, Dom was again stricken by her beauty. His response to her, on seeing her disembark from the plane, had been instant and powerful because of unremembered experiences they shared. But even if they had been complete strangers whose lives had never crossed, he would have felt something more at the sight of her than he felt when he saw other beautiful women. Under any circumstances, she would have turned his head. She was special.
        He drew a deep breath. "Shall I take you to meet the others?"
        "Oh, yes," she said, dabbing her slender fingers at the corners of her eyes to wipe away tears that her graveyard laughter had occasioned. "Yes, I'm eager to meet them. The other bugs on the giant's hand."
        

        
        Less than half an hour before nightfall, the shadows on the high plains were long, and the muddy gray light of the overcast dusk lent an air of mystery even to such ordinary objects as clumps of sagebrush, rock formations, and twisted mounds of dead brown bunch-grass.
        Before taking her to the motel, Dom Corvaisis had brought Ginger to what he called "the special place," more than two hundred yards south of Interstate 80. The wind rustled halfseen vegetation. The ice on the grass and sagebrush, when glimpsed at all, looked black, shiny black.
        The writer stood away from her, hands jammed in his jacket pockets, silent. He had told her that he did not want to influence her reaction to the place or color her first feelings with a description of his own.
        Ginger wandered slowly back and forth, feeling slightly foolish, as if taking part in a half-baked experiment in psychic perception, seeking clairvoyant vibrations. But she quickly stopped feeling foolish when the vibrations actually began to shake her. A queer uneasiness arose, and she found herself staying away from the deeper pockets of shadows, as if something hostile lurked in them. Her heart pounded. Uneasiness became fear, and she heard the tempo of her breathing change.
        "It's inside me. It's inside me."
        She whirled toward that voice. It was Dom's voice, but it had not come from him. The words had been spoken behind her. But no one was there: only dry sagebrush and a thin patch of snow glowing softly, luminously within a nest of shadows.
        "What's the matter?" Dom asked, moving toward her.
        She was wrong. Dom's other voice, the ghostly-sounding voice, had not come from behind her. It had come from within her. She heard that other Dom again, and she realized she was hearing a fragment of memory, an echo from the past, something he had said to her that Friday night, July 6, perhaps when they had both stood in this same place. The scrap of memory came with no visual or olfactory element because it was part of the events locked behind the Azrael Block. There were just those three urgent words repeated twice: "It's inside me. It's inside me."
        Abruptly, her simmering fear flashed bright. The landscape around her seemed to embody a nameless but monstrous threat. She started back toward the highway, walking fast, and Dom asked what was wrong, and she walked even faster, unable to answer because fear was like a paste in her mouth and throat. He called her name, and she began to run. Every object in sight seemed to have been wounded on its eastern flank, for black blood-shadows spilled in that direction.
        She was not able to speak until they were back in the Chevy, with the doors locked, the engine running, and the heater blowing warm air on her chilled face. Shakily, she told him about the nameless threat she had felt on that ordinary-looking piece of ground, and about