Strangers

open by surgical retractors to reveal the pulsing, mysterious complexity of the human heart in all its crimson grandeur.
        "Called," Brendan said. The softly spoken word echoed eerily around the room. "All of us. Called back to this place."
        "Look," Dom said, packing a paragraph of amazement into that one syllable, raising his arms and holding his hands out to show them the red rings of swollen flesh that had appeared in his palms.
        Surprised, Brendan raised his hands, which were also branded by the strange stigmata. As the men faced each other, the air thickened with unknown power. Yesterday, on the telephone, Father Wycazik had told Dom that Brendan was relatively certain no religious element was involved in the miraculous cures and other events that had recently transformed the young priest's life. Yet the motel office seemed, to Ginger, to be filled with a force that, if not supernatural, was certainly beyond the ken of any man or woman.
        "Called," Brendan said again.
        Ginger was gripped by breathless expectancy. She looked at Ernie, who stood behind Faye with his hands on her shoulders, and both their faces were full of tremulous suspense. Ned and Sandy, who were by the rack of postcards, holding hands, were wide-eyed.
        Ginger felt the flesh prickling on the back of her neck. She thought, Something's going to happen, and even as the thought took form, something did.
        Every lamp in the motel office was aglow in deference to Ernie's uneasiness in the presence of deep shadows, but abruptly the place was even brighter than it had been. A milky-white light filled the room, springing magically from molecules of air. It shimmered on all sides but rained mostly from overhead, a silvery mist of luminosity. She realized this was the same light that featured in her unremembered lunar dreams. She turned in a circle, looking around and up through spangled curtains of brilliant yet soft radiance, not in search of the source but with the hope of remembering her dreams and, ultimately, the events of that long-lost summer night that had inspired the dreams.
        Ginger saw Sandy reach into the glowing air with one hand, as if to grasp a fistful of the miraculous light. A tentative smile pulled at Ned's mouth. Faye smiled, too, and Ernie's expression of childlike wonder was almost laughably out of place on his ruggedly hewn face.
        "The moon," Ernie said.
        "The moon," Dom echoed, the stigmata still blazing on his hands.
        For one thrilling moment, Ginger Weiss was poised on the brink of complete understanding. The black, blank membrane of her memory block trembled; revelation pressed strenuously against the far side, and that membrane seemed certain to split and spill forth everything that had been dammed beyond it.
        Then the light changed from moon-white to blood-red, and with it the mood changed from wonder and growing delight to fear. She no longer sought revelation but dreaded it, no longer welcomed understanding but withdrew from it in terror and revulsion.
        Ginger stumbled back through the bloody glow, bumped against the front door. Across the room, beyond Dom and Brendan, Sandy Sarver had ceased reaching up to seize a handful of light; she was holding tightly to Ned, whose smile had become a rictus of repulsion. Faye and Ernie were pressing back against the check-in counter.
        As scarlet incandescence welled like fluid into the room and filled it from corner to corner, the stunning visual phenomena were augmented by sound. Ginger jumped in surprise as a loud three-part crash shook the sanguineous air, jumped once more as it repeated, then flinched but did not jump when it came again. It had a cardiac quality, like the thunderous beating of a great heart, though it featured one more stroke than a usual heartbeat: LUB-DUB-dub, LUB-DUB-dub, LUB-DUB-dub… She knew at once that it was the apparitional noise of which Father Wycazik had spoken in his telephone conversation with Dom, the noise that had arisen in Brendan Cronin's bedroom and had shaken St. Bernadette's.
        But she also knew that she had heard this very thing before. This entire display-the moonlike light, the blood-red radiance, the noise-was part of something that had happened the summer before last.
        LUB-DUB-dub… LUB-DUB-dub…
        The window frames rattled. The walls shook. The bloody light and the lamplight began to pulse in time with the