Strangers

pounding.
        LUB-DUB-dub… LUB-DUB-dub…
        Again, Ginger was approaching a shocking recollection. With each crash of sound and throb of light, long-buried memories surged nearer.
        However, her inhibiting fear grew; a towering black wave of terror bore down on her. The Azrael Block was doing what it was designed to do; rather than let remembrance have its way with her, she would plunge into a fugue state, as she had not done since the day Pablo Jackson had been killed, one week ago. The familiar signs of oncoming blackout were present: She was having difficulty breathing; she trembled with a sense of mortal danger so strong it was palpable; the world around her began to fade; an oily darkness seeped in at the edges of her vision.
        Run or die.
        Ginger turned her back on the phenomenal events transpiring in the office. With both hands, she gripped the frame of the front door, as if to anchor herself to consciousness and thwart the black wave that sought to sweep her away. In desperation, she looked through the glass at the vast Nevada landscape, at the somber winter sky, trying to block out the stimuli - the impossible light and sound - that pushed her toward a dark fugue. Terror and mindless panic grew so unbearable that escape into a hateful fugue seemed almost preferable, yet she somehow held fast to the doorframe, held tight, held on, shaking and gasping, held on, terrified not so much by the strange events occurring behind her but by the unremembered events of that summer of which these phenomena were only dim echoes, and still she held on, held on… until the three-stroke thunder faded, until the red light paled, until the room was silent, and until the only light was that coming through the windows or from ordinary lighting fixtures.
        She was all right now. She was not going to black out.
        For the first time, she had successfully resisted a seizure. Maybe her ordeal of the past few months had toughened her. Maybe just being here, within reach of all the answers to the mystery, had given her the heart to resist. Or maybe she had drawn strength from her new "family." Whatever the reason, she was confident that, having once fended off a fugue, she would find it easier to deal with future attacks. Her memory blocks were crumbling. And her fear of facing up to what had happened that July 6 was now far outweighed by the fear of never knowing.
        Shaky, Ginger turned toward the others again.
        Brendan Cronin tottered to the sofa and sat, trembling visibly. The rings were no longer visible in either his hands or Dom's.
        To the priest, Ernie said, "Did I understand you? That same light sometimes fills your room at night?"
        "Yes," Brendan acknowledged. "Twice before."
        "But you told us it was a lovely light," Faye said.
        "Yeah," Ned agreed. "You made it sound… wonderful."
        "It is," Brendan said. "Partly, it is. But when it turns red… well, then it scares the hell out of me. But when it first starts… oh, it uplifts me and fills me with the strangest joy."
        The ominous scarlet light and the frightening three-part hammering had generated such terror in Ginger that she had temporarily forgotten the exhilarating moon-white glow that had preceded it and that had filled her with wonder.
        Wiping his palms on his shirt, as if the vanished rings had left an unwanted residue upon his hands, Dom said, "There was both a good and evil aspect to the events of that night. We long to relive a part of what happened to us, yet at the same time it scares us… scares us.
        "Scares us shitless," Ernie said.
        Ginger noticed that even Sandy Sarver, who heretofore had perceived only a benign shape to the mystery, was frowning.
        

        
        When Jorja Monatella buried her ex-husband, Alan Rykoff, at eleven o'clock Monday morning, the Las Vegas sun beamed down between scattered iron-gray clouds. A hundred shafts of golden sunshine, some half a mile across, some only a few yards wide, like cosmic spotlights, left many buildings in winter shadows while highlighting others. Several shafts of sunshine moved across the cemetery, harried by the rushing clouds, sweeping eastward across the barren floor of the desert. As the portly funeral director concluded a nondenominational prayer, as the casket was lowered into the waiting grave, a particularly bright beam illuminated the scene, and color burst