Strangers

think he would be able to finish the drive home if he had to do it in full darkness. In the morning they would find him behind the wheel of the van, still parked along the roadside, stark raving mad from having spent long hours in horrified contemplation of the perfectly black landscape.
        In the two and a half weeks since Thanksgiving, he had continued to conceal his irrational fear of darkness from Faye. After she returned from her visit to Wisconsin, Ernie found it more difficult to sleep without a lamp burning, having indulged himself with a night light while she was gone. Every morning he used Murine to clear his bloodshot eyes. Fortunately, she had not suggested going into Elko at night for a movie, so Ernie had not been required to make excuses. A few times, after sunset, he'd had to go from the office to the Tranquility Grille next door, and even though the walk was well-lighted by the motel's outdoor lamps and signs, he had been nearly overwhelmed by a sense of fragility, vulnerability. But he had kept his secret.
        All his life, in the Marine Corps and out of it, to the best of his ability, Ernie Block had done what was required of him, all that could be expected. And now, by God, he was not going to fail his own wife.
        Behind the wheel of the Dodge van, racing westward toward the Tranquility Motel under a smeary orange-purple sky, Ernie Block wondered if his problem was premature senility, Alzheimer's disease. Even though he was only fifty-two, it almost had to be something like Alzheimer's. Although it frightened him, at least he could understand it.
        Understand it, yes, but he could not accept it. Faye depended on him. He could not become a mental invalid, a burden on her. The men in the Block family never let their womenfolk down. Never. Unthinkable.
        The highway rounded a small hillock, and a mile ahead, north of the Interstate, lay the motel, the only building in that vast panorama. Its blue and green neon sign was already switched on, shining fiercely bright against the twilight sky. He'd never seen a more welcome sight.
        Complete darkness was still ten minutes away, and he decided it was foolish to risk being stopped by a cop when he was this close to sanctuary. He eased up on the accelerator, and the speedometer needle swiftly dropped: ninety… eighty-five… seventy-five… sixty…
        He was three-quarters of a mile from home when a curious thing happened: He glanced southward, away from the road, and his breath caught. He did not know what startled him. Something about the landscape. Something about the way the light and shadow played across those down-sloping fields. He was suddenly gripped by the odd idea that a particular piece of ground - a half-mile ahead, on the opposite side of the highway - was of supreme importance in understanding the bizarre changes that had been taking place in him during the past few months.
        … fifty… forty-five… forty…
        He could see nothing to make that piece of land different from the tens of thousands of acres around it. Besides, he had seen it countless times before and had been unimpressed by it. Nevertheless, in the slope of the terrain, in the gently folded contours of the earth, in the bisecting wound of an arroyo, in the configuration of sagebrush and grass, and in the scattered gnarled outcroppings of rock, something seemed to cry out for investigation.
        He felt as if the land itself were saying, "Here, here, here is part of the answer to your problem, part of the explanation for your fear of the night. Here. Here… " But that was ridiculous.
        To his surprise, he found himself pulling to the shoulder of the highway, stopping a quarter-mile from home, not far from the exit ramp to the county road that led past the motel. He squinted south across the highway, at the place that had mysteriously captured his attention.
        He was gripped by the most amazing sense of impending epiphany, an overwhelming feeling that something of monumental importance was about to happen to him. The skin prickled along the back of his neck.
        He got out of the van, leaving it idling behind him. In a state of tremulous expectation that he could not understand, he headed toward the far side of the interstate, where he could have a better look at the plot of ground that fascinated him. He traversed two lanes of blacktop, clambered into the twenty-foot-wide gulley that divided the halves