Strangers

condition. They spoke urgently to each other. Although he knew they were speaking English, he could not understand them. A cold hand touched him. He heard the clink of glass. Somewhere a door shut.
        With the flash-cut suddenness of a scene transition in a film, the dream shifted to a bathroom or kitchen. Someone was forcing his face down into the sink. Breathing became even more difficult. The air was like mud: with each inhalation it clogged his nostrils. He choked and gasped and tried to blow out the mud-thick air, and the two people with him were shouting at him, and as before he could not understand what they were saying, and they pressed his face down into the sink-
        Dom woke and was still in bed. Last weekend he had been flung free of the dream only to discover that he had walked in his sleep and had been acting out the nightmare at his own bathroom sink. This time, he was relieved to find himself beneath the sheets.
        I am getting better, he thought.
        Trembling, he sat up and switched on the light.
        No barricades. No signs of somnambulistic panic.
        He looked at the digital clock: two-oh-nine A. M. A half-empty can of warm beer stood on the nightstand. He washed down another Dalmane tablet.
        I am getting better.
        It was Friday the thirteenth.
        

    10.
        

    Elko County, Nevada
        
        Friday night, three days after his weird experience on the I80, Ernie Block couldn't sleep at all. As darkness embraced him, his nerves wound tighter, tighter, until he thought he would start screaming and be unable to stop.
        Slipping out of bed as soundlessly as he could, pausing to make sure that Faye's slow and even breathing had not changed, he went into the bathroom, closed the door, turned on the light. Wonderful light. He reveled in the light. He put down the lid of the commode and sat for fifteen minutes in his underwear, just letting the brightness scar him, as mindlessly happy as a lizard on a sun-washed rock.
        Finally he knew he must return to the bedroom. If Faye woke, and if he remained in here too long, she would begin to think something was wrong. He was determined to do nothing that would make her suspicious.
        Although he had not used the toilet, he flushed it for cover, and went to the sink to wash his hands. He had just finished rinsing off the soap and had plucked the towel off the rack when his eyes were drawn to the only window in the room. It was above the bathtub, a rectangle about three feet wide and two feet high, which opened outward on an overhead piano hinge. Although the glass was frosted and provided no view of the night beyond, a shiver passed through Ernie as he stared at the opaque pane. More disturbing than the shiver was the sudden rush of peculiar, urgent thoughts that came with it:
        The window's big enough to get through, I could get away, escape, and the roof of the utility room is under the window, so there's not a long drop, and I could be off, into the arroyo behind the motel, up into the hills, make my way east, get to a ranch somewhere and get help…
        Blinking furiously as that swift train of thoughts flashed through his mind and faded away, Ernie discovered that he had stepped from the sink to the bathtub. He did not remember moving.
        He was bewildered by the urge to escape. From whom? From what? Why? This was his own home. He had nothing to fear within these walls.
        Yet he could not take his glaze from the milky window. A dreaminess had come over him. He was aware of it but unable to cast it off.
        Got to get out, get away, there won't be another chance, not another chance like this, now, go now, go, go…
        Unwittingly, he had stepped into the tub and was directly in front of the window, which was set in the wall at face-level. The porcelain coating of the tub was cold against his bare feet.
        Slide back the latch, push up the window, stand on the rim of the tub, pull yourself up onto the sill, out and away, a three- or four-minute headstart before you're missed, not much but enough…
        Panic rose in him without reason. There was a fluttering in his guts, a tightness in his chest.
        Without knowing why he was doing it, yet unable to stop himself, he slid the bolt from the latch on the bottom of the window. He pushed out. The window swung up.
        He was not alone.
        Something was at the other side of