Strangers by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

Don’t do anything cerebral. Get plenty of physical exercise. Go to bed tired every night, so tired that you can’t even bother to think about the book you’ve been working on. A few days of that, and you’ll be cured. I’m convinced of it.”
    Saturday, Dom began the treatment Dr. Cobletz prescribed, devoting himself to physical activity, though with more single-mindedness and flagellant persistence than the doctor had suggested. Consequently, he plummeted into a deep sleep the moment he put his head upon the pillow, and in the morning he did not wake in a closet.
    He did not wake in bed, either. This time, he was in the garage.
    He regained consciousness in a breathless state of terror, gasping, his heart hammering so hard it seemed capable of shattering his ribs with its furious blows. His mouth was dry, his hands curled into fists. He was cramped and sore, partly from Saturday’s excess of exercise, but partly from the unnatural and uncomfortable position in which he had been sleeping. During the night he evidently had taken two folded canvas dropcloths from a shelf above the workbench, and had squirreled into a narrow service space behind the furnace. That was where he lay now, concealed beneath the tarps.
    “Concealed” was the right word. He had not dragged the tarpaulins over himself merely for warmth. He had taken refuge behind the furnace and beneath the canvas because he had been hiding from something.
    From what?
    Even now, as Dominick pushed the tarps aside and struggled to sit up, as sleep receded and as his bleary eyes adjusted to the shadow-filled garage, the intense anxiety that had accompanied him up from sleep still clung tenaciously. His pulse pounded.
    Fear of what?
    Dreaming. In his nightmare he must have been running and hiding from some monster. Yes. Of course. His peril in the nightmare caused him to sleepwalk, and when, in the dream, he sought a place to hide, he also hid in reality, creeping behind the furnace.
    His white Firebird loomed ghostlike in the vague light from the wall vents and the single window above the workbench. Shuffling across the garage, he felt as if he were a revenant himself.
    In the house, he went directly to his office. Morning light filled the room, making him squint. He sat at the desk in his filthy pajama bottoms, switched on the word processor, and studied the documents on the diskette that he had left in the machine. The diskette was as he had left it on Thursday; it contained no new material.
    Dom had hoped that, in his sleep, he might have left a message that would help him understand the source of his anxiety. That knowledge was obviously held by his subconscious but thus far denied to his conscious mind. When sleepwalking, his subconscious was in control, and possibly it would try to explain things to his conscious mind by way of the Displaywriter. But as yet, it had not.
    He switched off the machine. He sat for a long time, staring out the window, toward the ocean. Wondering...
    Later, in the bedroom, as he was on his way to the master bath, he found something strange. Nails were scattered across the carpet, and he had to be careful where he walked. He stooped, picked up several of them. They were all alike: 1.5-inch steel finishing nails. At the far side of the room, he saw two objects that drew him there. Beneath the window, from which the drapes had been drawn aside, a box of nails lay on the floor by the baseboard; it was only half full because part of its contents had spilled from it. Beside the box was a hammer.
    He lifted the hammer, hefted it, frowned.
    What had he been doing in those lonely hours of the night?
    He raised his eyes to the windowsill and saw three loose nails that he had laid there. They gleamed in the sunlight.
    Judging from the evidence, he’d been preparing to nail the windows shut. Jesus. Something had so frightened him that he had intended to nail the windows shut and make a fortress of his house, but before he could set himself