Free Strangers by Dean Koontz Page B

attention of the police. God knows what might happen. No, no. To avoid jail and protect our reputations, we must not order lunch sooner than three o’clock. In fact, bring me
another
margarita. And another order of these magnificent nachos, please. More salsa—hotter if you’ve got it. A dish of chopped onions, too, please. And another beer for my dismayingly restrained friend.”
    “No,” Dom said. “I’m only half-finished with this one.”
    “That’s what I meant by ‘dismayingly restrained,’ you hopeless Puritan. You’ve sucked at that one so long it must be warm.”
    Ordinarily, Dominick would have leaned back and enjoyed Parker Faine’s energetic performance. The painter’s ebullience, his unfailing enthusiasm for life, was invigorating and amusing. Today, however, Dom was so troubled that he was not amused.
    As the waiter turned away, a small cloud passed over the sun, and Parker leaned in farther under the suddenly deeper shadow beneath the umbrella, returning his attention to Dominick, as if he had read his companion’s mind. “All right, let’s brainstorm. Let’s find some sort of explanation and figure out what to do. You don’t think the problem’s just related to stress…the upcoming publication of your book?”
    “I did. But not anymore. I mean, if the problem was just a mild one, I might be able to accept that career worries lay behind it. But, Jesus, my concerns about
Twilight
just aren’t great enough to generate behavior this unusual, this obsessive…this
crazy.
I go walking almost every night now, and it’s not just the walking that’s weird. The depth of my trance is incredible. Few sleepwalkers are as utterly comatose as I am, and few of them engage in such elaborate tasks as I do. I mean, I was attempting to nail the windows shut! And you don’t attempt to nail your windows shut just to keep out your worries about your career.”
    “You may be more deeply worried about
Twilight
than you realize.”
    “No. It doesn’t make sense. In fact, when the new book continued to go well, my anxiety about
Twilight
started fading. You can’t sit there and honestly tell me you think all this middle-of-the-night lunacy springs just from a few career worries.”
    “No, I can’t,” Parker agreed.
    “I crawl into the backs of those closets to
hide.
And when I wake up behind the furnace, when I’m still half-asleep, I have the feeling that something’s stalking me, searching for me, something that’ll kill me if it finds my hidey-hole. A couple of mornings I woke up trying to scream but unable to get it out. Yesterday, I woke up shouting, ‘Stay away, stay away, stay away!’ And this morning, the knife…”
    “Knife?” Parker said. “You didn’t tell me about a knife.”
    “Woke up behind the furnace, hiding again. Had a butcher’s knife. I’d removed it from the rack in the kitchen while I was sleeping.”
    “For protection? From what?”
    “From whatever…from whoever’s stalking me.”
    “And who
is
stalking you?”
    Dom shrugged. “Nobody that I’m aware of.”
    “I don’t like this. You could’ve cut yourself, maybe badly.”
    “That’s not what scares me the most.”
    “So what scares you the most?”
    Dom looked around at the other people on the terrace. Though some had followed Parker Faine’s bit of theater with the waiter, no one was now paying the least attention to him or Dominick.
    “What scares you the most?” Parker repeated.
    “That I might…might cut someone else.”
    Incredulous, Faine said, “You mean take a butcher’s knife and…go on a murdering rampage in your sleep? No chance.” He gulped his margarita. “Good heavens, what a melodramatic notion! Thankfully, your fiction is not quite so sloppily imagined. Relax, my friend. You’re not the homicidal type.”
    “I didn’t think I was the sleepwalking type, either.”
    “Oh, bullshit. There’s an explanation for this. You’re not mad. Madmen never doubt their sanity.”
    “I