Strangers

house first. Keeping his head down to avoid seeing the moons, which exerted a tidal force on him as real as the true moon's effect on the seas, he scurried into the bedroom, opened the closet, shoved the clothes aside, located his Remington.12-gauge and a box of shells. Head bowed, fighting the urge to look up, he made his way to the kitchen, where he loaded the shotgun and put it on the garbage-strewn table. Speaking aloud, he made a bargain with himself:
        "You get rid of the moon books, tear down the pictures so this place don't look so crazy, clean the kitchen, shave, bathe. Then maybe you'll get your head clear enough to figure what the hell's wrong with you. Then you can get help - just not while things are like this."
        The shotgun was the unspoken part of the bargain. He had been fortunate to rise briefly out of the moon-dream in which he had been living, shocked to his senses by the lack of food in the refrigerator, but if he drifted back into that nightmare, he could not count on being jolted awake again. Therefore, if he could not resist the siren song of the moons on the walls, he would quickly return to the kitchen, pick up the shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pull the trigger.
        Death was better than this.
        And death was better than being locked up forever like his father.
        Now, in the living room once more, keeping his eyes on the floor, he began to gather up the books. Some had once boasted jackets with photos of the moon, but he had clipped those pictures. He hefted an armload of them and went outside to the snow-covered back yard, where there was a barbecue pit lined with concrete blocks. Shivering in the crisp winter air, he dumped the books into the pit and headed back to the house for more, not daring to look at the night sky for fear of the great luminous body suspended in it.
        As he worked, the urge to return to the study of the moon was as intense and demanding as the hideous need that forced a heroin addict to return again and again to the needle, but Zeb fought it.
        Likewise, as he made trip after trip to the barbecue pit, he felt that memory of some long-forgotten event continuing to swell within him: Dominick, Ginger, Faye, Ernie… Instinctively, he knew that he would understand the cause of his fascination with the moon if only he could recall who those four people were. He concentrated on the names, trying to use them to block out the alluring summons of the moon, and it seemed to work because soon he had disposed of two or three hundred volumes in the barbecue pit and was ready to set them ablaze.
        But when he struck a match and leaned down to light the pages of a book, he discovered the pit was empty. He stared in shock and horror. Dropping the matches, he raced back to the house, threw open the kitchen door, stumbled inside, and saw what he had been most afraid of seeing. The books were piled there, damp with snow, smeared with wet ashes from the pit. He had indeed disposed of them, but then the lunacy had taken him again; under its spell and without knowing what he was doing, he had carried every volume back into the house.
        He began to cry, but he was still determined he would not wind up in a padded room. He picked up a score of books and headed back toward the barbecue pit, feeling as if he were in hell and condemned, for eternity, to the performance of this frantic ritual.
        When he figured he had filled the pit again, he suddenly realized he was not carrying books to the place of burning but away from it. Again, he had drifted off into his moon-dream and, instead of destroying the objects of his obsession, he was re-collecting them.
        As he headed back toward the house, he noticed how the crust of snow glimmered with a scintillant, reflected light. Against his will, his head came up. He looked into the deep and nearly cloudless sky.
        He said, "The moon."
        He knew then that he was a dead man.
        
        Laguna Beach, California.
        For Dominick Corvaisis, Christmas was usually not much different from other days. He had no wife or children to make it special. Raised in foster homes, he had no relatives with whom he could share a turkey and mincemeat pie. A couple of friends, including Parker Faine, always invited him to join in their festivities, but he declined, for he knew he would feel like the proverbial fifth wheel. However, Christmas was not sad or lonely. He was