Strangers

never bored by his own company, and his home overflowed with good books that could fill the day with delight.
        But this Christmas Dom could not concentrate to read, for he was preoccupied by the mysterious mail he had received the previous day and by the need to resist the urge to pop a Valium. Though he had been afraid that he would dream and walk in his sleep, he had taken no Valium yesterday and no Dalmane last night. He was determined to avoid any further reliance on chemicals, though he continued to crave them.
        In fact, the craving became so bad that he emptied the pills into the toilet and flushed them away, because he did not trust himself. As the day wore on, his anxiety rose to the level he had experienced before he had begun drug therapy.
        At seven o'clock Christmas night, Dom arrived at Parker's rambling hillside contemporary and accepted a glass of homemade eggnog with a cinnamon stick in it. The burly painter's beard, usually bushy and untamed, was neatly trimmed, and his mane of hair was newly cut and combed in honor of the holiday. Though he was more conservatively groomed and more subdued in dress than was his habit, he was every bit as ebullient as one expected him to be. "What a Christmas! Peace and love reigned in this house today, I tell you! My cherished brother made only forty or fifty nasty and envious remarks about my success, which is not half as many as he lets loose with on a less blessed occasion. My sainted half-sister, Carla, only once called her sister-in-law Doreen a bitch, and even that might be considered justified in light of the fact that Doreen started it by calling Carla a 'brainless New Age crackpot full of psychobabble." Ah, truly a day of fellowship and caring! Not one punch thrown this year, if you can believe it. And Carla's husband, though he got plastered as usual, did not throw up or fall down a flight of stairs, as in past years, though he did insist on doing his Bette Midler imitation at least a dozen times."
        As they moved toward a grouping of chairs by the window-wall overlooking the sea, Dom said, "I'm going on a trip, a long drive. I'll fly to Portland and rent a car up there. Then I'll retrace the journey I took the summer before last, from Portland down to Reno, across Nevada and half of Utah on Interstate 80, then to Mountainview."
        Dom sat down as he spoke, but Parker remained on his feet, very still. The announcement pleasantly electrified him. "What's happened? That's no vacation. That's not a route you'd take for pleasure. Are you sleepwalking again? Must be. And something's happened to convince you this is related to the changes you underwent that summer."
        "I haven't begun sleepwalking again, but I'm sure I will, probably tonight, because I've thrown the damn drugs away. They weren't curing me. I lied. I was getting hooked, Parker. I didn't care because it seemed that being hooked was better than enduring the things I did while sleepwalking. But now all that's changed because of these." He held up the two notes from his unknown correspondent. "The problem's not just within me, not just psychological. There's something stranger at work here." He gave the first note to Parker. His fearful state of mind was betrayed by the sheet of paper, which shook in his hand.
        When the painter read it, he looked baffled.
        Dom said, "It came in the mail yesterday at the post office. No return address. There was another note delivered to the house." He explained about having typed the words "the moon" on his word processor hundreds of times in his sleep and about waking from a dream with those same words on his lips, then passed the second note to Parker.
        "But if I'm the first one you've told about this moon thing, how could anyone have known enough to send such a note?"
        "Whoever he is," Dom said, "he knows about my sleepwalking, maybe because I've gone to a doctor about it-"
        "You're saying you're being watched?"
        "Apparently, to a degree. Periodically monitored if not constantly watched. But while the monitor knows about my sleepwalking, he probably doesn't know about my typing those words on the Displaywriter, or that I woke up repeating them in the night. Not unless he was standing beside my bed, which he wasn't. However, he indisputably does know that I'll react to "the moon," that those words'll frighten me. So he must know what lies behind this whole crazy