Strangers

moon…
        
        Laguna Beach, California.
        "The moon! The moon!"
        Dominick Corvaisis was awakened by his own fearful shouting and by a burning pain in his right wrist. He was on his hands and knees in the darkness beside his bed, wrenching frantically at something that had a grip on his arm. He continued to struggle for a few seconds until the mists of sleep cleared, whereupon he realized that he was being held by nothing more sinister than the rope with which he had tethered himself.
        Breathing raggedly, heart pounding, he fumbled for the lamp switch and winced as the sudden light stung his eyes. A quick look at the restraining rope showed that in his sleep (and in the dark) he had completely untied one of the four tightly drawn knots and partially unraveled a second before losing patience for the task. Then, in the panic that always accompanied his sleepwalking, he evidently had begun to pull and tug and twist against the belaying line as if he were a dumb animal protesting a leash, painfully abrading his right wrist.
        Dom got off the floor and, pushing aside the tangled blankets, sat on the edge of the bed.
        He knew he had been dreaming, though he could not recall anything about the dream. However, he was pretty sure that it was not the nightmare he had endured on other occasions during the past month, for that one had had nothing to do with the moon. This was another dream, equally terrifying but in a different way.
        His shouts, which had been partly responsible for waking him, had been so importunate, so haunted, so fright-filled that he could even now summon them in memory as clearly as he had first heard them: "The moon! The moon!" He shuddered and raised his hands to his throbbing head.
        The moon. What did it mean?
        
        Boston, Massachusetts.
        Ginger sat straight up in bed with a shrill cry.
        Lavinia, the Hannabys' housekeeper, said, "Oh, I'm sorry, Dr. Weiss. Didn't mean to scare you. You were having a nightmare."
        "Nightmare?" Ginger had no recollection of a dream.
        "Oh, yes," Lavinia said, "and a really bad one from the sound of it. I was passing in the hall when I heard you crying out. I almost came in right away, until I realized you must be dreaming. I hesitated then, but you went on and on, shouting it over and over again, until I thought I'd better wake you."
        Blinking, Ginger said, "Shouting? What was I shouting?"
        "Over and over again," the housekeeper said."
        "The moon, the moon, the moon." You sounded so frightened."
        "I don't remember."
        "The moon,' " Lavinia assured her, " 'the moon,' over and over again, in such a voice that I half-thought someone was killing you."

PART II
        
    Days of Discovery
        

    Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
    -MARK TWAIN
        

    Is there some -meaning to this life? What purpose lies behind the strife? Whence do we come, where are we bound? These cold questions echo and resound through each day, each lonely night. We long to find the splendid light that will cast a revelatory beam upon the meaning of the human dream.
    -THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS
        

    A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.
    -RALPH WALDO EMERSON

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    FOUR
        

    December 26-January 11
        

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    1.
        

    Boston, Massachusetts
        
        Between December 27 and January 5, Dr. Ginger Weiss went to Pablo Jackson's Back Bay apartment six times. On six of those visits he used hypnotic therapy to probe cautiously and patiently at the Azrael Block that sealed off a portion of her memory.
        To the old magician, she grew more beautiful each time she arrived at his door - more intelligent, charming, and appealingly tough-minded, too. Pablo saw in her the kind of woman he would have wanted as a daughter. Ginger had stirred in him protective fatherly feelings that he had never known before.
        He told her nearly everything he had learned from Alexander Christophson at the Hergensheimers' Christmas party. She resisted the idea that her memory block had not developed naturally but had been implanted by persons unknown. "Too bizarre. Things like that don't happen to ordinary people like me. I'm just a farmishteh from Brooklyn, not someone who gets involved in international intrigue."
        The only thing about his conversation