Strangers

furniture.
        
        There was more to the story, which had apparently been a local sensation for the past two weeks. Dom read with growing fascination and uneasiness. Most likely, Zebediah Lomack's mad obsession with the moon had nothing to do with Dom's own problems. Coincidence Yet… he felt a stirring of precisely that fear - part terror, part horror, and part awe - that filled him when he woke from his nightmares, that also overwhelmed him when he went sleepwalking and tried to nail windows shut.
        He pored over the article several times, and at nine-fifteen, in spite of his weariness, he decided that he had to get a look in the Lomack house. He dressed, retrieved his rented car from the hotel's valet parking, and got directions to Wass Valley Road from the attendant. Reno was below the snowline, so the night was dry and the roads clean. Dom stopped at an all-night Save-On drugstore to buy a flashlight. He arrived at 1420 Wass Valley Road shortly after ten o'clock and parked across the street.
        The house was actually a bungalow with large porches, every bit as modest as the news account had indicated. It sat on a half-acre lot. From previous storms, snow lay in patches on the roof, covered the lawn, weighted the branches of several large pines. The windows were dark.
        According to the article in the Reno newspaper, Eleanor Wolsey, Zebediah Lomack's sister, had flown in from Florida three days after his death, on December 28. She arranged the funeral services, which had been conducted on the thirtieth, and was staying over until the estate was settled. However, she was at a hotel rather than in her brother's house, because the bungalow was too depressing.
        Dom was a law-abiding citizen; the prospect of breaking into the house gave him no thrill. But it had to be done because there was no way he could see it except by forced entry. He saw no point in trying to persuade Eleanor Wolsey to allow a visit tomorrow, for she had been quoted in the newspaper as saying that she was sick and tired of gawkers and that she was repulsed by the perverse curiosity of strangers.
        Five minutes later, on the back porch of the Lomack bungalow, Dom discovered that the door was equipped with a deadbolt in addition to its regular lock. He tried the windows that faced onto the porch. The one above the kitchen sink was unlatched. He slid it open and clambered inside.
        Hooding the flashlight with one hand to avoid drawing the notice of anyone outside, he swept the narrowed beam around the kitchen, which was no longer in the disgusting condition in which Reno policemen had found it on Christmas. According to the newspaper, just two days ago Lomack's sister began cleaning the house and preparing it for sale. Evidently she had started here. The garbage was gone. The counters were clean, and the floor was spotless. The air was filled with the stink of new paint and Spectracide. A single startled roach scurried along the baseboard and disappeared behind the refrigerator, but there was no longer a gross infestation. And there were no pictures of the moon.
        Dom was suddenly worried that Eleanor Wolsey and her helpers might have made too much progress. Perhaps all traces of Zebediah Lomack's obsession had been stripped down, scrubbed out, and thrown away.
        But that concern was quickly put to rest when Dom followed the pale probing beam of the flashlight into the living room, where the walls and ceiling and windows were still papered with big posters of the moon. It seemed as if he were hanging in deep space, in some crowded realm where half a hundred cratered worlds orbited impossibly close to one another. The effect was disorienting. He felt dizzy, and his mouth went dry.
        He moved slowly out of the living room into a hallway, where hundreds of pictures of the moon - some color and some black-and-white, some large and some small, some overlapping others - had been fixed to every inch of the walls with glue, Scotch tape, masking tape, and staples. The same decorations had been applied in both bedrooms as well, so the omnipresent moons seemed almost like a fungus that had spored and spread throughout the house, creeping into every corner.
        The newspaper report had said that no one but Lomack had been in the house for more than a year prior to his suicide. Dom believed it, for if visitors had seen the work of this lunatic cut-and-paste Michelangelo, they would