Strangers

have contacted the mental health authorities at once. The neighbors told of the gambler's rapid metamorphosis from a hail-fellow to a recluse. Apparently his fascination with the moon had begun the summer before last.
        The summer before last… The timing uncannily paralleled the changes in Dom's own life.
        Second by second, Dom grew more uneasy. He could not understand the insane behavior that had created this eerie display, could not put himself inside the fevered mind of Lomack, but he could empathize with the gambler's terror. Just moving through the moon-crowded house, shining his flashlight on the lunar faces, Dom felt a tingling along the back of his neck. The moons did not mesmerize him as they had evidently mesmerized Lomack, but as he stared at them he sensed instinctively that the impulse that had driven Lomack to paper his house with moon images was the same impulse that drove Dom himself to dream of them.
        He and Lomack had shared some experience in which the moon had figured or of which it was an apt and powerful symbol. The summer before last they had been in the same place at the same time. The wrong place at the wrong time.
        Lomack had been driven mad by the stress of repressed memories.
        Will I be driven mad, too? Dom wondered as he stood in the master bedroom, turning slowly in a circle.
        A new and grim thought struck him. Suppose Lomack had not killed himself out of despair over his unshakable obsession but had, instead, been compelled to shove the shotgun barrel into his mouth because he had finally remembered what had happened to him the summer before last. Maybe the memory was far worse than the mystery. Maybe, if the truth were revealed, sleepwalking and nightmares would seem less terrifying than what had happened during that drive from Portland to Mountainview.
        Moons… The oppressiveness of those pendulant forms drastically increased. The claustrophobic mural made breathing difficult. The moons seemed to portend some unreadable but manifestly evil fate that awaited him, and he stumbled out of the room, suddenly eager to flee from them.
        Among a herd of leaping and prancing shadows whipped up by the bobbling beam of the flashlight, he ran down the short hall, into the living room, tripped over a stack of books, and fell with a jarring crash. For a moment he lay stunned. But his senses swiftly cleared, and he was jolted to find himself staring at the word "Dominick," which was scrawled in felttip pen across the luminous moon-face in one of the dozens of identical big posters. He had not noticed it when he had come through from the kitchen earlier, but now he had fallen so that the flash in his right hand was aimed just right.
        A chill rippled through Dom. He had read nothing about this in the newspaper, but the handwriting surely belonged to Lomack. To the best of his knowledge, he had not known the gambler. Yet to pretend that this was another Dominick would be to embrace an outrageous coincidence.
        He got up from the floor and took a couple of steps toward the poster that bore his name, stopping six feet from it. In the penumbra of the flashlight beam, he saw writing on an adjacent poster. His own name was only one of four that Lomack had scribbled across four lunar images: DOMINICK, GINGER, FAYE, ERNIE. If his name was here because he had shared a forgotten nightmarish experience with Lomack, then the other three must have been fellow sufferers as well, though Dom could remember nothing whatsoever about them.
        He thought of the priest in the Polaroid snapshot. Was that Ernie?
        And the blond strapped to the bed. Was she Ginger? Or Faye?
        As he moved the light from one name to the other and back again, some dark and awesome memory did indeed stir in him. But it remained far down in his subconscious, an amorphous blur like a giant ocean creature swimming past just below the mottled surface of a murky sea, its existence revealed only by the rippled wake of its passage and by the flicker of shadow and light in the water. He tried to reach out for the memory and seize it, but it dove deep and vanished.
        From the moment he had come into the Lomack place, Dom had been in the hands of fear, but now frustration took an even tighter grip on him. He shouted in the empty house, and his voice echoed coldly off the moon-papered walls. "Why can't I remember?" He knew why, of course: Someone had