Strangers

mucked with his mind, scrubbing out certain memories. But still he shouted - fearful, furious. "Why can't I remember? I've got to remember!" He held his left hand toward the poster that featured his name, as if to wrench from its substance the memory that had been in Lomack's mind when he had scrawled "Dominick." His heart thumped. He roared with hot anger: "Goddamn it, goddamn you whoever you are, I will remember. I will remember you sons of bitches. You bastards! I will."
        Suddenly, impossibly, even though he was not touching it, though his hand was still a few feet from it, the poster bearing his name tore loose from the wall. It was fixed in place with four strips of masking tape angled across its corners, but the tape peeled up with the sound of zippers opening, and the poster leapt off the wall as if a wind had blown straight through the lathe and plaster behind it. With a rattle and rustle of paper Vikings, it swooped at him, and he staggered back across the living room in surprise, nearly falling over the books again.
        In his unsteady hand, his flashlight revealed that the poster had stopped a few feet from him. It hung at eye-level, unsupported in thin air, undulating slightly from top to bottom, first bulging out at him and then bending away when the direction of undulation reversed itself. As the pocked surface of that moon rippled, his own handwritten name fluttered and writhed as if it were the legend on a wind-stirred banner.
        Hallucination, he thought desperately.
        But he knew it was really happening.
        He could not breathe, as if the cold air were so syrup-thick with miraculous power that it could not be inhaled.
        The poster floated closer.
        His hands shook. The flashlight jiggled. Sharp glints of light lanced off the undulant surface of the glossy paper.
        After a timeless moment in which the only sound was the crackle of the animated poster, other noise abruptly arose from every part of the room: the zipper-sound of masking tape being pulled loose. On the ceiling, walls, and windows, the other posters simultaneously disengaged themselves. With a brittle clatter-rattle-whoosh, half a hundred moon images exploded toward Dom from every direction, and he cried out in surprise and fear.
        The loosed cry was like a blockage expelled from his windpipe, for he was suddenly able to breathe.
        The last of the tape pulled loose. Fifty posters hung unmoving in midair, not even rippling, as if pasted firmly to nothing whatsoever. The silence in the dead gambler's house was as profound as in a temple devoid of worshipers, a cold and penetrating silence that seemed to pierce to the core of Dom, seeking to replace even the soft liquid susurration of his blood's movement through his arteries and veins.
        Then as if they were fifty parts of a single mechanism brought to life with the flick of a switch, the three-by-five-foot lunar images shivered, rustled, flapped. Although there was not the slightest breeze to propel them, they began to whirl around the room in the orderly manner of horses on a carousel. Dom stood in the middle of that eerie merry-go-round, and the moons circled him; they capered and twirled, curled and uncurled, flexed and flapped, here seen as half-moons and here as crescents and here full-face, and they waxed and waned, ascended and descended, faster, faster, faster still. In the flashlight glow, it seemed like a procession set in motion by the sorcerer's apprentice who, in the old story, had magically imparted life to a bunch of broomsticks.
        Dom's fear receded, making room for wonder. At the moment there seemed no threat in the phenomenon. In fact a wild delight burgeoned in him. He could think of no explanation for what he was witnessing, but stood in dumb astonishment, puzzled and amazed. Usually nothing was so terrifying as the unknown, but perhaps he sensed a benign power at work. Wonderstruck, he turned slowly in a circle, watching the moons parade around him, and at last a tremulous laugh escaped him.
        In an instant, the mood changed dramatically. In a cacophony of imitation wings, the posters flew at Dom as if they were fifty enormous and furious bats. They swooped and darted over his head, slapped his face, beat against his back. Though they were not alive, he attributed malevolent intent to their assault. He put one arm across his face and flailed at the moons with the hand that held the