Strangers

flashlight, but they did not fall back. The noise grew louder and more frantic as the paper wings beat on the chilly air and on one another.
        His previous delight forgotten, -Dom stumbled across the room in a panic, searching for the way out. But he could see nothing but zooming, soaring, spinning moons. No doors. No windows. He staggered one way, then another, disoriented.
        The noise grew still worse as, in the hallways and other rooms of the bungalow, a thousand moons began to tear free of their petrified orbits upon the walls. Tape pulled loose, and staples popped out of plaster, and glue suddenly lost its adhesiveness. A thousand cratered moonforms - and then a thousand more - detached themselves and rose into suspension with ten thousand rustles, spun and swooped toward the living room with a hundred thousand clicks and crackles and hisses, swinging into orbit around Dom with a steadily swelling roar that sounded as if he were immersed in raging flames. The glossy full-color pictures torn from magazines and books now flashed and sparkled and shimmered as they darted through the flashlight beam, contributing to the scintillant illusion of fire, and the black-and-white pictures cascaded down and spiraled up like bits of ash caught in thermal currents.
        Gasping for breath, he sucked in slick-paper and newsprint moons and had to spit them out. Thousands of small paper worlds seethed around him in layer upon layer, and when he hysterically parted one curtain composed of false planetoids, there was only another behind it.
        Intuitively, he perceived that this impossible display was meant to help him break through to a full recollection of his unremembered nightmares. He had no idea who or what lay behind the phenomenon, but he sensed the purpose. If he immersed himself in the storm of moons and let them sweep him away, he'd understand his dreams, understand the frightening cause of them, and know what had happened to him on the road eighteen months ago. But he was too scared to let go and be drawn into a trance by the mesmerizing weave-and-bobble of the pale spheres. He longed for that revelation but was terrified of it. He said, "No. No." He pressed his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. "Stop it! Stop it!" His heart hammered two beats to each exclamation. "Stop it!" His throat cracked as his cries broke loose: "Stop it!"
        He was astonished when the tumult was cut off with the suddenness of a symphony orchestra terminating a thunderous crescendo on one last bone-shaking note. He did not expect his shouted commands to be obeyed, and he still did not think his words had done the trick.
        He took his hands away from his ears. He opened his eyes.
        A galaxy full of moons hung around him.
        With a trembling hand, he plucked one of the pictures from its unsupported perch upon the air. Wonderingly, he turned it over in his hand. Tested its substance between two fingers. There was nothing special about the picture, yet it had been suspended magically before him, just as thousands more were still suspended, motionless.
        "How?" he said shakily, as if the moons, being able to levitate, ought also to be able to speak. "How? Why?"
        The moons fell as one. As by the breaking of some spell, the thousands of pieces of paper dropped straight to the floor, where they lay in uneven heaps, in a drift over Dom's winter boots, with no lingering trace of the mysterious life-force that had possessed them.
        Bewildered and half in shock, Dom shuffled toward the doorway that led to the hall. The moons crunched and rustled like dry autumn leaves. At the door he stopped and played his flashlight beam slowly over the short corridor, where not a single lunar image remained moored by staples, tape, or glue. The walls had been stripped bare.
        Turning, he took a couple of steps into the center of the living room once more, then knelt among the debris. He put down the glowing flashlight and sifted paper moons through his trembling hands, trying to understand what he had seen.
        Within him, fear fought delighted amazement and terror battled awe. But in truth he could not decide how he ought to feel, because there was no precedent for what he had experienced. One moment a giddy laugh began to build, but then joy was frozen by a breath of cold horror. Now he felt he'd been in the presence of something unspeakably evil, but now he was just as