Strangers

motel, across the vast meadows and hills of the uninhabited uplands, and the only light out there was what fell from the stars. He must pull the drapes aside, come face to face with that tenebrous landscape, stand fast, endure it. Confrontation would be a purgative, flushing the poison from his system.
        Ernie pulled open the drapes. He peered out at the night and told himself that this perfect blackness was not so bad - deep and pure, vast and cold, but not malevolent, and in no way a personal threat.
        However, as he watched, unmoving and unmovable, portions of the darkness seemed to… well, to shift, to coalesce, forming into not quite visible but nonetheless solid shapes, lumps of pulsing and denser blackness within the greater blackness, lurking phantoms that at any moment might launch themselves toward the fragile window.
        He clenched his jaws, put his forehead against the ice-cold glass.
        The Nevada barrens, a huge emptiness to begin with, now seemed to expand even farther. He could not see the night-cloaked mountains, but he sensed that they were magically receding, that the plains between him and the mountains were growing larger, extending outward hundreds of miles, thousands, expanding swiftly toward infinity, until suddenly he was at the center of a void so immense that it defied description. On all sides of him, there was emptiness and lightlessness beyond man's ability to measure, beyond the limits of his own feeble imagination, a terrible emptiness, to the left and right, front and back, above and below, and suddenly he could not breathe.
        This was considerably worse than anything he had known before. A deeper-reaching fear. Profound. Shocking in its power. And it was in total control of him.
        Abruptly he was aware of all the weight of that enormous darkness, and it seemed to be sliding inexorably in upon him, sliding and sliding, incalculably high walls of heavy darkness, collapsing, pressing down, squeezing the breath out of him-
        He screamed and threw himself back from the window.
        He fell to his knees as the drapes dropped into place with a soft rustle. The window was hidden again. The darkness was concealed. All around him was light, blessed light. He hung his head, shuddered, and took great gulps of air.
        He crawled to the bed and hoisted himself onto the mattress, where he lay for a long time, listening to his heartbeat, which was like footfalls, sprinting then running then just walking fast inside him. Instead of solving his problem, bold confrontation had made it worse.
        "What's happening here?" he said aloud, staring at the ceiling. "What's wrong with me? Dear God, what's wrong with me?"
        It was November 22.
        

    4.
        

    Laguna Beach, California
        
        Saturday, in desperate reaction to yet another troubling episode of somnambulism, Dom Corvaisis thoroughly, methodically exhausted himself. By nightfall, he intended to be so wrung out that he'd sleep as still as a stone locked immemortally in the bosom of the earth. At seven o'clock in the morning, with the night's cool mist lingering in the canyons and bearding the trees, he performed half an hour of vigorous calisthenics on the patio overlooking the ocean, then put on his running shoes and did seven arduous miles on Laguna's sloped streets. He spent the next five hours doing heavy gardening. Then, because it was a warm day, he put on his swimsuit, put towels in his Firebird, and went to the beach. He sunbathed a little and swam a lot. After dinner at Picasso's, he walked for another hour along shop-lined streets sparsely populated by off-season tourists. At last he drove home.
        Undressing in his bedroom, Dom felt as if he were in the land of Lilliput, where a thousand tiny people were pulling him down with grappling lines. He rarely drank, but now he tossed back a shot of Rdmy Martin. In bed, he fell asleep even as he clicked off the lamp.
        
        The incidents of somnambulism were growing more frequent, and the problem was now the central issue of his life. It was interfering with his work. The new book, which had been going well - it contained the best writing he had ever done was stalled. In the past two weeks, he had awakened in a closet on nine occasions, four times in the last four nights. The affliction had ceased to be amusing and intriguing. He was afraid to go to sleep because, asleep, he was not in