Strangers

not only with guns but with scrub brushes and soap. "My housekeeper doesn't come until Monday. And she's not going to want to deal with this disgusting mess."
        Jorja broke the bloody bathroom's hypnotic hold on her and stumbled blindly a few steps along the hall.
        "Hey," Pepper Carrafield said, "you okay?"
        Jorja gagged, clenched her teeth, moved quickly along the hall, and leaned against the jamb of another doorway.
        "Hey, honey, you were still carrying a torch for him, weren't you?"
        "No," Jorja said softly.
        Pepper moved closer, too close, putting an unwanted consoling hand upon her shoulder. "Sure, you were. Jesus, I'm sorry." Pepper oozed unctuous sympathy, and Jorja wondered if the woman was capable of any genuine emotion that did not have its roots in self-interest. "You said you were burnt out on him, but I should've seen."
        Jorja wanted to shout: You stupid bitch, I'm not carrying a torch for him, but he was still a human being, for Christ's sake. How can you be so callous? What's wrong with you? Is something missing in you?
        But she only said, "I'm all right. I'm all right. Where are his things? I want to sort through them and get out of here."
        Pepper ushered Jorja through the doorway in which she had been leaning, into a bedroom. "He had the bottom drawers of the highboy, plus the left side of the dresser, and that half of the closet. I'll help." She pulled out the lowest drawer of the highboy.
        For Jorja, the room suddenly was as eerie and unreal as a place in a dream. Her heart began to pound, and she moved around the bed toward the first of three things that had filled her with fear. Books. Half a dozen books were stacked on the nightstand. She had seen the word "moon" on the spines of two of them. With trembling hands, she sorted through them and found that all six dealt with the same subject.
        "Something wrong?" Pepper asked.
        Jorja moved to the dresser, on which stood a globe the size of a basketball. A cord trailed from it. She clicked a switch on the cord and found the globe was opaque with a light inside. It was not a globe of the earth but of the moon, with geological features - craters, ridges, plains - clearly named. She gave the glowing sphere a spin.
        The third thing that frightened her was a telescope on a tripod beside the dresser, in front of a window. Nothing about the instrument was different from other amateur telescopes, but to Jorja it seemed ominous, even dangerous, with dark and unknowable associations.
        "Those're Alan's things," Pepper said.
        "He was interested in astronomy? Since when?"
        "For the past couple months," Pepper said.
        The similarities between Alan's and Marcie's conditions troubled Jorja. Marcie's irrational fear of doctors. Alan's compulsive sex drive. Those were different psychological problems - obsessive fear in one case, obsessive attraction in the other - but they shared the element of obsession. Apparently, Marcie had been cured of her phobia. Alan was not as fortunate. He'd had no one to help him, and he had snapped, shooting off the genitals that had come to control him, putting a bullet in his brain. Jorja shuddered. It was too coincidental that father and daughter had been stricken by psychological problems simultaneously, but what made it more than coincidence was the other strangeness they shared: their interest in the moon. Alan had not seen Marcie in six months, and their most recent phone conversation had been in September, weeks before either had become fascinated by the moon. There had been no contact by which either could have transmitted that fascination to the other; it appeared to have sprung up spontaneously in each of them.
        Remembering Marcie's moon-troubled sleep, Jorja said, "Do you know if he was having unusual dreams? About the moon?"
        "Yeah. How'd you figure that? He was having them, but he could never remember any details when he woke up. They started… back in late October, I think it was. Why? What's it matter?"
        "These dreams-were they nightmares?"
        Pepper shook her head. "Not exactly. I'd hear him talking in his sleep. Sometimes he sounded afraid, but lots of times he'd smile, too."
        Jorja felt as if ice had formed in her marrow.
        She turned to look at the lighted globe of the moon.
        What in the hell is going on? she wondered. A shared dream?