Strangers

there was the slightest chance, I'd have told you," Heeton said. "Now, let me have one last look."
        Brendan turned his hands palms-up for examination.
        "What the devil?" Dr. Heeton said, surprised.
        The rings were gone.
        

    ***
        
        That night, in his room at the Holiday Inn, Brendan again endured the by-now familiar nightmare about which he had spoken with Father Wycazik. It had disturbed his sleep twice before in the past week.
        He dreamed he was lying in a strange place, with his arms and legs restrained by straps or braces. From out of a haze, a pair of hands reached for him. Hands encased in shiny black gloves.
        He woke in knots of sweat-soaked sheets, sat up in bed, and leaned back against the headboard, letting the dream evaporate as sweat dried on his forehead. In the dark he brought his hands to his face to blot it-and went rigid when his palms touched his cheeks. He switched on the lamp. The swollen, inflamed rings had returned to his palms. But as he watched, they faded.
        It was Thursday, December 12.
        

    9.
        

    Laguna Beach, California
        
        Dom Corvaisis thought he had slept Wednesday night straight through in peace. He woke in bed, in precisely the same position in which he had gone to sleep, as if he had not moved an inch during the night.
        But when he went to work at his Displaywriter, he was dismayed to find proof of his somnambulistic wandering on the current work diskette. As on a few other occasions, he apparently had gone to the Displaywriter in his night trance and had repeatedly typed two words. Previously, he had typed, "I'm scared," but this time there were two different words:
        The moon. The moon. The moon. The moon.
        The moon. The moon. The moon. The moon.
        There were hundreds of repetitions of those seven letters, and he was at once reminded that he had heard himself murmuring the same words in a state of drowsy disorientation, just as he had fallen asleep last Sunday. Dominick stared at the screen for a long time, chilled, but he had no idea what special meaning "the moon" held for him, if any.
        The Valium and Dalmane therapy was working well. Until now, there had been no new episodes of sleepwalking and no dreams since last weekend, when he'd had that nasty nightmare about being forced face-down into a sink. He had seen Dr. Cobletz again, and the physician had been pleased by his swift progress.
        Cobletz had said, "I'm going to extend your prescriptions, but be sure not to take the Valium more than once-or at most, twice - a day."
        "I never do," Dom had lied.
        "And only one Dalmane a night. I don't want you becoming drug-dependent. I'm sure we'll beat this thing by the first of the year."
        Dom believed Cobletz was correct, which was why he did not want to worry the doctor by confessing that there were days when he only made it through with the aid of Valium and nights when he took two or even three Dalmane tablets, washing some of them down with beer or Scotch. But in a couple of weeks he could stop taking them without fear that the somnambulism would get a new grip on him. The treatment was working. That was the important thing. The treatment was, thank God, working.
        Until now.
        The moon.
        Frustrated and angry, he deleted the words from the diskette, a hundred lines of them, four repetitions to the line.
        He stared at the screen a long time, growing increasingly nervous.
        Finally he took a Valium.
        

    ***
        
        That morning Dom got no work done, and at eleven-thirty he and Parker Faine picked up Denny Ulmes and Nyugen Kao Tran, the two boys assigned to them by the Orange County chapter of Big Brothers of America. They had planned a lazy afternoon at the beach, dinner at Hamburger Hamlet, and a movie, and Dominick had been looking forward to the outing.
        He had become involved in the Big Brothers program years earlier in Portland, Oregon. It had been his only community involvement, the only thing that had been able to bring him out of his rabbit hole.
        He had spent his own childhood in a series of foster homes, lonely and increasingly withdrawn. Some day, when he finally got married, he hoped to adopt kids. In the meantime, when he spent time with these kids, he was not only helping them but was also comforting the lonely child within