Strangers

page featured a mill seal or brand-name watermark, which might have proven that the original note had not been typed on paper from his own stock.
        He thought: Parker, Dr. Cobletz, and me. Who else could know?
        And what was the note trying to tell him, exactly? What secret was buried in his past? What suppressed trauma or forgotten event lay at the root of his somnambulism?
        Sitting at his desk, staring at the night beyond the big window, straining blindly toward understanding, he grew tense.
        Again, he felt a need for Valium, almost a craving, but he resisted.
        The note engaged his curiosity, logic, and reason. He was able to focus his intellect on the search for a solution and concentrate with an intensity of which he had not been capable recently, and thus he found the will power to forsake the solace of tranquilization.
        He was beginning to feel good about himself for the first time in weeks. In spite of the helplessness in which he had been wallowing, he now realized that, after all, he still had the power to shape and direct the course of his own life. All he had needed was something like the note, something tangible on which he could focus.
        He paced around the house, carrying the note, thinking. Eventually he came to a front window from which he could see his curbside mailbox - a brick column with a metal receptacle mortared into it - standing in the bluish fall of light from a mercury-vapor streetlamp.
        Because he kept the post office drawer in town, the only mail he got at home was that addressed to "Occupant" and occasional cards or letters from friends who had both his mailing and street address but who sometimes forgot that all correspondence was to go to the former. Standing at the window, staring at the curbside receptacle, Dom realized that he had not picked up today's delivery.
        He went outside, down the front walk to the street, and used a key to unlock the receptacle. Except for the breeze that rustled the trees, the night was quiet. The wind carried the scent of the sea, and the air was chilly. The overhead mercury-vapor lamp was sufficiently bright for Dom to identify the mail as he withdrew it from the box: six advertising flyers and catalogs, two Christmas cards… and a plain white business-size envelope with no return address.
        Excited, fearful, he hurried back into the house, to his study, tearing open the white envelope and extracting a single sheet of paper as he went. At his desk, he unfolded the letter. The moon.
        No other words could have shocked him as badly as those.
        He felt as if he had fallen into the White Rabbit's hole and was tumbling down into a fantastic realm where logic and reason no longer applied.
        The moon. This was impossible. No one knew he had awakened from bad dreams with those words on his lips, repeating them in panic: "The moon, moon…" And no one knew that, while sleepwalking, he had typed those words on the Displaywriter. He'd told neither Parker nor Cobletz, because those incidents had transpired after he'd begun drug therapy and after the drugs seemed to be working, and he had not wanted to appear to be slipping backward. Besides, although those two words filled him with dread, he did not understand their significance. He did not know why they had the power to raise gooseflesh, and he instinctively felt that it was unwise to mention this development to anyone until he had gotten a better handle on it. He had been afraid Cobletz would conclude that the drugs were not helping him and would discontinue them in favor of psychotherapy - and Dom had needed the drugs.
        The moon.
        No one knew, damn it. No one but… Dom himself.
        In the streetlamp's dim glow, he had not checked for a postmark. Now, he saw that its point of origin was not a mystery, as was the case with the letter that had come this morning. It was clearly stamped NEW YORK, N Y., and dated December 18. Wednesday of last week.
        He almost laughed out loud. He was not insane, after all. He was not sending these cryptic messages to himself - could not possibly be sending them - because he had been in Laguna last week. Three thousand miles separated him from the mailbox in which this - and undoubtedly the other-strange message had first been deposited.
        But who had sent him the notes - and why? Who in New York could know that he was sleepwalking… or that he had