Strangers (45 page)

The house was actually a bungalow with large porches, every bit as modest as the news account had indicated. It sat on a half-acre lot. From previous storms, snow lay in patches on the roof, covered the lawn, weighted the branches of several large pines. The windows were dark.

According to the article in the Reno newspaper, Eleanor Wolsey, Zebediah Lomack’s sister, had flown in from Florida three days after his death, on December 28. She arranged the funeral services, which had been conducted on the thirtieth, and was staying over until the estate was
settled. However, she was at a hotel rather than in her brother’s house, because the bungalow was too depressing.

Dom was a law-abiding citizen; the prospect of breaking into the house gave him no thrill. But it had to be done because there was no way he could see it except by forced entry. He saw no point in trying to persuade Eleanor Wolsey to allow a visit tomorrow, for she had been quoted in the newspaper as saying that she was sick and tired of gawkers and that she was repulsed by the perverse curiosity of strangers.

Five minutes later, on the back porch of the Lomack bungalow, Dom discovered that the door was equipped with a deadbolt in addition to its regular lock. He tried the windows that faced onto the porch. The one above the kitchen sink was unlatched. He slid it open and clambered inside.

Hooding the flashlight with one hand to avoid drawing the notice of anyone outside, he swept the narrowed beam around the kitchen, which was no longer in the disgusting condition in which Reno policemen had found it on Christmas. According to the newspaper, just two days ago Lomack’s sister began cleaning the house and preparing it for sale. Evidently she had started here. The garbage was gone. The counters were clean, and the floor was spotless. The air was filled with the stink of new paint and Spectracide. A single startled roach scurried along the baseboard and disappeared behind the refrigerator, but there was no longer a gross infestation. And there were no pictures of the moon.

Dom was suddenly worried that Eleanor Wolsey and her helpers might have made too much progress. Perhaps all traces of Zebediah Lomack’s obsession had been stripped down, scrubbed out, and thrown away.

But that concern was quickly put to rest when Dom followed the pale probing beam of the flashlight into the living room, where the walls and ceiling and windows were still papered with big posters of the moon. It seemed as if he were hanging in deep space, in some crowded realm where half a hundred cratered worlds orbited impossibly close to one another. The effect was disorienting. He felt dizzy, and his mouth went dry.

He moved slowly out of the living room into a hallway, where hundreds of pictures of the moon—some color and some black-and-white, some large and some small, some overlapping others—had been fixed to every inch of the walls with glue, Scotch tape, masking tape, and staples. The same decorations had been applied in both bedrooms as well, so the omnipresent moons seemed almost like a fungus that had spored and spread throughout the house, creeping into every corner.

The newspaper report had said that no one but Lomack had been in the house for more than a year prior to his suicide. Dom believed it, for if visitors had seen the work of this lunatic cut-and-paste Michelangelo,
they would have contacted the mental health authorities at once. The neighbors told of the gambler’s rapid metamorphosis from a hail-fellow to a recluse. Apparently his fascination with the moon had begun the summer before last.

The summer before last…The timing uncannily paralleled the changes in Dom’s own life.

Second by second, Dom grew more uneasy. He could not understand the insane behavior that had created this eerie display, could not put himself inside the fevered mind of Lomack, but he
could
empathize with the gambler’s terror. Just moving through the moon-crowded house, shining his flashlight on the lunar faces, Dom felt a tingling along the back of his neck. The moons did not mesmerize him as they had evidently mesmerized Lomack, but as he stared at them he sensed instinctively that the impulse that had driven Lomack to paper his house with moon images was the same impulse that drove Dom himself to dream of them.

He and Lomack had shared some experience in which the moon had figured or of which it was an apt and powerful symbol. The summer before last they had been in the same place at the same time. The wrong place at the wrong time.

Lomack had been driven mad by the stress of repressed memories.

Will I be driven mad, too? Dom wondered as he stood in the master bedroom, turning slowly in a circle.

A new and grim thought struck him. Suppose Lomack had not killed himself out of despair over his unshakable obsession but had, instead, been compelled to shove the shotgun barrel into his mouth
because he had finally remembered what had happened to him the summer before last.
Maybe the memory was far worse than the mystery. Maybe, if the truth were revealed, sleepwalking and nightmares would seem less terrifying than what had happened during that drive from Portland to Mountainview.

Moons…The oppressiveness of those pendulant forms drastically increased. The claustrophobic mural made breathing difficult. The moons seemed to portend some unreadable but manifestly evil fate that awaited him, and he stumbled out of the room, suddenly eager to flee from them.

Among a herd of leaping and prancing shadows whipped up by the bobbling beam of the flashlight, he ran down the short hall, into the living room, tripped over a stack of books, and fell with a jarring crash. For a moment he lay stunned. But his senses swiftly cleared, and he was jolted to find himself staring at the word “Dominick,” which was scrawled in felt-tip pen across the luminous moon-face in one of the dozens of identical big posters. He had not noticed it when he had come through from the
kitchen earlier, but now he had fallen so that the flash in his right hand was aimed just right.

A chill rippled through Dom. He had read nothing about this in the newspaper, but the handwriting surely belonged to Lomack. To the best of his knowledge, he had not known the gambler. Yet to pretend that this was
another
Dominick would be to embrace an outrageous coincidence.

He got up from the floor and took a couple of steps toward the poster that bore his name, stopping six feet from it. In the penumbra of the flashlight beam, he saw writing on an adjacent poster. His own name was only one of four that Lomack had scribbled across four lunar images:
DOMINICK,
GINGER, FAYE, ERNIE.
If his name was here because he had shared a forgotten nightmarish experience with Lomack, then the other three must have been fellow sufferers as well, though Dom could remember nothing whatsoever about them.

He thought of the priest in the Polaroid snapshot. Was that Ernie?

And the blonde strapped to the bed. Was she Ginger? Or Faye?

As he moved the light from one name to the other and back again, some dark and awesome memory did indeed stir in him. But it remained far down in his subconscious, an amorphous blur like a giant ocean creature swimming past just below the mottled surface of a murky sea, its existence revealed only by the rippled wake of its passage and by the flicker of shadow and light in the water. He tried to reach out for the memory and seize it, but it dove deep and vanished.

From the moment he had come into the Lomack place, Dom had been in the hands of fear, but now frustration took an even tighter grip on him. He shouted in the empty house, and his voice echoed coldly off the moon-papered walls. “Why can’t I remember?” He knew why, of course: Someone had mucked with his mind, scrubbing out certain memories. But still he shouted—fearful, furious. “Why can’t I remember? I’ve got to
remember!
” He held his left hand toward the poster that featured his name, as if to wrench from its substance the memory that had been in Lomack’s mind when he had scrawled “Dominick.” His heart thumped. He roared with hot anger: “Goddamn it, goddamn you whoever you are, I will remember. I will remember you sons of bitches. You bastards! I
will.
”

Suddenly, impossibly, even though he was not touching it, though his hand was still a few feet from it, the poster bearing his name tore loose from the wall. It was fixed in place with four strips of masking tape angled across its corners, but the tape peeled up with the sound of zippers opening, and the poster
leapt
off the wall as if a wind had blown straight through the lathe and plaster behind it. With a rattle and rustle of paper
wings, it swooped at him, and he staggered back across the living room in surprise, nearly falling over the books again.

In his unsteady hand, his flashlight revealed that the poster had stopped a few feet from him. It hung at eye-level, unsupported in thin air, undulating slightly from top to bottom, first bulging out at him and then bending away when the direction of undulation reversed itself. As the pocked surface of that moon rippled, his own handwritten name fluttered and writhed as if it were the legend on a wind-stirred banner.

Hallucination, he thought desperately.

But he knew it was really happening.

He could not breathe, as if the cold air were so syrup-thick with miraculous power that it could not be inhaled.

The poster floated closer.

His hands shook. The flashlight jiggled. Sharp glints of light lanced off the undulant surface of the glossy paper.

After a timeless moment in which the only sound was the crackle of the animated poster, other noise abruptly arose from every part of the room: the zipper-sound of masking tape being pulled loose. On the ceiling, walls, and windows, the other posters simultaneously disengaged themselves. With a brittle clatter-rattle-whoosh, half a hundred moon images exploded toward Dom from every direction, and he cried out in surprise and fear.

The loosed cry was like a blockage expelled from his windpipe, for he was suddenly able to breathe.

The last of the tape pulled loose. Fifty posters hung unmoving in midair, not even rippling, as if pasted firmly to nothing whatsoever. The silence in the dead gambler’s house was as profound as in a temple devoid of worshipers, a cold and penetrating silence that seemed to pierce to the core of Dom, seeking to replace even the soft liquid susurration of his blood’s movement through his arteries and veins.

Then as if they were fifty parts of a single mechanism brought to life with the flick of a switch, the three-by-five-foot lunar images shivered, rustled, flapped. Although there was not the slightest breeze to propel them, they began to whirl around the room in the orderly manner of horses on a carousel. Dom stood in the middle of that eerie merry-go-round, and the moons circled him; they capered and twirled, curled and uncurled, flexed and flapped, here seen as half-moons and here as crescents and here full-face, and they waxed and waned, ascended and descended, faster, faster, faster still. In the flashlight glow, it seemed like a procession set in motion by the sorcerer’s apprentice who, in the old story, had magically imparted life to a bunch of broomsticks.

Dom’s fear receded, making room for wonder. At the moment there seemed no threat in the phenomenon. In fact a wild delight burgeoned in him. He could think of no explanation for what he was witnessing, but stood in dumb astonishment, puzzled and amazed. Usually nothing was so terrifying as the unknown, but perhaps he sensed a benign power at work. Wonderstruck, he turned slowly in a circle, watching the moons parade around him, and at last a tremulous laugh escaped him.

In an instant, the mood changed dramatically. In a cacophony of imitation wings, the posters flew at Dom as if they were fifty enormous and furious bats. They swooped and darted over his head, slapped his face, beat against his back. Though they were not alive, he attributed malevolent intent to their assault. He put one arm across his face and flailed at the moons with the hand that held the 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!”