shut.
He pored over the article several times, and at nine-fifteen, in spite
of his weariness, he decided that he had to get a look in the Lomack
house. He dressed, retrieved his rented car from the hotel's valet
parking, and got directions to Wass Valley Road from the attendant. Reno
was below the snowline, so the night was dry and the roads clean. Dom
stopped at an all-night Save-On drugstore to buy a flashlight. He
arrived at 1420 Wass Valley Road shortly after ten o'clock and parked
across the street.
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 felttip 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 bo
re 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 blond 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 Vikings, 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.
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 weaveand-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!"
He was astonished when the tumult was cut off with the suddenness of a
symphony orchestra terminating a thunderous crescendo on one last
bone-shaking note. He did not expect his shouted commands to be obeyed,
and he still did not think his words had done the trick.
He took his hands away from his ears. He opened his eyes.
A galaxy full of moons hung around him.
With a trembling hand, he pfucked one of the pictures from its
unsupported perch upon the air. Wonderingly, he turned it over in his
hand. Tested its substance between two fingers. There was nothing
special about the picture, yet it had been suspended magically before
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 42