eyes. Incredible, but I saw it. Can't prove it, Father, but I know
those two slugs did smash Tolk's sternum and shatter his rib. They did
send bone fragments through him like shrapnel. Major, mortal damage was
done, had to have been. But by the time he was on the table in surgery,
his body had almost entirely healed itself. The shattered bones had . .
. reformed. The superior mesenteric artery and the intercostal vein
were severed to begin with, which is why he lost blood so fast, but by
the time I opened him, both vessels had knitted up except for a small
tear in each. Sounds crazy, but if I hadn't moved to repair the artery,
I'm sure it would've finished closing on its own . . . just as the
vein did."
"What did your nurse and other assistants think of this?"
"Funny thing is . . . we didn't talk much about it. I can't account
for how little we discussed it. Maybe we didn't talk about it because .
. . we're living in a rational age when the miraculous is
unacceptable."
"How sad if true," Stefan said.
With the shadow of dread still shimmering anemone-like in the depths of
his eyes, Sonneford said, "Father, if there is a God-and I'm not
admitting there is-why would He save this particular cop?"
"He's a good man," Father Wycazik said.
"So? I've seen hundreds of good men die. Why should this one be saved
and none of the others?"
Father Wycazik pulled a chair around from the side of the desk in order
to be able to sit near the surgeon. "You've been frank with me, Doctor,
so I'll be upfront with you. I sense a force behind these events that's
more than human. A Presence. And that Presence isn't primarily
concerned with Winton Tolk but with Brendan, the man . . . the priest
who first reached Officer Tolk in that sandwich shop."
Bennet Sonneford blinked in surprise. "Oh. But you wouldn't have
gotten such a notion unless . . ."
"Unless Brendan was linked to at least one other miraculous event,"
Stefan said. Without using Emmy Halbourg's
name, he told Sonneford about the girl's mending limbs that had once
been crippled by disease.
Instead of taking hope from what Stefan told him, Bennet Sonneford
shriveled farther in the heat of his strange despair.
Frustrated by the physician's relentless gloominess, Father Wycazik
said, "Doctor, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me you've
got every reason to be joyous. You were privileged to witness what-I
personally believe-was the hand of God at work." He held one hand out to
Sonneford and was not surprised when the doctor gripped it tightly.
"Bennet, why're you so despondent?"
Sonneford cleared his throat and said, "I was born and raised a
Lutheran, but for twenty-five years I've been an atheist. And now .
.."
"Ah," Stefan said, "I see.
Happily, Stefan began angling for Bennet Sonneford's soul in the
fish-lined den. He had no suspicion that, before the day was done, his
current euphoria would be dispelled and that he would experience a
bitter disappointment.
Reno, Nevada.
Zeb Lomack had never imagined that his life would end in bloody suicide
on Christmas, but by that night he had sunk so low that he longed to end
his existence. He loaded his shotgun, put it on the filthy kitchen
table, and promised himself that he would use it if he was unable to get
rid of all the goddamned moon stuff before midnight.
His bizarre fascination with the moon had begun the summer before last,
though at first it had seemed innocent enough. Toward the end of August
that year, he had taken to going out on the back porch of his cozy
little house and watching the moon and stars while sipping Coors. In
a couple of books on amateur astronomy.
Zebediah was surprised by his own sudden interest in stargazing. For
most of his fifty years, Zeb Lomack, a professional gambler, had shown
little interest in anything but cards. He worked Reno, Lake Tahoe,
Vegas, occasionally one of the smaller gambling towns like Elko or
Bullhead City, playing poker with the tourists and local would-be poker
champs. He was not only good at card games: He loved cards more than he
loved women, booze, food. Even the money was not important to Zeb; it
was just a handy by-product of playing cards. The important thing was
staying in the game.
Until he got the telescope and went crazy.
For a couple of months he used the scope on a casual basis, and he
bought a few more books on astronomy, and it was just a hobby. But by
last Christmas he began to focus his attention less on the stars than on
the moon, and thereafter something strange happened to him. The new
hobby soon became as interesting as card games, and he found himself
canceling planned excursions to the casinos in order to study the lunar
surface. By February, he was glued to the eyepiece of the Tasco every
night that the moon was visible. By April he built a collection of
books about the moon that numbered more than one hundred, and he went
out to play cards only two or three nights a week. By the end of June,
his book collection had grown to five hundred titles, and he had begun
to paper the bedroom walls and ceiling with pictures of the moon clipped
from old magazines and newspapers. He no longer played cards, but began
living off his savings, and thereafter his interest in things lunar
ceased to bear any resemblance to a hobby and became a mad obsession.
By September, his book collection had grown to more than fifteen hundred
volumes stacked throughout his small house. During the day, he read
about the moon or, more often, sat for hours staring intently at
photographs of it, unable either to understand or to resist its allure,
until its craters and ridges and plains became as familiar to him as the
five rooms of his own house. On those nights when the moon was visible,
he studied it through the telescope until he could no longer stay awake,
until his eyes were bloodshot and sore.
Before this obsession took control of him, Zeb Lomack had been a
ruggedly hewn and relatively fit man. But as his preoccupation with
things lunar tightened its grip, he stopped exercising and began eating
junk food-cake, ice cream, TV dinners, bologna sandwiches-because he no
longer had time to prepare good meals. Furthermore, the moon not only
fascinated him but also made him uneasy, filled him not only with wonder
but with dread, so he was always nervous; and he tranquilized himself
with food. He became softer, flabbier,
though he was only minimally aware of the physical changes he was
undergoing.
By early October, he thought about the moon every hour of every day,
dreamed of it, and could go nowhere in his house without seeing hundreds
of images of the lunar face. He had not stopped repapering the walls
when he had finished his bedroom in June, but had carried that project
throughout. The full-color and black-and-white moon pictures came from
astron
omy journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. On one of his
infrequent ventures out of the house, he had seen a three-by-five-foot
poster of the moon, a color photograph taken by astronauts, and he had
bought fifty copies, enough to paper the ceiling and every wall in the
living room; he had even taped the poster over the windows, so every
square inch of the room was decorated with that repeating image, except
for doorways. He moved the furniture out, transforming the empty
chamber into a planetarium where the show never changed. Sometimes he'd
lie on his back on the floor and stare up and around at those fifty
moons, transported by an exhilarating sense of wonder and an
inexplicable terror, neither of which he could understand.
Christmas night, as Zeb was sprawled on the floor with half a hundred
bloated moons hanging over him, bearing down on him, he suddenly noticed
writing on one of them, a single word scrawled across the lunar image
with a felt-tip pen, where there had never been a word before. The
picture had been defaced with a name: Dominick. He recognized his own
handwriting, but he could not remember having scrawled that name across
the moon. Then his eye was caught by another name written on another
poster: Ginger. And then a third name on a third poster: Faye. And a
fourth: Ernie. Suddenly anxious, Zeb stumbled around the room, checking
the other posters, but he found no more names.
In addition to being unable to recall writing those words, he could not
think of anyone he knew named Dominick, Ginger, or Faye. He knew a
couple of Ernies, though neither was a close friend, and the appearance
of that name on one of the moons was no less mysterious than the three
others. Staring at the names, he grew increasingly uneasy, for he had
the odd feeling that he did know them, that they had played a terribly
important role in his life, and that his very sanity and survival
depended on remembering who they were.
Some long-forgotten memory swelled in him like a steadily inflating
balloon, and intuitively he knew that when the balloon popped he would
recollect everything, not only the identities of these four people, but
also the origins of his fevered fascination with-and underlying fear
of-the moon. But as the memory balloon swelled within him, his fear grew
as well, and he began to sweat and then to shake uncontrollably.
He turned from the posters, suddenly terrified of remembering, and
lurched out to the kitchen, driven by that gnawing hunger that was
always occasioned by thoughts that made him nervous. He wrenched open
the refrigerator door and was startled to discover that the shelves were
bare. They held dirty bowls and empty plastic containers in which food
had been kept, two empty milk cartons, an egg carton with one broken and
dried egg. He looked in the freezer, found only frost.
Zeb tried to remember when he had last been to the supermarket. It
might have been days or weeks since his most recent shopping expedition.
He could not remember because, in his moon-filled world, time no longer
had any meaning. And how much time had passed since his last meal? He
vaguely remembered having some canned pudding, but he was not clear
whether that had been earlier today or yesterday or even two days ago.
Zebediah Lomack was so shocked by this development that his mind cleared
for the first time in weeks, and when he looked around the kitchen, he
made a strangled sound of disgust and fear. For the first time he
saw-really saw-the mess in which he'd been living, a situation
previously masked by his all-encompassing fascination with the moon.
Garbage covered the floor: discarded cans sticky with fruit juice, slimy
with traces of rancid gravy; empty cereal boxes and a score of drained
milk cartons; dozens of wadded-up and discarded potato-chip bags and
candy wrappers. And roaches. They squirmed, scuttled, and jigged
through the garbage, raced across the floor, climbed walls, crouched on
counters, and lurked in the sink.
"My God," Zeb said in a voice that was hardly more than a croak, "what's
happened to me? What've I been doing?
What's wrong with me?"
He put one hand to his face and twitched with surprise
when he felt a beard. He had always been clean-shaven, and he had
thought he shaved just this morning. The wiry hair on his face sent him
in a panic to the bathroom, where he could look in the mirror. He saw a
stranger: filthy, matted hair hanging in tangled clumps; pale, soft,
sickly-looking skin; a two-week beard crusted with food and dirt; wild
eyes. He became aware of his body odor: His stink was so rank that he
gagged on his own aroma. Apparently, he had not bathed in days, weeks.
He needed help. He was sick. Confused and sick. He could not
understand what had happened to him, but he knew that he must go to the
telephone and call for help.
But he did not go immediately to the phone because he was afraid they'd
say he was hopelessly insane and would lock him away forever. Like they
had locked away his father. When Zebediah was eight, his father pitched
a terrible fit, ranting and raving about lizard-things that were
crawling out of the walls, and the doctors took him to the hospital to
dry him out. But that time, unlike before, the DTs had not gone away,
and Zeb's dad had been institutionalized for the rest of his life. Ever
after, Zeb had been afraid his own mind might be flawed, too. Staring
at his pale face in the mirror, he knew he could not call for help until
he made himself presentable and straightened up the house; otherwise,
they would lock him up and throw away the key.
He could not bear to look at his reflection long enough to shave, so he
decided to deal with the house first. Keeping his head down to avoid
seeing the moons, which exerted a tidal force on him as real as the true
moon's effect on the seas, he scurried into the bedroom, opened the
closet, shoved the clothes aside, located his Remington .12-gauge and a
box of shells. Head bowed, fighting the urge to look up, he made his
way to the kitchen, where he loaded the shotgun and put it on the
garbage-strewn table. Speaking aloud, he made a bargain with himself:
"You get rid of the moon books, tear down the pictures so this place
don't look so crazy, clean the kitchen, shave, bathe. Then maybe you'll
get your head clear enough to figure what the hell's wrong with you.
Then you can get help-just not while things are like this."
The shotgun was the unspoken part of the bargain. He had been fortunate
to rise briefly out of the moon-dream in which he had been living,
shocked to his senses by the lack of food in the refrigerator, but if he
drifted back into that nightmare, he could not count on being jolted
awake again. Therefore, if he could not resist the siren song of the
moons on the walls, he would quickly return to the kitchen, pick up the
shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pull the trigger.
Death was better than this.
And death was better than being locked up forever like his father.
Now, in the living roo
m once more, keeping his eyes on the floor, he
began to gather up the books. Some had once boasted jackets with photos
of the moon, but he had clipped those pictures. He hefted an armload of
them and went outside to the snow-covered back yard, where there was a
barbecue pit lined with concrete blocks. Shivering in the crisp winter
air, he dumped the books into the pit and headed back to the house for
more, not daring to look at the night sky for fear of the great luminous
body suspended in it.
As he worked, the urge to return to the study of the moon was as intense
and demanding as the hideous need that forced a heroin addict to return
again and again to the needle, but Zeb fought it.
Likewise, as he made trip after trip to the barbecue pit, he felt that
memory of some long-forgotten event continuing to swell within him:
Dominick, Ginger, Faye, Ernie ... Instinctively, he knew that he would
understand the cause of his fascination with the moon if only he could
recall who those four people were. He concentrated on the names, trying
to use them to block out the alluring summons of the moon, and it seemed
to work because soon he had disposed of two or three hundred volumes in
the barbecue pit and was ready to set them ablaze.
But when he struck a match and leaned down to light the pages of a book,
he discovered the pit was empty. He stared in shock and horror.
Dropping the matches, he raced back to the house, threw open the kitchen
door, stumbled inside, and saw what he had been most afraid of seeing.
The books were piled there, damp with snow, smeared with wet ashes from
the pit. He had indeed disposed of them, but then the lunacy had taken
him again; under its spell and without knowing what he was doing, he had