Dom Corvaisis’s receipt of the anonymous “Moon” letter turns a private symptom into an apparent message from beyond his own knowledge. Its two words match a phrase he has heard himself repeat in panic and typed while sleepwalking, though he has told no one about either episode. A postmark from New York, dated while he was in Laguna Beach, California, makes the note harder to dismiss as his own doing and leaves him with a question he cannot yet see how to investigate.

Finding the Letter

Carrying the earlier note and thinking as he paced through the house, Dom eventually stopped at a front window overlooking his curbside mailbox. The brick column and its metal receptacle stood under the bluish light of a mercury-vapor streetlamp. Because he kept a post-office drawer in town, the mail delivered to his house was usually limited to items addressed to “Occupant” and occasional correspondence from friends who forgot that his letters were meant to go to the other address. He realized he had not collected that day’s delivery.

Outside, with only the breeze rustling the trees and the scent of the sea in the chilly air, Dom unlocked the box. Under the lamp he could make out six advertising flyers and catalogs, two Christmas cards, and a plain white business-size envelope without a return address. The contents were ordinary except for the unmarked envelope; the absence of a sender’s name made it an immediate mystery, but the message inside made it something more personal.

Dom hurried back to his study, excited and afraid, opening the envelope as he went. He pulled out a single sheet and unfolded it at his desk. It contained only two words: “The moon.” The abruptness mattered: there was no explanation, signature, or surrounding text to soften or clarify them. Dom’s response was not merely surprise. He felt as though he had entered a realm where ordinary logic no longer applied, because the note named something he believed no one else could know.

A Phrase Kept Secret

The words echoed his recent experiences. He had awakened from bad dreams with them on his lips, repeating them in panic, and while sleepwalking he had typed them on his Displaywriter. Yet he had told neither Parker Faine nor Cobletz. Both episodes had happened after Dom began drug therapy, when the medication seemed to be working, and he did not want to appear to be relapsing. The phrase frightened him even though he did not understand why it held such power over him.

That secrecy had been deliberate, if also uncertain. Dom instinctively felt it unwise to discuss the development before he understood it better. He feared Cobletz might conclude that the drugs were not helping and stop them in favor of psychotherapy; Dom believed he needed the drugs. The note therefore strikes at a concealed part of his life, not a fact he had casually shared or a subject anyone around him had been invited to discuss. In the moment, he can identify no plausible person who would know both the words and their connection to his sleepwalking.

The Postmark and the Break in Explanation

In the streetlamp’s dim light, Dom had not checked the postmark. At his desk he saw that this envelope, unlike the letter that had arrived that morning, had a legible point of origin: New York, New York, and a date of December 18, the preceding Wednesday. That date makes the postmark more than a clue about where the letter entered the mail. Dom had been in Laguna Beach the previous week, around three thousand miles from the mailbox in which this note—and, he concludes, probably the earlier strange message—had first been deposited.

The distance sharply alters what he can believe about the letters. He had almost laughed with relief: he could not have sent the notes to himself from New York while he was in Laguna Beach. But disproving that possibility does not identify the sender. Instead, it enlarges the mystery. Someone in New York seems to have known that Dom sleepwalked and repeatedly typed the phrase, yet he cannot think of how such knowledge could have been obtained.

An Unanswered Message

The letter offers no explicit request, explanation, or route to an answer. Dom is left asking who sent the notes and why, but sees no logical direction for an inquiry: the situation is too bizarre for him to know where to begin. The message thus changes the meaning of the sleepwalking without resolving its cause. What he had regarded for two months as the strangest and most frightening thing that had happened to him now appears to be only part of a larger, still less comprehensible disturbance.

The scene’s force comes from the collision between a commonplace delivery and an intensely private phrase. The mailbox contains routine advertisements and Christmas cards alongside the anonymous envelope; the message itself is reduced to two words, while the consequences of recognizing them multiply. The postmark gives Dom one firm fact—the letter came from New York—yet that certainty only deepens the central uncertainty. The episode ends not with discovery of a sender, but with his recognition that the unexplained messages may be connected to something stranger and more frightening than his nightwalking.