Dom receives the anonymous “The moon” note

Dom’s receipt of the anonymous moon note turns a private, half-understood symptom into evidence that someone else knows about it. A plain envelope reaches his home carrying the very words he has concealed from Parker Faine and Dr. Cobletz; its New York postmark makes self-authorship seem impossible, but offers no explanation of who sent it or how they learned his secret.

Finding the Note

After pacing through the house with an earlier note, Dom reaches a front window and realizes he has not collected the day’s mail. He goes down the walk to the curbside mailbox, a brick column with a metal receptacle mortared into it, and opens it with a key. Under the mercury-vapor streetlamp, he sorts through six advertising flyers and catalogs, two Christmas cards, and a plain white business-size envelope without a return address.

The envelope excites and frightens him. He hurries back to his study, tearing it open as he goes, and unfolds the single sheet at his desk. The message consists only of the words The moon. Its brevity gives the note its force: it names no sender, makes no request, and supplies no explanation, yet strikes directly at a fear Dom has not shared.

The Secret Behind the Words

Dom has awakened from bad dreams repeating the phrase in panic, and, while sleepwalking, typed it on his IBM Displaywriter. He has told neither Parker Faine nor Dr. Cobletz about these episodes. They began after he started drug therapy and after the medication seemed to be helping, so he feared that disclosing them would look like a relapse. He also worried that Dr. Cobletz might stop the drugs in favor of psychotherapy, treatment Dom felt he needed.

The note therefore reaches him at the point where secrecy and uncertainty reinforce each other. Dom does not understand why the words fill him with dread, but their effect is unmistakable: he feels the fear physically, with gooseflesh, and senses that he should not discuss the development until he can make better sense of it. The anonymous writer has touched a phrase that belongs, as far as Dom knows, to his most private experience.

The Postmark and the Unanswered Question

In the dim light outside, Dom had not checked the postmark. At his desk, he sees that the envelope is stamped NEW YORK, N Y., and dated December 18, the previous Wednesday. Unlike the earlier letter that arrived that morning, this one has a discernible point of origin. Dom was in Laguna Beach the week before, three thousand miles from the mailbox where the note—and, he concludes, probably the other strange message—was first deposited.

That distance relieves one fear without resolving the mystery. Dom concludes that he cannot have sent the messages to himself, but the postmark does not identify the sender or explain how anyone in Jack and Jenny's New York City could know about his sleepwalking and his repeated typing. A thousand questions crowd in, and he can see no logical direction for an inquiry. The note changes the problem from an unsettling private symptom into an unexplained intrusion, while leaving both its source and its purpose open.