Moon Obsession

Moon Obsession is a recurring fixation that appears in the lives of Marcie, her estranged father Alan Rykoff, and professional gambler Zebediah Lomack. Its manifestations range from a child’s collecting project to a dead man’s thousands of moon photographs, and the parallels unsettle those who encounter them. The story makes the fixation significant not by establishing a single cause, but by allowing repeated details to make coincidence feel increasingly inadequate while remaining unexplained.

Forms of the Fixation

On Sunday morning, January 5, Jorja found seven-year-old Marcie at the dining-room table removing photographs from the family album and sorting them into neat stacks. Marcie wanted the album for a moon collection. She had already cut a picture of the moon from a magazine and placed it on a blank page; when Jorja asked why she was so interested, the child answered that the moon was pretty. The quiet domestic scene is specific and ordinary, but Marcie’s concentration gives it an unsettling edge: Jorja recognizes an intensity reminiscent of the way her daughter had once played Little Ms. Doctor.

Marcie’s new interest initially frightens Jorja because the earlier doctor phobia had also begun quietly and innocently. She wonders whether her daughter has exchanged one fixation for another, and briefly considers contacting Ted Coverly even though it is Sunday. But she distinguishes the two conditions: Marcie is not afraid of the moon. She is fascinated by it, and Jorja decides this may be a temporary enthusiasm of the kind a bright seven-year-old can pursue fiercely before moving on. She plans to mention it at Marcie’s next session rather than treat fascination as proof of a new phobia.

The distinction matters. Marcie’s moon collection does not itself establish that her former fear has returned or that the moon has become a threat to her. The narrative instead lets Jorja’s parental vigilance coexist with a more measured judgment. A familiar object in a child’s album becomes troubling because of the pattern Jorja has already lived through, not because Marcie says she is frightened.

Lomack’s House and the Public Record

A newspaper account turns the moon fixation into public spectacle after Zebediah Lomack’s death. On Christmas night, police in Reno responded to a neighbor’s report of shotgun fire and found Lomack dead in the kitchen of his house at 1420 Wass Valley Road. Their investigation revealed thousands of photographs of the moon covering the walls, ceilings, and furniture. What had been private attention had become an environment: the moon was not confined to a picture or collection, but had multiplied across the rooms of the house.

The article also reports that Lomack was fifty, a professional gambler, and the owner of an estate valued at more than half a million dollars. Most of his wealth was held in savings-and-loan accounts and Treasury bills, while the modest house was appraised at only thirty-five thousand dollars. Friends described his talent for poker and his losses at craps. These details place the moon-covered home within an otherwise documented life, but they do not explain the fixation or establish that it caused his death. The newspaper identifies the obsession as a discovery made after the suicide, not as a diagnosis or a proven motive.

The article’s public, factual tone does not neutralize its effect on Dom. Reading about Lomack, he feels the same mixture of terror, horror, and awe associated with his nightmares and his sleepwalking attempts to nail the windows shut. He tells himself that Lomack’s obsession probably has nothing to do with his own problems, yet the resemblance disturbs him enough to act: despite his weariness, he buys a flashlight and drives to the house shortly after ten that night. The report thus becomes more than information about a stranger; it draws Dom toward a place where he hopes to confront the troubling parallel.

Alan Rykoff and the Family Parallel

Jorja encounters a closer and more intimate version of the pattern while sorting Alan Rykoff’s belongings. In his room she finds six books, two with the word moon on their spines, and discovers that all six concern the same subject. On the dresser is a basketball-sized illuminated globe, not of Earth but of the moon, marked with named craters, ridges, and plains. The carefully labeled features and the globe’s internal light make Alan’s interest tangible in a way that echoes Marcie’s magazine picture and album, though on a very different scale.

Pepper says Alan had been interested in astronomy for the past couple of months. Jorja also learns that he had moon dreams beginning around late October, although he could not remember their details after waking. She asks whether they were nightmares, connecting his dreams to Marcie’s moon-troubled sleep without assuming that she already knows what they contained. The evidence presented establishes the dreams and their approximate beginning, but does not provide their full content or a definitive explanation.

The timing sharpens Jorja’s unease. Alan had not seen Marcie for six months; their most recent telephone conversation was in September, before either of them became fascinated with the moon. Jorja sees no contact through which one could have passed the fixation to the other. Their psychological problems were different—Marcie’s irrational fear of doctors and Alan’s compulsive sexual drive—and Alan, unlike Marcie, had no one to help him. His crisis ended in suicide. Jorja finds the simultaneous emergence of the moon interest, alongside separate psychological troubles, too coincidental to dismiss easily, but the narrative stops short of proving a connection or identifying an agent behind it.

Pattern, Uncertainty, and Consequence

The fixation changes meaning as it recurs. For Marcie, it begins as an absorbing collection project that Jorja can still interpret as a passing childhood enthusiasm. For Alan, it occupies books, a specialized lunar globe, and dreams, appearing alongside a severe personal crisis. For Lomack, it fills the physical surfaces of his home and becomes visible to police only after his death. The contrast in scale makes the shared subject harder to ignore without making the three cases identical.

Jorja’s response is shaped by what she knows of both her daughter and her former husband; Dom’s response is shaped by his own episodes of sleepwalking and fear. In each case, recognition comes before explanation. The recurring moon interest raises the possibility of a connection that ordinary channels of influence cannot account for, especially between Alan and Marcie, but no one establishes what the connection is. Moon Obsession therefore functions as an uncanny pattern of attention: familiar enough to be called fascination, yet repeated across separate lives and accompanied by dreams, psychological distress, and death. Its force lies in that unresolved gap between observable likeness and unknown cause.