Moon images come to life and attack Dom in the Lomack house

Dom Corvaisis’s visit to Zebediah Lomack’s house turns a private investigation into an impossible confrontation: thousands of moon pictures tear free, whirl through the bungalow, and attack him, while names on the images connect Lomack’s obsession to Dom’s own missing past. The episode offers no settled explanation for what animates the pictures. Instead, it makes the house itself seem to press at the boundary between memory and revelation—and leaves Dom with physical evidence that vanishes almost as soon as it appears.

The investigation leads into Lomack’s house

Dom goes to 1420 Wass Valley Road after reading about Lomack’s death and the photographs of the moon found throughout his home. At nine-fifteen, despite his weariness, he decides he must see the place for himself. He collects his rented car, gets directions from the hotel attendant, and stops at an all-night Save-On drugstore for a flashlight. Reno lies below the snowline; the roads are clear, and he reaches the house shortly after ten, parking across the street.

The bungalow stands on a half-acre lot, its large porches and modest appearance matching the newspaper account. Snow remains in patches on the roof and lawn and weighs on the branches of nearby pines. The dark windows offer no sign of life. Inside, recent cleaning has transformed the kitchen where police found Lomack’s body on Christmas night. Lomack’s sister, Eleanor Wolsey, has begun preparing the house for sale: the garbage is gone, the counters and floor are clean, and fresh paint and Spectracide fill the air. The moon pictures have been removed from this room, making Dom fear that the evidence he came to find has been scrubbed away with the filth.

That fear proves premature. The living room’s walls, ceiling, and windows remain papered with large moon posters. Their closeness makes the room feel less like an ordinary interior than a crowded field of cratered worlds. Dom grows dizzy and dry-mouthed. In the hallway, and in both bedrooms, hundreds more pictures cover the walls: color and monochrome, large and small, pasted over one another with glue, tape, and staples. The accumulation seems to have spread through the house into every corner.

Names hidden among the moons

The newspaper had reported that no one but Lomack had entered the house for more than a year before his suicide. Neighbors had described the gambler’s change from sociable man to recluse, and said his moon fascination began the summer before last. That timing troubles Dom because it coincides with the period connected to his own changes. He wonders whether Lomack’s death might have followed not simply from obsession but from remembering what happened to him during that summer. The prospect makes Dom’s nightmares and sleepwalking seem less frightening than the buried event they may conceal.

As the lunar images begin to overwhelm him, Dom stumbles from the room and falls among a stack of books. His flashlight lands on a large poster marked with the name “Dominick.” The handwriting appears to be Lomack’s. Dom believes he did not know the gambler, and the possibility that the name belongs to someone else seems an implausible coincidence. A second look reveals three other names, each written across a separate image: “GINGER,” “FAYE,” and “ERNIE.” Dom reasons that if Lomack had written his name because they shared a forgotten, nightmarish experience, the other three must have been fellow sufferers. He cannot remember any of them in that connection.

The names call up further fragments without supplying answers. Dom recalls a priest in a Polaroid and wonders whether he was Ernie; he thinks of a blond person strapped to a bed and cannot decide whether the figure was Ginger or Faye. Something stirs beneath his awareness, but the recollection remains indistinct and slips away when he tries to grasp it. He recognizes that someone has tampered with his mind, yet the knowledge does not restore what has been taken. His fear hardens into anger as he demands to remember and directs his fury at whoever erased his memories.

The pictures break free

While Dom stands several feet from his poster, it tears loose despite the four strips of masking tape holding its corners. The tape peels away, and the image sails toward him without any contact or visible breeze. It stops in midair at eye level, wavering as the moon’s surface seems to ripple and the handwritten name flutters. Dom attempts to explain what he sees as a hallucination. The room gives him little time to settle on that explanation: the tape on the other images starts to pull away, and pictures detach from the ceiling, walls, and windows all at once.

About fifty posters rush toward him with a brittle clatter and a wash of paper noise. Then they hang motionless in the air, apparently fixed to nothing. The sudden stillness releases Dom’s breath. A moment later, the pictures begin to move together, circling him like a carousel. They flex and flap, turn from crescent to full moon, and seem to wax and wane as they speed up. For a short interval, Dom’s fear gives way to wonder. He cannot explain the event, but he feels no immediate threat and even laughs in astonishment.

The change is abrupt. The posters dive at him like enormous bats, striking his face and beating against his back. Dom shields himself and swings at them with the flashlight, but cannot drive them away. Disoriented, he searches for an exit and can see only the circling images. From the hallways and other rooms, more pictures rip loose: tape pulls free, staples pop from plaster, and glue loses its hold. Thousands of lunar images rise and converge on the living room, their glossy colors flashing in the flashlight beam while black-and-white pictures spiral like ash. Dom gasps and spits out the paper he has drawn into his mouth as layers of pictures fill the space around him.

An interrupted revelation

Within the assault, Dom senses that the spectacle is meant to help him recover his lost memories. He connects the moon storm to his nightmares and to what happened on the road eighteen months earlier. The possibility of understanding is also the possibility of reliving something he is not ready to face: although he longs for the revelation, he is too frightened to surrender to the images or the trance they seem to invite. He covers his ears, shuts his eyes, and shouts for the storm to stop. The tumult ends suddenly, though Dom does not believe his commands caused it.

He takes down one of the suspended pictures and finds nothing unusual in the paper itself. Then all the moons fall together, dropping into heaps across the floor and over his winter boots. The hallway walls have been stripped bare. Kneeling among the debris, Dom cannot decide whether the force he encountered was evil, good, or neither. What he can conclude is that whatever happened to him the summer before last was stranger than he had understood.

As he sifts the paper, Dom notices raised red rings on both palms, each sharply defined as if drawn with a compass. He watches the marks fade and disappear. This fleeting bodily sign does not explain the moving pictures or restore his memory, but it makes the encounter more than an episode of fear in Lomack’s abandoned house: for an instant, the mystery leaves a mark on Dom himself. The event takes place on Tuesday, January 7, and ends with the decisive revelation still out of reach.