Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

He couldn't feel the earth under his feet. No sense of gravity, weight, or weariness of muscle. Might as well have been floating.

The odors of the winter were no longer perceptible. Gone was the faint, crisp, ozone-like scent of snow. Gone, the fresh smell of the pine forest that rose just in front of him. Gone, the faint sour stink of his own icy sweat.

No taste on his tongue. That was the weirdest of all. He had never before realized there was always an endless and subtly changing series of tastes in his mouth even when he wasn't eating anything. Now a blandness. Neither sweet nor sour. Neither salty nor bitter. Not even a blandness. Beyond blandness.

Nothing. Nada. He worked his mouth, felt saliva flooding it, but still no taste.

All of his powers of sensory perception seemed to be focused solely on the ghost light shining from within the trees and on the punishing, insistent sound. He no longer felt the throbbing bass washing in cold waves across his body, rather, the sound was coming from within him now, and it surged out of him in the same way that it issued from the trees.

Suddenly he was standing at the edge of the woods, on ground as effulgent as molten lava. Inside the phenomenon. Gazing down, he saw that his feet seemed to be planted on a sheet of glass beneath which a sea of fire churned, a sea as deep as the stars were distant. The extent of that abyss made him cry out in panic, although no thinnest whisper escaped him.

Fearfully and reluctantly, yet wonderingly, Eduardo looked at his legs and body, and saw that the amber light also radiated from him and was riddled with bursts of red. He appeared to be a man from another world, filled with alien energy, or a holy Indian spirit that had walked out of the high mountains in search of the ancient nations once in dominion over the vast Montana wilderness but long lost:

Blackfeet?

Crow, Sioux, Assiniboin, Cheyenne.

He raised his left hand to examine it more closely. His skin was transparent, his flesh translucent. At first he could see the bones of his hand and fingers, well-articulated gray-red forms within the molten amber substance of which he seemed to be made. Even as he watched, his bones became transparent too, and he was entirely a man of glass, no substance to him at all any more, he had become a window through which could be seen an unearthly fire, just as the ground under him was a window, just as the stones and trees were windows.

The crashing waves of sound and the electronic squeal arose from within the currents of fire, ever more insistent. As on that night in March, he had an almost clairvoyant perception of something straining against confinement, struggling to break out of a prison or through a barrier… Something trying to force open a door.

He was standing in the intended doorway.

On the threshold.

He was seized by the bizarre conviction that if the door opened while he was standing in the way, he would shatter into disassociated atoms as if he'd never existed. He would become the door. An unknown caller would enter through him, out of the fire and through him.

Jesus, help me, he prayed, though he wasn't a religious man.

He tried to move.

Paralyzed.

Within his raised hand, within his entire body, within the trees and stones and earth, the fire grew less amber, more red, hotter, entirely red, scarlet, seething. Abruptly it was marbled with blue-white veins to rival the consuming brightness at the very heart of a star. The malevolent pulsations swelled, exploded, swelled, exploded, like the pounding of colossal pistons, booming, booming, pistons in the perpetual engines that drove the universe itself, harder, harder, pressure escalating, his glass body vibrating, fragile as crystal, pressure, expanding, demanding, hammering, fire and thunder, fire and thunder, fire and thunder-Blackness.

Silence.

Cold.

When he woke, he was lying at the perimeter of the forest, in the light of a quarter moon. Above him, the trees stood sentinel, dark and still.

He was in possession of all his senses again. He smelled the ozone crispness of snow, dense masses of pines, his own sweat-and urine. He had lost control of his bladder. The taste in his mouth was unpleasant but familiar: blood. In his terror or when he'd fallen, he must have bitten his tongue.

Evidently, the door in the night had not opened.

That same night, Eduardo removed the weapons from the cabinet in the study and reloaded them. He distributed them throughout the house, so one firearm or another would always be within reach.

The following morning, April fourth, he drove into Eagle's Roost, but he didn't go to the sheriff's substation. He still had no evidence to back up his story.

He went, instead, to Custer's Appliance. Custer's was housed in a yellow-brick building dating from about 1920, and the glittering.high-tech merchandise in its display windows was as anachronistic as tennis shoes on a Neanderthal.

Eduardo purchased a videocassette recorder, a video camera, and half a dozen blank tapes.

The salesman was a long-haired young man who looked like Mozart, in boots, jeans, a decoratively stitched cowboy shirt, and a string tie with a turquoise clasp. He kept up a continuous chatter about the multitude of features the equipment offered, using so much jargon that he seemed to be speaking a foreign language.

Eduardo just wanted to record and play back. Nothing more. He didn't care if he could watch one show while taping another, or whether the damned gadgets could cook his dinner, make his bed, and give him a pedicure.

The ranch already had a television capable of receiving a lot of channels, because shortly before his death, Mr. Quartermass had installed a satellite dish behind the stables. Eduardo seldom watched a program, maybe three or four times a year, but he knew the TV worked.

From the appliance store he went to the library. He checked out a stack of novels by Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, plus collections of stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and M.

R. James.

He felt no less a fool than if he had selected lurid volumes of flapdoodle purporting to be nonfiction accounts of the Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster, the Lost Continent of Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, and the true story of Elvis Presley's faked death and sex-change operation. He fully expected the librarian to sneer at him or at least favor him with a pitying and patronizing smile, but she processed the books as if she found nothing frivolous about his taste in fiction.

After stopping at the supermarket as well, he returned to the ranch and unpacked his purchases.

He needed two full days and more beers than he would ordinarily have allowed himself in order to get the hang of the video system. The damned equipment had more buttons and switches and readouts than the cockpit of an airliner, and at times it seemed the manufacturers had complicated their products for no good reason, out of a sheer love of complication. The instruction books read as if they'd been written by someone for whom English was a second language-which was very likely the case, as both the VCR and the camcorder were made by the Japanese.

"Either I'm getting feebleminded," he groused aloud in one fit of frustration, "or the world's going to hell in a hand-basket."

Maybe both.

Warmer weather arrived sooner than usual. April was often a winter month at that latitude and altitude, but this year the daytime.temperatures rose into the forties. The season-long accumulation of snow melted, and gurgling freshets filled every gully and declivity.

The nights remained peaceful.

Eduardo read most of the books he'd borrowed from the library.

Blackwood and especially James wrote in a style that was far too mannered for his taste, heavy on atmosphere and light on substance.