Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

Coping mechanism or not, it was sick.

And speaking of sick, she had hurt two of those boys. Never mind that they deserved it. She had never hurt anyone in her life before. Now that the heat of the moment was past, she felt… not remorse, exactly, because they had earned what she'd done to them… but a sadness that it had been necessary. She felt soiled. Her exhilaration had fallen with her adrenaline level.

She examined her right foot. It was beginning to swell, but the pain was tolerable.

"Good God, woman," she admonished herself, "who did you think you were-one of the Ninja Turtles?"

She got two Excedrin from the bathroom medicine cabinet, washed them down with tepid water.

In the bedroom again, she switched off the bedside lamp.

She wasn't afraid of the darkness.

What she feared was the damage people were capable of doing to one another either in darkness or at high noon.

The tenth of June was not a day in which to be cooped up inside. The sky was delft blue, the temperature hovered around eighty degrees, and the meadows were still a dazzling green because the heat of summer had not yet seared the grass… Eduardo spent most of the balmy afternoon in a bentwood hickory rocking chair on the front porch. A new video camera, loaded with tape and fully charged batteries, lay on the porch floor beside the rocker.

Next to the camera was a shotgun. He got up a couple of times to fetch a fresh bottle of beer or to use the bathroom. And once he went for a half-hour walk around the nearer fields, carrying the camera. For the most part, however, he remained in the chair-waiting.

It was in the woods.

Eduardo knew in his bones that something had come through the black doorway in the first hour of May third, over five weeks ago. Knew it, felt it. He had no idea what it was or where it had begun its journey, but he knew it had traveled from some strange world into that Montana night.

Thereafter, it must have found a hiding place, into which it had crawled. No other analysis of the situation made sense. Hiding. If it had wanted its presence to be known, it would have revealed itself to him that night or later. The woods, vast and dense, offered an infinite number of places to go to ground.

Although the doorway had been enormous, that didn't mean the traveler-or the vessel carrying it, if a vessel existed-was also large. Eduardo had once been to New York City and driven through the Holland Tunnel, which had been a lot bigger than any car that used it.

Whatever had come out of that death-black portal might be no larger than a man, perhaps even smaller, and able to hide almost anywhere among those timbered vales and ridges.

The doorway indicated nothing about the traveler, in fact, except that it was undoubtedly intelligent. Sophisticated science and engineering lay behind the creation of that gate.

He had read enough Heinlein and Clarke-and selected others in their vein-to have exercised his imagination, and he had realized that the intruder might have a variety of origins. More likely than not, it was extraterrestrial.

However, it might also be something from another dimension or from a parallel world. It might even be a human being, opening a passage into this age from the far future.

The numerous possibilities were dizzying, and he no longer felt like a fool when he speculated about them. He also had ceased being embarrassed about borrowing fantastical literature from the library-though the cover art was often trashy even when well drawn-and his appetite for it had become voracious.

Indeed, he found that he no longer had the patience to read the realist writers who had been his lifelong favorites. Their work simply wasn't as realistic as it had seemed before. Hell, it wasn't realistic at all to him any longer. Now, when he was just a few pages into a book or story by one of them, Eduardo got the distinct feeling that their point.of view consisted of an extremely narrow slice of reality, as if they looked at life through the slit of a welder's hood. They wrote well, certainly, but they were writing about only the tiniest sliver of the human experience in a big world and an infinite universe.

He now preferred writers who could look beyond this horizon, who knew that humanity would one day reach childhood's end, who believed intellect could triumph over superstition and ignorance, and who dared to dream.

He was also thinking about buying a second Discman and giving Wormheart another try.

He finished a beer, put the bottle on the porch beside the rocker, and wished he could believe the thing that had come through the doorway was just a person from the distant future, or at least something benign.

But it had gone into hiding for more than five weeks, and its secretiveness did not seem to indicate benevolent intentions. He was trying not to be xenophobic. But instinct told him that he'd had a brush with something not merely different from humanity but inherently hostile to it.

Although his attention was focused, more often than not, on the lower woods to the east, at the edge of which the doorway had opened, Eduardo wasn't comfortable venturing near the northern and western woods, either, because the evergreen wilderness on three sides of the ranch house was contiguous, broken only by the fields to the south. Whatever had entered the lower woods could easily make its way under the cover of the trees into any arm of the forest.

He supposed it was possible that the traveler had not chosen to hide anywhere nearby but had circled into the pines on the western foothills and from there into the mountains. It might long ago have retreated into some high redoubt, secluded ravine, or cavern in the remote reaches of the Rocky Mountains, many miles from Quartermass Ranch.

But he didn't think that was the case.

Sometimes, when he was walking near the forest, studying the shadows under the trees, looking for anything out of the ordinary, he was aware of… a presence. Simple as that. Inexplicable as that. A presence.

On those occasions, though he neither saw nor heard anything unusual, he was aware that he was no longer alone. So he waited.

Sooner or later something new would happen.

On those days when he grew impatient, he reminded himself of two things.

First, he was well accustomed to waiting, since Margaret had died three years ago, he hadn't been doing anything but waiting for the time to come when he could join her again. Second, when at last something did happen, when the traveler finally chose to reveal itself in some fashion, Eduardo more likely than not would wish that it had remained.concealed and secretive.

Now he picked up the empty beer bottle, rose from the rocking chair, intending to get another brew-and saw the raccoon. It was standing in the yard, about eight or ten feet from the porch, staring at him. He hadn't noticed it before because he'd been focused on the distant trees-the once-luminous trees-at the foot of the meadow.

The woods and fields were heavily populated with wildlife. The frequent appearance of squirrels, rabbits, foxes, possums, deer, horned sheep, and other animals was one of the charms of such a deeply rural life.

Raccoons, perhaps the most adventurous and interesting of all the creatures in the neighborhood, were highly intelligent and rated higher still on any scale of cuteness. However, their intelligence and aggressive scavenging made them a nuisance, and the dexterity of their almost hand-like paws facilitated their mischief. In the days when horses had been kept in the stables, before Stanley Quartermass died, raccoons-although primarily carnivores-had been endlessly inventive in the raids they launched on apples and other equestrian supplies.

Now, as then, trash cans had to be fitted with raccoon-proof lids, though these masked bandits still made an occasional assault on the containers, as if they'd been in their dens, brooding about the situation for weeks, and had devised a new technique they wanted to try out.