Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

The specimen in the front yard was an adult, sleek and fat, with a shiny coat that was somewhat thinner than the thick fur of winter. It sat on its hindquarters, forepaws against its chest, head held high, watching Eduardo. Though raccoons were communal and usually roamed in pairs or groups, no others were visible either in the front yard or along the edge of the meadow.

They were also nocturnal. They were rarely seen in the open in broad daylight.

With no horses in the stables and the trash cans well secured, Eduardo had long ago stopped chasing raccoons away-unless they got onto the roof at night. Engaged in raucous play or mouse chasing across the top of the house, they could make sleeping impossible.

He moved to the head of the porch steps, taking advantage of this uncommon opportunity to study one of the critters in bright sunlight at such close range.

The raccoon moved its head to follow him.

Nature had cursed the rascals with exceptionally beautiful fur, doing them the tragic disservice of making them valuable to the human species, which was ceaselessly engaged in a narcissistic search for materials with which to bedeck and ornament itself. This one had a particularly bushy tail, ringed with black, glossy and glorious.

"What're you doing out and about on a sunny afternoon?" Eduardo asked… The animal's anthracite-black eyes regarded him with almost palpable curiosity.

"Must be having an identity crisis, think you're a squirrel or something."

With a flurry of paws, the raccoon busily combed its facial fur for maybe half a minute, then froze again and regarded Eduardo intently.

Wild animals-even species as aggressive as raccoons-seldom made such direct eye contact as this fellow. They usually tracked people furtively, with peripheral vision or quick glances. Some said this reluctance to meet a direct gaze for more than a few seconds was an acknowledgment of human superiority, the animal's way of humbling itself as a commoner might do before a king, while others said it indicated that animals-innocent creatures of God-saw in men's eyes the stain of sin and were ashamed for humanity. Eduardo had his own theory: animals recognized that people were the most vicious and unrelenting beasts of all, violent and unpredictable, and avoided direct eye contact out of fear and prudence.

Except for this raccoon. It seemed to have no fear whatsoever, to feel no humility in the presence of a human being.

"At least not this particular sorry old human being, huh?"

The raccoon just watched him.

Finally the coon was less compelling than his thirst, and Eduardo went inside to get another beer. The hinge springs sang when he pulled open the screen door- which he'd hung for the season only two weeks before-and again when he eased it shut behind him.

He expected the strange sound to startle the coon and send it scurrying away, but when he looked back through the screen, he saw the critter had come a couple, of feet closer to the porch steps and more directly in line with the door, keeping him in sight.

"Funny little bugger," he said.

He walked to the kitchen, at the end of the hall, and, first thing, looked at the clock above the double ovens because he wasn't wearing a watch. Twenty past three.

He had a pleasing buzz on, and he was in the mood to sustain it all the way to bedtime. However, he didn't want to get downright sloppy. He decided to have dinner an hour early, at six instead of seven, get some food on his stomach.

He might take a book to bed and turn in early as well.

This waiting for something to happen was getting on his nerves.

He took another Corona from the refrigerator. It had a twist-off cap, but he had a touch of arthritis in his hands. The bottle opener was on the cutting board by the sink… As he popped the cap off the bottle, he happened to glance out the window above the sink-and saw the raccoon in the backyard. It was twelve or fourteen feet from the rear porch. Sitting on its hindquarters, forepaws against its chest, head held high. Because the yard rose toward the western woods, the coon was in a position to look over the porch railing, directly at the kitchen window.

It was watching him.

Eduardo went to the back door, unlocked and opened it.

The raccoon moved from its previous position to another from which it could continue to study him.

He pushed open the screen door, which made the same screaky sound as the one at the front of the house. He went onto the porch, hesitated, then descended the three back steps to the yard.

The animal's dark eyes glittered.

When Eduardo closed half the distance between them, the raccoon dropped to all fours, turned, and scampered twenty feet farther up the slope.

There it stopped, turned to face him again, sat erect on its hindquarters, and regarded him as before.

Until then he had thought it was the same raccoon that had been watching him from the front yard. Suddenly he wondered if, in fact, it was a different beast altogether.

He walked quickly around the north side of the house, cutting a wide enough berth to keep the raccoon at the back in sight. He came to a point, well to the north of the house, from which he could see the front and back yards-and two ring-tailed sentinels.

They were both staring at him.

He proceeded toward the raccoon in front of the house.

When he drew close, the coon put its tail to him and ran across the front yard. At what it evidently regarded as a safe distance, it stopped and sat watching him with its back against the higher, unmown grass of the meadow.

"I'll be damned," he said.

He returned to the front porch and sat in the rocker.

The waiting was over. After more than five weeks, things were beginning to happen.

Eventually he realized he'd left his open beer by the kitchen sink. He went inside to retrieve it because, now more than ever, he needed it.

He had left the back door standing open, though the screen door had closed behind him when he'd gone outside. He locked up, got his beer,stood at the window watching the backyard raccoon for a moment, and then returned to the front porch.

The first raccoon had crept forward from the edge of the meadow and was again only ten feet from the porch.

Eduardo picked up the video camera and recorded the critter for a couple of minutes. It wasn't anything amazing enough to convince skeptics that a doorway from beyond had opened in the early-morning hours of May third, however, it was peculiar for a nocturnal animal to pose so long in broad daylight, making such obviously direct eye contact with the operator of the camcorder, and it might prove to be the first small fragment in a mosaic of evidence.

After he finished with the camera, he sat in the rocker, sipping beer and watching the raccoon as it watched him, waiting to see what would happen next.

Occasionally the ring-tailed sentinel smoothed its whiskers, combed its face fur, scratched behind its ears, or performed some other small act of grooming.

Otherwise, there were no new developments.

At five-thirty he went inside to make dinner, taking his empty beer bottle, camcorder, and shotgun with him. He closed and locked the front door.

Through the oval, beveled-glass window, he saw the coon still on duty.

At the kitchen table, Eduardo enjoyed an early dinner of rigatoni and spicy sausage with thick slabs of heavily buttered Italian bread. He kept the yellow legal-size tablet beside his plate and, while he ate, wrote about the intriguing events of the afternoon.

He had almost brought the account up-to-date when a peculiar clicking noise distracted him. He glanced at the electric stove, then at each of the two windows to see if something was tapping on the glass.

When he turned in his chair, he saw that a raccoon was in the kitchen behind him. Sitting on its hindquarters. Staring at him.