Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

He shoved his chair back from the table and got quickly to his feet.

Evidently the animal had entered the room from the hallway. How it had gotten inside the house in the first place, however, was a mystery.

The clicking he'd heard had been its claws on the pegged-oak floor.

They rattled against the wood again, though it didn't move.

Eduardo realized it was racked by severe shivers. At first he thought it was frightened of being in the house, feeling threatened and cornered.

He backed away a couple of steps, giving it space… The raccoon made a thin mewling sound that was neither a threat nor an expression of fear, but the unmistakable voice of misery. It was in pain, injured or ill.

His first reaction was: Rabies.

The.22 pistol lay on the table, as he always kept a weapon close at hand these days. He picked it up, though he did not want to have to kill the raccoon in the house.

He saw now that the creature's eyes were protruding unnaturally and that the fur under them was wet and matted with tears. The small paws clawed at the air, and the black-ringed tail swished back and forth furiously across the oak floor. Gagging, the coon dropped off its haunches, flopped on its side. It twitched convulsively, sides heaving as it struggled to breathe. Abruptly blood bubbled from its nostrils and trickled from its ears. After one final spasm that rattled its claws against the floor again, it lay still, silent.

Dead.

"Dear Jesus," Eduardo said, and put one trembling hand to his brow to blot away the sudden dew of perspiration that had sprung up along his hairline.

The dead raccoon didn't seem as large as either of the sentinels he'd seen outside, and he didn't think that it looked smaller merely because death had diminished it. He was pretty sure it was a third individual, perhaps younger than the other two, or maybe they were males, and this was a female.

He remembered leaving the kitchen door open when he'd walked around the house to see if the front and back sentries were the same animal. The screen door had been closed. But it was light, just a narrow pine frame and screen. The raccoon might have been able to pry it open wide enough to insinuate its snout, its head, and then its body, sneaking into the house before he'd returned to close the inner door.

Where had it hidden in the house when he'd been passing the late afternoon in the rocking chair? What had it been up to while he was cooking dinner?

He went to the window at the sink. Because he had eaten early and because the summer sunset was late, twilight had not yet arrived, so he could clearly see the masked observer. It was in the backyard, sitting on its hindquarters, dutifully watching the house.

Stepping carefully around the pitiful creature on the floor, Eduardo went down the hall, unlocked the front door, and stepped outside to see if the other sentry was still in place. It was not in the front yard, where he'd left it, but on the porch, a few feet from the door. It was lying on its side, blood pooled in the one ear that he could see, blood at its nostrils, eyes wide and glazed.

Eduardo raised his attention from the coon to the lower woods at the bottom of the meadow. The declining sun, balanced on the peaks of the.mountains in the west, threw slanting orange beams between the trunks of those trees but was incapable of dispelling the stubborn shadows.

By the time he returned to the kitchen and looked out the window again, the backyard coon was running frantically in circles. When he went out onto the porch, he could hear it squealing in pain. Within seconds it fell, tumbled. It lay with its sides heaving for a moment, and then it was motionless.

He looked uphill, past the dead raccoon on the grass, to the woods that flanked the fieldstone house where he had lived when he'd been the caretaker.

The darkness among those trees was deeper than in the lower forest because the westering sun illuminated only their highest boughs as it slid slowly behind the Rockies.

Something was in the woods.

Eduardo didn't think the raccoons' strange behavior resulted from rabies or, in fact, from an illness of any kind. Something was… controlling them.

Maybe the means by which that control was exerted had proved so physically taxing to the animals that it had resulted in their sudden, spasmodic deaths.

Or maybe the entity in the woods had purposefully killed them to exhibit the extent of its control, to impress Eduardo with its power, and to suggest that it might be able to waste him as easily as it had destroyed the raccoons.

He felt he was being watched-and not just through the eyes of other raccoons.

The bare peaks of the highest mountains loomed like a tidal wave of granite.

The orange sun slowly submerged into that sea of stone.

A steadily inkier darkness rose under the evergreen boughs, but Eduardo didn't think that even the blackest condition in nature could match the darkness in the heart of the watcher in the woods-if, in fact, it had a heart at all.

Although he was convinced that disease had not played a role in the behavior and death of the raccoons, Eduardo could not be certain of his diagnosis, so he took precautions when handling the bodies. He tied a bandanna over his nose and mouth, and wore a pair of rubber gloves. He didn't handle the carcasses directly but lifted each with a short-handled shovel and slipped it into its own large plastic trash bag. He twisted the top of each bag, tied a knot in it, and put it in the cargo area of the Cherokee station wagon in the garage. After hosing off the small smears of blood on the front porch, he used several cotton cloths to scrub the kitchen floor with pure Lysol.

Finally he threw the cleaning rags into a bucket, stripped off the.gloves and dropped them on top of the rags, and set the bucket on the back porch to be dealt with later.

He also put a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun and the.22 pistol in the Cherokee.

He took the video camera with him, because he didn't know when he might need it. Besides, the tape currently in the camera contained the footage of the raccoons, and he didn't want that to disappear as had the tape he'd taken of the luminous woods and the black doorway. For the same reason, he took the yellow tablet that was half filled with his handwritten account of these recent events.

By the time he was ready to drive into Eagle's Roost, the long twilight had surrendered to night. He didn't relish returning to a dark house, though he had never been skittish about that before. He turned on lights in the kitchen and the downstairs hall. After further thought, he switched on lamps in the living room and study.

He locked up, backed the Cherokee out of the garage-and thought too much of the house remained dark. He went back inside to turn on a couple of upstairs lights. By the time he returned to the Cherokee and headed down the half-mile driveway toward the county road to the south, every window on both floors of the house glowed.

The Montana vastness appeared to be emptier than ever before. Mile after mile, up into the black hills on one hand and across the timeless plains on the other, the few tiny clusters of lights that he saw were always in the distance. They seemed adrift on a sea, as if they were the lights of ships moving inexorably away toward one horizon or another.

Though the moon had not yet risen, he didn't think its glimmer would have made the night seem any less enormous or more welcoming. The sense of isolation that troubled him had more to do with his interior landscape than with the Montana countryside.

He was a widower, childless, and most likely in the last decade of his life, separated from so many of his fellow men and women by age, fate, and inclination. He had never needed anyone but Margaret and Tommy.

After losing them, he had been resigned to living out his years in an almost monkish existence-and had been confident that he could do so without succumbing to boredom or despair. Until recently he'd gotten along well enough. Now, however, he wished that he had reached out to make friends, at least one, and had not so single-mindedly obeyed his hermit heart.