Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

Eduardo followed him into the hall and through another door into Potter's private office. The vet rummaged in the drawers of a white, enameled-metal storage cabinet and handed him a pair of pamphlets- one on rabies, one on bubonic plague.

"Read up on the symptoms for both," Potter said. "You notice anything similar in yourself, even similar, get to your doctor."

"Don't like doctors much."

"That's not the point. You have a doctor?"

"Never need one."

"Then you call me, and I'll get a doctor to you, one way or the other.

Understand?"

"All right."

"You'll do it?"

"Sure will."

Potter said, "You have a telephone out there?"

"Of course. Who doesn't have a phone these days?"

The question seemed to confirm that he had an image as a hermit and an eccentric. Which maybe he deserved. Because now that he thought about it, he hadn't used the phone to receive or place a call in at least five or six months. He doubted if it'd rung more than three times in the past year, and one of those was a wrong number.

Potter went to his desk, picked up a pen, pulled a notepad in front of him, and wrote the number down as Eduardo recited it. He tore off another sheet of notepaper and gave it to Eduardo because it was imprinted with his office address and his own phone numbers.

Eduardo folded the paper into his wallet. "What do I owe you?"

"Nothing," Potter said. "These weren't your pet raccoons, so why should you pay? Rabies is a community problem."

Potter accompanied him out to the Cherokee.

The larches rustled in the warm breeze, crickets chirruped, and a frog croaked like a dead man trying to talk.

As he opened the driver's door, Eduardo turned to the vet and said,

"When you do that autopsy…"

"Yes?"."Will you look just for signs of known diseases?"

"Disease pathologies, trauma."

"That's all?"

"What else would I look for?"

Eduardo hesitated, shrugged, and said, "Anything… strange."

That stare again. "Well, sir," Potter said, "I will now."

All the way home through that dark and forlorn land, Eduardo wondered if he had done the right thing. As far as he could see, there were only two alternatives to the course of action he'd taken, and both were problematic.

He could have disposed of the raccoons on the ranch and waited to see what would happen next. But he might have been destroying important evidence that something not of this earth was hiding in the Montana woods.

Or he could have explained to Travis Potter about the luminous trees, throbbing sounds, waves of pressure, and black doorway. He could have told him about the raccoons keeping him under surveillance-and the sense he'd had that they were serving as surrogate eyes for the unknown watcher in the woods. If he was generally regarded as the old hermit of Quartermass Ranch, however, he wouldn't be taken seriously.

Worse, once the veterinarian had spread the story, some busybody public official might get it in his head that poor old Ed Fernandez was senile or even flat-out deranged, a danger to himself and others. With all the compassion in the world, sorrowful-eyed and softvoiced, shaking their heads sadly and telling themselves they were doing it for his own good, they might commit him against his will for medical examinations and a psychiatric review.

He was loath to be carted away to a hospital, poked and prodded and spoken to as if he had reverted to infancy. He wouldn't react well.

He knew himself. He would respond to them with stubbornness and contempt, irritating the do-gooders to such an extent that they might induce a court to take charge of his affairs and order him transferred to a nursing home or some other facility for the rest of his days.

He had lived a long time and had seen how many lives were ntined by people operating with the best intentions and a smug assurance of their own superiority and wisdom. The destruction of one more old man wouldn't be noticed, and he had no wife or children, no friend or relative, to stand with him against the killing kindness of the state.

Giving the dead animals to Potter to be tested and autopsied was, therefore, as far as Eduardo had dared to go. He only worried that, considering the inhuman nature of the entity that controlled the coons, he might have put Travis Potter at risk in some way he couldn't.foresee.

Eduardo had hinted at a strangeness, however, and Potter had seemed to have his share of common sense. The vet knew the risks associated with disease. He would take every precaution against contamination, which would probably also be effective against whatever unguessable and unearthly peril the carcasses might pose in addition to microbiotic infection.

Beyond the Cherokee, the home lights of unmet families shone far out on the sea of night. For the first time in his life, Eduardo wished that he knew them, their names and faces, their histories and hopes.

He wondered if some child might be sitting on a distant porch or at a window, staring across the rising plains at the headlights of the Cherokee progressing westward through the June darkness. A young boy or girl, full of plans and dreams, might wonder who was in the vehicle behind those lights, where he was bound, and what his life was like.

The thought of such a child out there in the night gave Eduardo the strangest sense of community, an utterly unexpected feeling that he was part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan, flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble and admirable, with a common destiny that every member shared.

For him, that was an unusually optimistic and philosophically generous view of his fellow men and women, uncomfortably close to sentimentality. But he was warmed as well as astonished by it.

He was convinced that whatever had come through the doorway was inimical to humankind, and his brush with it had reminded him that all of nature was, in fact, hostile. It was a cold and uncaring universe, either because God had made it that way as a test to determine good souls from bad, or simply because that's the way it was. No man could survive in civilized comfort without the struggles and hard-won successes of all the people who had gone before him and who shared his time on earth with him. If a new evil had entered the world, one to dwarf the evil of which some men and women were capable, humanity would need a sense of community more desperately than ever before in its long and troubled journey.

The house came into view when he was a third of the way along the half-mile driveway, and he continued uphill, approaching to within sixty or eighty yards of it before realizing that something was wrong.

He braked to a full stop.

Prior to leaving for Eagle's Roost, he had turned on lights in every room. He clearly remembered all of the glowing windows as he had driven away. He had been embarrassed by his childlike reluctance to return to a dark house.

Well, it was dark now. As black as the inside of the devil's bowels.

Before he quite realized what he was doing, Eduardo pressed the master.lock switch, simultaneously securing all the doors on the station wagon.

He sat for a while, just staring at the house. The front door was closed, and all the windows he could see were unbroken. Nothing appeared out of order.

Except that every light in every room had been turned off. By whom?

By what?

He supposed a power failure could have been responsible-but he didn't believe it. Sometimes, a Montana thunderstorm could be a real sternwinder, in the winter, blizzard winds and accumulated ice could play havoc with electrical service. But there had been no bad weather tonight and only the mildest breeze. He hadn't noticed any downed power lines on the way home.