Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

The house waited.

Couldn't sit in the car all night. Couldn't live in it, for God's sake.

He drove slowly along the last stretch of driveway and stopped in front of the garage. He picked up the remote control and pressed the single button.

The automatic garage door rolled up. Inside the three-vehicle space, the overhead convenience lamp, which was on a three-minute timer, shed enough light to reveal that nothing was amiss in the garage.

So much for the power-failure theory.

Instead of pulling forward ten feet and into the garage, he stayed where he was. He put the Cherokee in Park but didn't switch off the engine. He left the headlights on too.

He picked up the shotgun from where it was angled muzzle-down in the knee space in front of the passenger seat, and he got out of the station wagon. He left the driver's door wide open.

Door open, lights on, engine running.

He didn't like to think that he would cut and run at the first sign of trouble. But if it was run or die, he was sure as hell going to be faster than anything that might be chasing him.

Although the pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun contained only five rounds-one already in the breech and four in the magazine tube-he was unconcerned that he hadn't brought any spare shells. If he was unlucky enough to encounter something that couldn't be brought down with five shots at close range, he wouldn't live long enough to reload, anyway.

He went to the front of the house, climbed the porch steps, and tried the front door. It was locked.

His house key was on a bead chain, separate from the car keys. He.fished it out of his jeans and unlocked the door.

Standing outside, holding the shotgun in his right hand, he reached cross-body with his left, inside the half-open door, fumbling for the light switch. He expected something to rush at him from out of the night. downstairs hallway-or to put its hand over his as he patted the wall in search of the switch plate.

He flipped the switch, and light filled the hall, spilled over him onto the front porch. He crossed the threshold and took a couple of steps inside, leaving the door open behind him.

The house was quiet.

Dark rooms on both sides of the hallway. Study to his left. Living room to his right.

He hated to turn his back on either room, but finally he moved to the right, through the archway, the shotgun held in front of him. When he turned on the overhead light, the expansive living room proved to be deserted. No intruder.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Then he noticed a dark clump lying on the white fringe at the edge of the Chinese carpet. At first glance he thought it was feces, that an animal had gotten in the house and done its business right there. But when he stood over it and looked closer, he saw it was only a caked wad of damp earth.

A couple of blades of grass bristled from it.

Back in the hallway, he noticed, for the first time, smaller crumbs of dirt littering the polished oak floor.

He ventured cautiously into the study, where there was no ceiling fixture. The influx of light from the hallway dispelled enough shadows to allow him to find and click on the desk lamp.

Crumbs and smears of dirt, now dry, soiled the blotter on the desk.

More of it on the red leather seat of the chair.

"What the hell?" he wondered softly.

Warily he rolled aside the mirrored doors on the study closet, but no one was hiding in there.

In the hall he checked the foyer closet too. Nobody.

The front door was still standing open. He couldn't decide what to do about it. He liked it open because it offered an unobstructed exit if he wanted to get out fast. On the other hand, if he searched the house top to bottom and found no one in it, he would have to come back, lock the door, and search every room again to guard against the possibility that someone had slipped in behind his back. Reluctantly he closed it and engaged the dead bolt… The beige wall-to-wall carpet that was used through the upstairs also extended down the inlaid-oak staircase, with its heavy handrail. In the center of a few of the lower treads were crumbled chunks of dry earth, not much, just enough to catch his eye.

He peered up at the second floor.

No. First, the downstairs.

He found nothing in the powder room, in the closet under the stairs, in the large dining room, in the laundry room, in the service bath. But there was dirt again in the kitchen, more than elsewhere.

His unfinished dinner of rigatoni, sausage, and butter bread was on the table, for he'd been interrupted in mid-meal by the intrusion of the raccoon-and by its spasmodic death. Smudges of now dry mud marked the rim of his dinner plate. The table around the plate was littered with pea-size lumps of dry earth, a spadeshaped brown leaf curled into a miniature scroll, and a dead beetle the size of a penny.

The beetle was on its back, six stiff legs in the air. When he flicked it over with one finger, he saw that its shell was iridescent blue-green.

Two flattened wads of dirt, like dollar pancakes, were stuck to the seat of the chair. On the oak floor around the chair was more detritus.

Another concentration of soil lay in front of the refrigerator.

Altogether, it amounted to a couple of tablespoons' worth, but there were also a few blades of grass, another dead leaf, and an earthworm.

The worm was still alive but curled up on itself, suffering from a lack of moisture.

A crawling sensation along the nape of his neck and a sudden conviction that he was being watched made him clutch the shotgun with both hands and spin toward one window, then the other. No pale, ghastly face was pressed to either pane of glass, as he had imagined.

Only the night.

The chrome handle on the refrigerator was dulled by filth, and he did not touch it. He opened the door by gripping the edge. The food and beverages inside seemed untouched, everything just as he'd left it.

The doors of both double ovens were hanging open. He closed them without touching the handles, which were also smeared in places with unidentifiable crud.

Caught on a sharp edge of the oven door was a torn scrap of fabric, half an inch wide and less than an inch long. It was pale blue, with a fragmentary curve of darker blue that might have been a portion of a repeating pattern against the lighter background… Eduardo stared at the fragment of cloth for a personal eternity. Time seemed to-stop, and the universe hung as still as the pendulum of a broken grandfather clock- until icy spicules of profound fear formed in his blood and made him shudder so violently that his teeth actually chattered. The graveyard… He whipped around again, toward one window, the other, but nothing was there.

Only the night. The night. The blind, featureless, uncaring face of the night.

He searched the upstairs. Telltale chunks, crumbs, and smears of earth-once moist, now dry-could be found in most rooms. Another leaf. Two more dead beetles as dry as ancient papyrus. A pebble the size of a cherry pit, smooth and gray.

He realized that some of the switch plates and light switches were soiled.

Thereafter, he flicked the lights on with his sleeve-covered arm or the shotgun barrel.

When he had examined every chamber, probed to the back of every closet, inspected behind and under every piece of furniture where a hollow space might conceivably offer concealment even to something as large as a seven- or eight-year-old child, and when he was satisfied that nothing was hiding on the second floor, he returned to the end of the upstairs hall and pulled on the dangling release cord that lowered the attic trapdoor.

He pulled down the folding ladder fixed to the back of the trap.

The attic lights could be turned on from the hall, so he didn't have to ascend into darkness. He searched every shadowed niche in the deep and dusty eaves, where snowflake moths hung in webs like laces of ice and feeding spiders loomed as cold and black as winter shadows.