Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

Nevertheless, his prognosis was excellent.

His room might have been in a motel. Carpet instead of a vinyl-tile floor, green-and-white-striped wallpaper, nicely framed prints of bucolic landscapes, garishly patterned but cheerful drapes at the window. The two hospital beds, however, belied the Holiday Inn image.

The physical therapy room, where he was taken in a wheelchair for the first time at six-thirty in the morning, June twelfth, was well equipped with exercise machines. It smelled more like a hospital than like a gym, which wasn't bad. And perhaps because he had at least an idea of what lay ahead of him, he thought the place looked less like a gym than like a torture chamber.

His physical therapist, Moshe Bloom, was in his late twenties, six feet four, with a body so pumped and well carved that he looked as if he was in training to go one-on-one with an army tank. He had curly black hair, brown eyes flecked with gold, and a dark complexion enhanced by the California sun to a lustrous bronze shade. In white sneakers, white cotton slacks, white T-shirt, and skullcap, he was like a radiant.apparition, floating a fraction of an inch above the floor, come to deliver a message from God, which turned out to be, "No pain, no gain."

"Doesn't sound like advice, the way you say it," Jack told him.

"Oh?"

"Sounds like a threat."

"You'll cry like a baby after the first several sessions."

"If that's what you want, I can cry like a baby right now, and we can both go home."

"You'll fear the pain to start with."

"I've had some therapy at Westside General."

"That was just a game of patty-cake. Nothing like the hell I'm going to put you through."

"You're so comforting."

Bloom shrugged his immense shoulders. "You've got to have no illusions about any easy rehabilitation."

"I'm the original illusionless man."

"Good. You'll fear the pain at first, dread it, cower from it, beg to be sent home half crippled rather than finish the program-"

"Gee, I can hardly wait to start."

"— but I'll teach you to hate the pain instead of fear it-"

"Maybe I should just go to some UCLA extension classes, learn Spanish instead."

"— and then I'll teach you to love the pain, because it's a sure sign that you're making progress."

"You need a refresher course in how to inspire your patients."

"You've got to inspire yourself, Mcgarvey. My main job is to challenge you."

"Call me Jack."

The therapist shook his head. "No. To start, I'll call you Mcgarvey, you call me Bloom. This relationship is always adversarial at first.

You'll need to hate me, to have a focus for your anger. When that time comes, it'll be easier to hate me if we aren't using first names."."I hate you already."

Bloom smiled. "You'll do all right, Mcgarvey."

After the night of June tenth, Eduardo lived in denial. For the first time in his life, he was unwilling to face reality, although he knew it had never been more important to do so. It would have been healthier for him to visit the one place on the ranch where he would find-or fail to find-evidence to support his darkest suspicions about the nature of the intruder who had come into the house when he had been at Travis Potter's office in Eagle's Roost. Instead, it was the one place he assiduously avoided. He didn't even look toward that knoll.

He drank too much and didn't care. For seventy years he had lived by the motto "Moderation in all things," and that prescription for life had led him only to this point of humbling loneliness and horror. He wished the been-which he occasionally spiked with good bourbon-would have a greater numbing effect on him. He seemed to have an uncanny tolerance for alcohol. And even when he had poured down enough to turn his legs and his spine to rubber, his mind remained far too clear to suit him.

He escaped into books, reading exclusively in the genre for which he'd recently developed an appreciation. Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Sturgeon, Benford, Clement, Wyndham, Christopher, Niven, Zelazny.

Whereas he had first found, to his surprise, that fiction of the fantastic could be challenging and meaningful, he now found it could also be narcotizing, a better drug than any volume of beer and less taxing on the bladder. The effect it her enlightenment and wonder or intellectual and emotional anesthesia-was strictly at the discretion of the reader. Spaceships, time machines, teleportation cubicles, alien worlds, colonized moons, extraterrestrials, mutants, intelligent plants, robots, androids, clones, computers alive with artificial intelligence, telepathy, starship war fleets engaged in battles in far reaches of the galaxy, the collapse of the universe, time running backward, the end of all things! He lost himself in a fog of the fantastic, in a tomorrow that would never be, to avoid thinking about the unthinkable.

The traveler from the doorway became quiescent, holed up in the woods, and days passed without new developments. Eduardo didn't understand why it would have come across billions of miles of space or thousands of years of time, only to proceed with the conquest of the earth at a turtle's pace.

Of course, the very essence of something truly and deeply alien was that its motivations and actions would be mysterious and perhaps even incomprehensible to a human being. The conquest of earth might be of no interest whatsoever to the thing that had come through the doorway, and its concept of time might be so radically different from Eduardo's that days were like minutes to it… In science fiction novels, there were essentially three kinds of aliens. The good ones generally wanted to help humanity reach its full potential as an intelligent species and thereafter coexist in fellowship and share adventures for eternity. The bad ones wanted to enslave human beings, feed on them, plant eggs in them, hunt them for sport, or eradicate them because of a tragic misunderstanding or out of sheer viciousness. The third-and least encountered-type of extraterrestrial was neither good nor bad but so utterly alien that its purpose and destiny were as enigmatic to human beings as was the mind of God, this third type usually did the human race a great good service or a terrible evil merely by passing through on its way to the galactic rim, like a bus running across a column of busy ants on a highway, and was never even aware of the encounter, let alone that it had impacted the lives of intelligent beings.

Eduardo hadn't a clue as to the larger intentions of the watcher in the woods, but he knew instinctively that, on a personal level, it didn't wish him well.

It wasn't seeking eternal fellowship and shared adventures. It wasn't blissfully unaware of him, either, so it was not one of the third type.

It was strange and malevolent, and sooner or later it would kill him.

In the novels, good aliens outnumbered bad. Science fiction was basically a literature of hope.

As the warm June days passed, hope was in far shorter supply on Quartermass Ranch than in the pages of those books.

On the afternoon of June seventeenth, while Eduardo was sitting in a living-room armchair, drinking beer and reading Walter M. Miller, the telephone rang. He put down the book but not the beer, and went into the kitchen to take the call.

Travis Potter said, "Mr. Fernandez, you don't have to worry."

"Don't I?"

"I got a fax from the state lab, results of the tests on the tissue samples from those raccoons, and they aren't infected."

"They sure are dead," Eduardo said.

"But not from rabies. Not from plague, either. Nothing that appears to be infectious, or communicable by bite or fleas."

"You do an autopsy?"

"Yes, sir, I did."

"So was it boredom that killed them, or what?"