Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

Potter hesitated. "The only thing I could find was severe brain inflammation and swelling."."Thought you said there was no infection?"

"There isn't. No lesions, no abscesses or pus, just inflammation and extreme swelling. Extreme."

"Maybe the state lab ought to test that brain tissue."

"Brain tissue was part of what I sent them in the first place."

"I see."

"I've never encountered anything like it," Potter told him.

Eduardo said nothing.

"Very odd," Potter said. "Have there been more of them?"

"More dead raccoons? No. Just the three."

"I'm going to run some toxicological studies, see if maybe we're dealing with a poison here."

"I haven't put out any poisons."

"Could be an industrial toxin."

"It could? There's no damned industry around here."

"Well… a natural toxin, then."

Eduardo said, "When you dissected them…"

"Yes?"

"… opened the skull, saw the brain inflamed and swollen…"

"So much pressure, even after death, blood and spinal fluid squirted out the instant the bone saw cut through the cranium."

"Vivid image."

"Sorry. But that's why their eyes were bulging."

"Did you just take samples of the brain tissue or…"

"Yes?"

"… did you actually dissect the brain?"

"I performed complete cerebrotomies on two of them."

"Opened their brains all the way up?"

"Yes."

"And you didn't find anything?"."Just what I told you."

"Nothing… unusual?"

The puzzlement in Potter's silence was almost audible. Then: "What would you have expected me to find, Mr. Fernandez?"

Eduardo did not respond.

"Mr. Fernandez?"

"What about their spines?" Eduardo asked. "Did you examine their spines, the whole length of their spines?"

"Yes, I did."

"You find anything… attached?"

"Attached?" Potter said.

"Yes."

"What do you mean, attached'?"

"Might have… might have looked like a tumor."

"Looked like a tumor?"

"Say a tumor… something like that?"

"No. Nothing like that. Nothing at all."

Eduardo took the telephone handset away from his head long enough to swallow some beer.

When he put the phone to his ear again, he heard Travis Potter saying,

"— know something you haven't told me?"

"Not that I'm aware of," Eduardo lied.

The veterinarian was silent this time. Maybe he was sucking on a beer of his own. Then: "If you come across any more animals like this, will you call me?"

"Yes."

"Not just raccoons."

"All right."

"Any animals at all."

"Sure."

"Don't move them," Potter said.

"I won't."."I want to see them in situ, just where they fell."

"Whatever you say."

"Well…"

"Goodbye, Doctor."

Eduardo hung up and went to the sink. He stared out the window at the forest at the top of the sloped backyard, west of the house.

He wondered how long he would have to wait. He was sick to death of waiting.

"Come on," he said softly to the hidden watcher in the woods.

He was ready. Ready for hell or heaven or eternal nothingness, whatever came.

He wasn't afraid of dying.

What frightened him was the how of dying. What he might have to endure. What might be done to him in the final minutes or hours of his life. What he might see.

On the morning of June twenty-first, as he was eating breakfast and listening to the world news on the radio, he looked up and saw a squirrel at the window in the north wall of the kitchen. It was perched on the window stool, gazing through the glass at him. Very still. Intense. As the raccoons had been.

He watched it for a while, then concentrated on his breakfast again.

Each time he looked up, it was on duty.

After he washed the dishes, he went to the window, crouched, and came face-to-face with the squirrel. Only the pane of glass was between them. The animal seemed unfazed by this close inspection.

He snapped one fingernail against the glass directly in front of its face.

The squirrel didn't flinch.

He rose, twisted the thumb-turn latch, and started to lift the lower half of the double-hung window.

The squirrel leaped down from the stool and fled to the side yard, where it turned and regarded him intently once more.

He closed and locked the window and went out to sit on the front porch.

Two squirrels were already out there on the grass, waiting for him.

When Eduardo sat in the hickory rocking chair, one of the small beasts.remained in the grass, but the other climbed to the top porch step and kept a watch on him from that angle.

That night, abed in his barricaded room again, seeking sleep, he heard squirrels scampering on the roof. Small claws scratching at the shingles.

When he finally slept, he dreamed of rodents.

The following day, June twenty-second, the squirrels remained with him.

At windows. In the yard. On the porches. When he went for a walk, they trailed him at a distance.

The twenty-third was the same, but on the morning of the twenty-fourth, he found a dead squirrel on the back porch. Clots of blood in its ears. Dried blood in its nostrils. Eyes protruding from the sockets.

He found two more squirrels in the yard and a fourth on the front-porch steps, all in the same condition.

They had survived control longer than the raccoons.

Apparently the traveler was learning.

Eduardo considered calling Dr. Potter. Instead, he gathered up the four bodies and carried them to the center of the eastern meadow. He dropped them in the grass, where scavengers could find and deal with them.

He thought, also, of the imagined child in the faraway ranch who might have been watching the Cherokee's headlights on the way back from the vet's two weeks earlier. He told himself that he owed it to that child-or to other children, who really existed-to tell Potter the whole story. He should try to involve the authorities in the matter as well, even though getting anyone to believe him would be a frustrating and humiliating ordeal.

Maybe it was the beer he still drank from morning until bedtime, but he could no longer summon the sense of community he had felt that night.

He'd spent his whole life avoiding people. He couldn't suddenly find it within himself to embrace them.

Besides, everything had changed for him when he'd come home and found the evidence of the intruder: the crumbling clumps of soil, the dead beetles, the earthworm, the scrap of blue cloth caught in the frame of the oven door. He was waiting in dread for the next move in that part of the game, yet refusing to speculate about it, instantly blocking every forbidden thought that started to rise in his tortured mind.

When that fearful confrontation occurred, at last, he could not possibly share it with strangers. The horror was too personal, for him alone to witness and endure… He still maintained the diary of these events, and in that yellow tablet he wrote about the squirrels. He hadn't the will or the energy to record his experiences in as much detail as he had done at first.

He wrote as succinctly as possible without leaving out any pertinent information. After a lifetime of finding journal-keeping too burdensome, he was now unable to stop keeping this one.

He was seeking to understand the traveler by writing about it. The traveler… and himself.

On the last day of June, he decided to drive into Eagle's Roost to buy groceries and other supplies. Considering that he now lived deep in the shadow of the unknown and the fantastic, every mundane act-cooking a meal, making his bed every morning, shopping-seemed to be a pointless waste of time and energy, an absurd attempt to paint a facade of normality over an existence that was now twisted and strange. But life went on.

As Eduardo backed the Cherokee out of the garage, into the driveway, a large crow sprang off the front-porch railing and flew across the hood of the wagon with a great flapping of wings. He jammed on the brakes and stalled the engine. The bird soared high into a mottled-gray sky.