Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

Later, in town, when Eduardo walked out of the supermarket, pushing a cart filled with supplies, a crow was perched on the hood ornament of the station wagon. He assumed it was the same creature that had startled him less than two hours before.

It remained on the hood, watching him through the windshield, as he went around to the back of the Cherokee and opened the cargo hatch. As he loaded the bags into the space behind the rear seat, the crow never looked away from him. It continued to watch him as he pushed the empty cart back to the front of the store, returned, and got in behind the steering wheel. The bird took flight only when he started the engine.

Across sixteen miles of Montana countryside, the crow tracked him from on high. He could keep it in view either by leaning forward over the wheel to peer through the upper part of the windshield or simply by looking out his side window, depending on the position from which the creature chose to monitor him. Sometimes it flew parallel to the Cherokee, keeping pace, and sometimes it rocketed ahead so far that it became only a speck, nearly vanished into the clouds, only to double back and take up a parallel course once more. It was with him all the way home.

While Eduardo ate dinner, the bird perched on the exterior stool of the window in the north wall of the kitchen, where he had first seen one of the sentinel squirrels. When he got up from his meal to raise the bottom half of the window, the crow scrammed, as the squirrel had.

He left the window open while he finished dinner. A refreshing breeze skimmed in off the twilight meadows. Before Eduardo had eaten his last bite, the crow returned… The bird remained in the open window while Eduardo washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away. It followed his every move with its bright black eyes.

He got another beer from the refrigerator and returned to the table.

He settled in a different chair from the one in which he'd sat before, closer to the crow. Only an arm's length separated them.

"What do you want?" he asked, surprised that he didn't feel at all foolish talking to a damned bird.

Of course, he wasn't talking to the bird. He was addressing whatever controlled the bird. The traveler.

"Do you just want to watch me?" he asked.

The bird stared.

"Would you like to communicate?"

The bird lifted one wing, tucked its head underneath, and pecked at its feathers as if plucking out lice.

After another swallow of beer, Eduardo said, "Or would you like to control me the way you do these animals?"

The crow shifted back and forth from foot to foot, shook itself, cocked its head to peer at him with one eye.

"You can act like a damned bird all you want, but I know that's not what you are, not all you are."

The crow grew still again.

Beyond the window, twilight had given way to night.

"Can you control me? Maybe you're limited to simpler creatures, less complex neurological systems."

Black eyes glittering. Sharp orange beak parted slightly.

"Or maybe you're learning the ecology here, the flora and fauna, figuring out how it works in this place, honing your skills. Hmmm?

Maybe you're working your way up to me. Is that it?"

Watching.

"I know there's nothing of you in the bird, nothing physical. Just like you weren't in the raccoons. An autopsy established that much.

Thought you might have to insert something into an animal to control it, something electronic, I don't know, maybe even something biological. Thought maybe there were a lot of you out in the woods, a hive, a nest, and maybe one of you actually had to enter an animal to control it. Half expected Potter would find some strange slug living.in the raccoon's brain, some damned centipede thing hooked to its spine. A seed, an unearthly-looking spider, something. But you don't work that way, huh?"

He took a swallow of Corona.

"Ahhh. Tastes good."

He held the beer out to the crow.

It stared at him over the top of the bottle.

"Teetotaler, huh? I keep learning things about you. We're an inquisitive bunch, we human beings. We learn fast and we're good at applying what we learn, good at meeting challenges. Does that worry you any?"

The crow raised its tail feather and crapped.

"Was that a comment," Eduardo wondered, "or just part of doing a good bird imitation?"

The sharp beak opened and closed, opened and closed, but no sound issued from the bird.

"Somehow you control these animals from a distance. Telepathy, something like that? From quite a distance, in the case of this bird.

Sixteen miles into Eagle's Roost. Well, maybe fourteen miles as the crow flies."

If the traveler knew that Eduardo had made a lame pun, it gave no indication through the bird.

"Pretty clever, whether it's telepathy or something else. But it sure as hell takes a toll on the subject, doesn't it? You're getting better, though, learning the limitations of the local slave population."

The crow pecked for more lice.

"Have you made any attempts to control me? Because if you have, I don't think I was aware of it. Didn't feel any probing at my mind, didn't see alien images behind my eyes, none of the stuff you read about in novels."

Peck, peck, peck.

Eduardo chugged the rest of the Corona. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

Having nailed the lice, the bird watched him serenely, as though it would sit there all night and listen to him ramble, if that was what he wanted.

"I think you're going slow, feeling your way, experimenting. This.world seems normal enough to those of us born here, but maybe to you it's one of the weirdest places you've ever seen. Could be you're not too sure of yourself here."

He had not begun the conversation with any expectation that the crow would answer him. He wasn't in a damned Disney movie. Yet its continued silence was beginning to frustrate and annoy him, probably because the day had sailed by on a tide of beer and he was full of drunkard's anger.

"Come on. Let's stop farting around. Let's do it."

The crow just stared.

"Come here yourself, pay me a visit, the real you, not in a bird or squirrel or raccoon. Come as yourself. No costumes. Let's do it.

Let's get it over with."

The bird flapped its wings once, half unfurling them, but that was all.

"You're worse than Poe's raven. You don't even say a single word, you just sit there. What good are you?"

Staring, staring.

And the Raven, never Jutting, still is sitting, still is sitting.

Though Poe had never been one of his favorites, only a writer he had read while discovering what he really admired, he began quoting aloud to the feathered sentry, infusing the words with the vehemence of the troubled narrator that the poet had created: " And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor-" Abruptly he realized, too late, that the bird and the poem and his own treacherous mind had brought him to a confrontation with the horrific thought that he'd repressed ever since cleaning up the soil and other leavings on June tenth. At the heart of Poe's "The Raven" was a lost maiden, young Lenore, lost to death, and a narrator with a morbid belief that Lenore had come back from-Eduardo slammed down a mental door on the rest of that thought.

With a snarl of rage, he threw the empty beer bottle. It hit the crow.

Bird and bottle tumbled into the night.

He leaped off his chair and to the window.

The bird fluttered on the lawn, then sprang into the air with a furious flapping of wings, up into the dark sky… Eduardo closed the window so hard he nearly shattered the glass, locked it, and clasped both hands to his head, as if he would tear out the fearful thought if it would not be repressed again.