Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

His face was creased and ruddy from years spent outdoors, and his big, leathery hands were scarred by physical labor. He wore scuffed boots, tan jeans, a white shirt, and a bolo tie with a silver clasp in the form of a bucking bronco.

In L.A. people in similar outfits were dentists or accountants or.executives, costumed for an evening at a Country-Western bar, and could not disguise their true nature. But Youngblood looked as if he had been born in Western garb, birthed between a cactus and a campfire, and raised on horseback.

Although he appeared to be rough enough to walk into a biker bar and take on a mob of machine wranglers, the attorney was soft-spoken and so polite that Jack was aware of how badly his own manners had deteriorated under the constant abrasion of daily life in the city.

Youngblood won Toby's heart by calling him "Scout" and offering to teach him horseback riding "come spring, starting with a pony, of course… and assuming that's okay with your folks."

When the lawyer put on a suede jacket and a cowboy hat before leading them out to Quartermass Ranch, Toby regarded him with wide-eyed awe.

They followed Youngblood's white Bronco across sixteen miles of country more beautiful than it had appeared to be in photographs. Two stone columns, surmounted by a weathered wooden arch, marked the entrance to their property. Burned into the arch, rustic lettering spelled QUARTERMASS RANCH. They turned off the county route, under the sign, and headed uphill.

Wow! This all belongs to us?" Toby asked from the back seat, enraptured by the sprawl of fields and forests. Before either Jack or Heather could answer him, he posed the question that he no doubt had been wanting to ask for weeks: "Can I have a dog?"

"Just a dog?" Jack asked. "Huh?"

"With this much land, you could have a pet cow." Toby laughed. "Cows aren't pets."

"You're wrong," Jack said, striving for a serious tone. "They're darned good pets."

"Cows!" Toby said incredulously. "No, really. You can teach a cow to fetch, roll over, beg for its dinner, shake hands, all the usual dog stuff- plus they make milk for your breakfast cereal."

"You're putting me on. Mom, is he serious?"

"The only problem is," Heather said, "you might get a cow that likes to chase cars-in which case it can do a lot more damage than a dog."

"That's silly," the boy said, and giggled. "Not if you're in the car being chased," Heather assured him. "Then it's terrifying," Jack agreed. "I'll stick with a dog."

"Well, if that's what you want," Jack said. "You mean it? I can have a dog?" Heather said, "I don't see why not." Toby whooped with delight.

The private lane led to the main residence, which overlooked a meadow.of golden-brown grass. In the last hour of its journey toward the western mountains, the sun backlit the property, and the house cast a long purple shadow. They parked in that shade behind Paul Youngblood's Bronco.

They began their tour in the basement. Although windowless and entirely beneath ground level, it was cold. The first room contained a washer, a dryer, a double sink, and a set of pine cabinets. The corners of the ceiling were enlivened by the architecture of spiders and a few cocooning moths. In the second room stood an electric forced-air furnace and a water heater. A Japanese-made electric generator, as large as a washing machine, was also provided. It looked capable of producing enough power to light a small town.

"Why do we need this?" Jack wondered, indicating the generator. Paul Youngblood said, "Bad storm can knock out the public power supply for a couple of days in some of these rural areas. Since we don't have natural-gas service, and the price of being supplied by a fuel-oil company in this territory can be high, we have to rely on electricity for heating, cooking, everything. It goes out, we have fireplaces, but that's not ideal. And Stan Quartermass was a man who never wanted to be without the comforts of civilization."

"But this is a monster," Jack said, patting the dustsheathed generator.

"Supplies the main house, caretaker's house, and the stables. Doesn't just provide backup power to run a few lights, either. As long as you've got gasoline, you can go on living with all the amenities, just as if you were still on public power."

"Might be fun to rough it a couple of days now and then," Jack suggested. The attorney frowned and shook his head. "Not when the real temperature is below zero and the windchill factor pushes it down to minus thirty or forty degrees."

"Ouch," Heather said. She hugged herself at the very thought of such arctic cold. "I'd call that more than roughing it,"

" Youngblood Jack agreed. "I'd call it suicide." I'll make sure we have a good gasoline supply.

The thermostat had been set low in the two main floors of the untenanted house.

A stubborn chill pooled everywhere, like the icy remnant of a flood tide. It surrendered gradually to the electric heat, which Paul switched on after they ascended from the basement and inspected half the ground floor. In spite of her insulated ski jacket, Heather shivered through the entire tour. The house had both character and every convenience, and would be even easier to settle into than they'd expected. Eduardo Fernandez's personal effects and clothing had not been disposed of, so they would need to empty closets to make room for their own things. In the four months since the old man's sudden death, the place had been closed and unattended, a thin layer of dust coated every surface. However, Eduardo had led a neat and orderly life, there was no great mess with which to deal… In the final bedroom on the second floor, at the back of the house, coppery late-afternoon sunlight slanted through west-facing windows, and the air glowed like that in front of an open furnace door. It was light without heat, and still Heather shivered.

Toby said, "This is great, this is terrific!" The room was more than twice the size of the one in which the boy had slept in Los Angeles, but Heather knew he was less excited by the dimensions than by the almost whimsical architecture, which would have sparked the imagination of any child. The twelve-foot-high ceiling was composed of four groin vaults, and the shadows that lay across those concave surfaces were complex and intriguing. "Neat," Toby said, staring up at the ceiling.

"Like hanging under a parachute." In the wall to the left of the hall door was a four-footdeep, six-foot-long, arched niche into which a custom-built bed had been fitted. Behind the headboard on the left and in the back wall of the niche were recessed bookshelves and deep cabinets for the storage of model spaceships, action figures, games, and the other possessions that a young boy cherished. Curtains were drawn back from both sides of the niche and, when closed, could seal it off like a berth on an old-fashioned railroad sleeping car.

"Can this be my room, can it, please?" Toby asked. "Looks to me like it was made for you," Jack said. "Great!" Opening one of the two other doors in the room, Paul said, "This walk-in closet is so deep you could almost say it's a room itself."

The last door revealed the head of an uncarpeted staircase as tightly curved as that in a lighthouse. The wooden treads squeaked as the four of them descended.

Heather instantly disliked the stairs. Perhaps she was somewhat claustrophobic in that cramped and windowless space, following Paul Youngblood and Toby, with Jack close behind. Perhaps the inadequate lighting-two widely spaced, bare bulbs in the ceiling-made her uneasy. A mustiness and a vague underlying odor of decay didn't add any charm. Neither did spiderwebs hung with dead moths and beetles.

Whatever the reason, her heart began to pound as if they were climbing rather than descending. She was overcome by the bizarre fear- similar to the nameless dread in a nightmare-that something hostile and infinitely strange was waiting for them below.