Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

"Really?"

"More than that. He can do math as well as you or me." The claim was made with such calm conviction that the boy looked up wide-eyed at Youngblood. "You mean, like you ask him a problem, he can pound out the answer with his hoof?"

"He could do that, sure. Or just tell you the answer."

"Huh?"

"This steer, he can talk."

"No way," Toby said, following Jack and Heather outside. "Sure. He can talk, dance, drive a car, and he goes to church every Sunday," Paul said, switching off the stae unrelenting darkness of night in that largely unplowed vastness. Looking directly upslope from the stable, toward a knoll at the terminus of the western woods, Paul said, "No point showing you the cemetery in this poor light. Not that much to see even at noon."

"Cemetery?" Jack said, frowning. "You've got a state-certified private cemetery on your grounds," the attorney said. "Twelve plots, though only four have been used." Staring toward the knoll, where she could vaguely see part of what might have been a low stone wall and a pair of gateposts in the plum-dark light, Heather said, "Who's buried there?"

"Stan Quartermass, Ed Fernandez, Margaret, and Tommy."

"Tommy, my old partner, he's buried up there?" Jack asked. "Private cemetery," Heather said. She told herself that the only reason she shivered was because the air was growing colder by the minute. "That's a little macabre."

"Not so strange around here," Paul assured her. "A lot of these ranches, the same family has been on the land for generations. It's not only their home, it's their hometown, the only place they love.

Eagle's Roost is JUST somewhere to shop. When it comes to being put to eternal rest, they want to be part of the land they've given their lives to."."Wow," Toby said. "How cool can you get? We live in a graveyard."

"Hardly that," Paul said. "My grandfolks and my parents are buried over to our place, and there's really nothing creepy about it.

Comforting. Gives you a sense of hentage, continuity. Carolyn and I figure to be put to rest there too, though I can't say what our kids want to do, now they're off in medical school and law school making new lives that don't have anything to do with the ranch."

"Darn it, we just missed Halloween," Toby said, more to himself than to them. He stared toward the cemetery, caught up in a personal fantasy that no doubt involved the challenge of walking through a graveyard on All Hallows' Eve. They stood quietly for a moment.

The dusk was heavy, silent, still. Uphill, the cemetery seemed to cast off the fading light and pull the night down like a shroud, covering it-self with darkness faster than any of the land around it. Heather glanced at Jack to see if he showed any sign of being troubled by having Tommy Fernandez's remains buried nearby. Tommy had died at his side, after 11, eleven months before Luther Bryson had been shot.

With Tommy's grave so close, Jack couldn't help but recall, perhaps too vividly, violent events best condemmed forever to the deeper vaults of memory. As if sensing her concern, Jack smiled. "Makes me feel better to know Tommy found rest in a place as beautiful as this."

As they walked back to the house, the attorney invited them to dinner and to stay overnight with him and his wife. "One, you arrived too late today to get the place cleaned and livable. Two, you don't have any fresh food here, only what might be in the freezer. And three, you don't want to have to cook after putting in a long day on the road.

Why not relax this evening, get a start on it first thing in the morning, when you're rested?"

Heather was grateful for the invitation, not merely for the reasons Paul had enumerated but because she remained uneasy about the house and the isolation in which it stood. She had decided that her jumpiness was nothing other than a city person's initial response to more wide open spaces than she'd ever seen or contemplated before. A mild phobic reaction. Temporary agoraphobia.

It would pass. She simply needed a day or two-perhaps only a few hours-to acclimate herself to this new landscape and way of life. An evening with Paul Youngblood and his wife might be just the right medicine.

After setting the thermostats throughout the house, even in the basement, to be sure it would be warm in the morning, they locked up, got in the Explorer, and followed Paul's Bronco to the county road. He turned east toward town, and so did they.

The brief twilight had vanished under the falling wall of night. The moon had not yet risen. The darkness on all sides was so deep that it seemed as if it could never be banished again even by the ascension of the sun. The Youngblood ranch was named after the predominant tree.within its boundaries. Spotlights at each end of the overhead entrance sign were directed inward to reveal green letters on a white background: PONDEROSA PINES. Under those two words, in small letters:

Paul and Carolyn Youngblood.

The attorney's spread, a working ranch, was considerably larger than their own.

On both sides of the entrance lane, which was even longer than the one at Quartermass Ranch, lay extensive complexes of whitetrimmed red stables, riding rings, exercise yards, and fenced pastures. The buildings were illuminated by the pearly glow of low-voltage night-lights. White fences divided the rising meadows: dimly phosphorescent geometric patterns that dwindled into the darkness, like lines of inscrutable hieroglyphics on tomb walls. The main house, in front of which they parked, was a large, low ranch-style building of river rock and darkly stained pine. It seemed to be an almost organic extension of the land.

As he walked with them to the house, Paul answered Jack's question about the business of Ponderosa Pines. "We have two basic enterprises, actually. We raise and race quarter horses, which is a popular sport throughout the West, from New Mexico to the Canadian border. Then we also breed and sell several types of show horses that never go out of style, mostly Arabians. We have one of the finest Arabian bloodlines in the country, specimens so perfect and pretty they can break your heart-or make you pull out your wallet if you're obsessed with the breed."

"No cows?" Toby said as they reached the foot of the steps that led up to the long, deep veranda at the front of the house. "Sorry, Scout, no cows," the attorney said. "Lots of ranches round here have cattle, but not us. However, we do have our share of cowboys." He pointed to a cluster of lighted bungalows approximately a hundred twenty yards to the east of the house. "Eighteen wranglers currently live here on the ranch, with their wives if they're married.

A little town of our own, sort of."

"Cowboys," Toby said in the awed tone of voice with which he had spoken of the private graveyard and of the prospect of having a pony. Montana was proving to be as exotic to him as any distant planet in the comic books and science fiction movies he liked. "Real cowboys."

Carolyn Youngblood greeted them at the door and warmly welcomed them.

To be the mother of Paul's children, she must have been his age, fifty, but she looked and acted younger. She wore tight jeans and a decoratively stitched red-and-white Western shirt, revealing the lean, limber figure of an athletic thirty-year-old.

Her snowy hair-cut short in an easy-care gamine style-wasn't brittle, as white hair often was, but thick and soft and lustrous. Her face was far less lined than Paul's, and her skin was silk-smooth. Heather decided that if this was what life in the ranch country of Montana could do for a woman, she could overcome any aversion to the unnervingly large open spaces, to the immensity of the night, to the.spookiness of the woods, and even to the novel experience of having four corpses interred in a far corner of her backyard.