Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

Deciding that she needed a hot shower, she got up from the bed.

Disgust swiftly ripened into nausea. In the dark bathroom she was racked by dry heaves at left a bitter taste. After turning on the light only enough to find the bottle of mouthwash, she rinsed away the bitterness. In the dark again, she repeatedly bathed her face in handfuls of cold water. She sat on the edge of the tub. She dried her face on a towel. As she waited for calm to return, she tried to figure out why a mere dream could have had such a powerful effect on her, but there was no understanding.

In a few minutes, when she'd regained her composure, she quietly returned to the bedroom. Jack was still snoring softly. Her robe was draped over the back of a Queen Anne chair. She picked it up, slipped out of the room, and eased the door shut behind her.

In the hall, she pulled on the robe and belted it. Although she'd intended to go downstairs, brew a pot of coffee, and read, she turned instead toward Toby's room at the end of the hall. Try as she might, Heather was unable to extinguish completely the fear from the nightmare, and her simmering anxiety began to focus on her son.

Toby's door was ajar, and his room was not entirely — dark Since moving to the ranch, he had chosen to sleep with a night-light again, although he had given up that security a year ago. Heather and Jack were surprised but not particularly concerned by the boy's loss of confidence. They assumed, once he adjusted to his surroundings he would again prefer darkness to the red glow of the low-wattage bulb that was plugged into a wall socket near the floor.

Toby was tucked under his covers, only his head exposed on the.pillow.

His breathing was so shallow that to hear it, Heather had to bend close to him.

Nothing in the room was other than it ought to have been, but she hesitated to leave. Mild apprehension continued to tug at her.

Finally, as Heather reluctantly retreated to the open hall door, she heard a soft scrape that halted her. She turned to the bed, where Toby had not awakened, had not moved.

Even as she glanced at her son, however, she realized that the noise had come from the back stairs. It had been the sly, stealthy scrape of something hard, perhaps a boot heel, dragged across a wooden step-recognizable because of the air space under each stair tread, which lent the sound a distinctive hollow quality.

She was instantly afflicted by the same distress that she'd not felt while cleaning the stairs but that had plagued her on Monday when she'd followed Paul Youngblood and Toby down that curving well. The sweaty paranoid conviction that somebody- something? — was waiting around the next turn. Or descending behind them. An enemy possessed by a singular rage and capable of extreme violence.

She stared at the closed door at the head of those stairs. It was painted white, but it reflected the red glow of the night-light and seemed almost to shimmer like a portal of fire. She waited for another sound. Toby sighed in his sleep.

Just a sigh. Nothing more. Silence again. Heather supposed she could have been wrong, could have heard an innocent sound from outside-perhaps a night bird settling onto the roof with a rustle of feathers and a scratching of claws against shingles-and could have mistakenly transposed the noise to the stairwell. She was jumpy because of the nightmare.

Her perceptions might not be entirely trustworthy. She certainly wanted to believe she had been wrong. Creak-creak. No mistaking it this time. The new sound was quieter than the first, but it definitely came from behind the door at the head of the back stairs. She remembered how some of the wooden treads creaked when she had first descended to the ground floor during the tour on Monday and how they groaned and complained when she had been cleaning them on Wednesday.

She wanted to snatch Toby from the bed, take him out of the room, go quickly down the hall to the master bedroom, and wake Jack. However, she had never run from anything in her life. During the crises of the past eight months, she'd developed considerably more inner strength and self-confidence than ever before. Although the skin on the back of her neck tingled as if alive with crawling hairy spiders, she actually blushed at the mental image of herself fleeing like the frail-hearted damsel of a bad gothic-romance novel, spooked out of her wits by nothing more menacing than a strange sound.

Instead, she went to the stairwell door. The dead-bolt lock was securely engaged. She put her left ear to the crack between door and.jamb. The faintest draft of cold air seeped through from the far side, but no sound came with it.

As she listened, she suspected that the intruder was on the upper landing of the stairwell, inches from her with only the door between them. She could easily imagine him there, a dark and strange figure, his head against the door just as hers was, his ear pressed to the crack, listening for a sound from her.

Nonsense. The scraping and creaking had been nothing more than settling noises.

Even old houses continued to settle under the unending press of gravity. That damned dream had really spooked her.

Toby muttered wordlessly in his sleep. She turned her head to look at him. He didn't move, and after a few seconds his murmuring subsided.

Heather backed up one step and considered the door for a moment. She didn't want to endanger Toby, but she was beginning to feel more ridiculous than afraid. Just a door. Just a staircase at the back of the house. Just an ordinary night, a dream, a bad case of jumpy nerves. She put one hand on the knob, the other on the thumb-turn of the dead-bolt lock. The brass hardware was cool under her fingers.

She remembered the urgent need that had possessed her in the dream: Let it in, let it in, let it in. That had been a dream. This was reality.

People who couldn't tell them apart were housed in rooms with padded walls, tended by nurses with fixed smiles and soft voices. Let it in.

She disengaged the lock, turned the knob, hesitated. Let it in.

Exasperated with herself, she yanked open the door. She'd forgotten the stairwell lights would be off. That narrow shaft was windowless, no ambient light leached into it from outside. The red radiance in the bedroom was too weak to cross the threshold.

She stood face-to-face with perfect darkness, unable to tell if anything loomed on the upper steps or even on the landing immediately before her. Out of the gloom wafted the repulsive odor that she'd eradicated two days before with hard work and ammonia water, not strong but not as faint as before, either: the vile aroma of rotting meat.

Maybe she had only dreamed that she'd awakened but was still in the grip of the nightmare. Her heart slammed against her breastbone, her breath caught in her throat, and she groped for the light switch, which was on her side of the door. If it had been on the other side, she might not have had the courage to reach into that coiled blackness to feel for it.

She missed it on the first and second tries, dared not look away from the darkness before her, felt blindly where she recalled having seen it, almost shouted at Toby to wake up and run, at last found the switch-thank God-clicked it. Light. The deserted landing. Nothing.there. Of course. What else?

Empty steps curving down and out of sight. A stair tread creaked below. Oh, Jesus. She stepped onto the landing. She wasn't wearing slippers. The wood was cool and rough under her bare feet. Another creak, softer than before.

Settling noises. Maybe. She moved off the landing, keeping her left hand against the concave curve of the outer wall to steady herself.

Each step that she descended brought a new step into view ahead of her.

At the first glimpse of anyone, she would turn and run back up the stairs, into Toby's room, throw the door shut, snap the dead bolt in place. The lock couldn't be opened from the stairwell, only from inside the house, so they would be safe. From below came a furtive click, a faint thud-as of a door being pulled shut as quietly as possible.