Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

Suddenly she was less disturbed by the prospect of confrontation than by the possibility that the episode would end inconclusively. Needing to know, one way or the other, Heather shook off timidity. She ran down the stairs, making more than enough noise to reveal her presence, along the convex curve of the inner wall, around, around, into the vestibule at the bottom. Deserted. She tried the door to the kitchen.

It was locked and required a key to be opened from this side. She had no key. Presumably, an intruder would not have one, either.

The other door led to the back porch. On this side, the dead bolt operated with a thumb-turn. It was locked. She disengaged it, pulled open the door, stepped onto the porch. Deserted. And as far as she could see, no one was sprinting away across the backyard. Besides, although an intruder would not have needed a key to exit by that door, he would have needed one to lock it behind him, for it operated only with a key from the outside.

Somewhere an owl issued a mournful interrogative. Windless, cold, and humid, the night air seemed not like that of the outdoors but like the dank and ever so slightly fetid atmosphere of a cellar. She was alone.

But she didn't feel alone.

She felt… watched… "For God's sake, Heth," she said, "what the hell's the matter with you?" She retreated into the vestibule and locked the door. She stared at the gleaming brass thumb-turn, wondering if her imagination had seized on a few perfectly natural noises to conjure a threat that had even less substance than a ghost.

The rotten smell lingered. Yes, well, perhaps the ammonia water had not been able to banish the odor for more than a day or two. A rat or another small animal might be dead and decomposing inside the wall. As she turned toward the stairs, she stepped in something. She lifted her left foot and studied the floor. A clod of dry earth about as large as.a plum had partially crumbled under her bare heel. Climbing to the second floor, she noticed dry crumbs of earth scattered on a few of the treads, which she'd failed to notice in her swift descent. The dirt hadn't been there when she finished cleaning the stairwell on Wednesday. She wanted to believe it was proof the intruder existed.

More likely, Toby had tracked a little mud in from the backyard. He was usually a considerate kid, and he was neat by nature, but he was, after all, only eight years old.

Heather returned to Toby's room, locked the door, and snapped off the stairwell light. Her son was sound asleep. Feeling no less foolish than confused, she went down the front stairs, directly to the kitchen.

If the repulsive smell was a sign of the intruder's recent presence, and if the slightest trace of that stink hung in the kitchen, it would mean he had a key with which he'd entered from the back stairs. In that case she intended to wake Jack and insist they search the house top to bottom-with loaded guns.

The kitchen smelled fresh and clean. No crumbles of dry soil on the floor, either. She was almost disappointed. She was loath to think that she'd imagined everything, but the facts justified no other interpretation. Imagination or not, she couldn't rid herself of the feeling that she was under observation. She closed the blinds over the kitchen windows. Get a grip, Heather thought. You're fifteen years away from the change of life, lady, no excuse for these weird mood swings. She had intended to spend the rest of the night reading, but she was too agitated to concentrate on a book. She needed to keep busy. While she brewed a pot of coffee, she inventoried the contents of the freezer compartment in the side-by-side refrigerator.

There were half a dozen frozen dinners, a package of frankfurters, two boxes of Green Giant white corn, one box of green beans, two of carrots, and a package of Oregon blueberries, none of which Eduardo Fernandez had opened and all of which they could use. On a lower shelf, under a box of Eggo waffles and a pound of bacon, she found a Ziploc bag that appeared to contain a legal-size tablet of yellow paper. The plastic was opaque with frost, but she could vaguely see that lines of handwriting filled the first page. She popped the pressure seal on the bag-but then hesitated.

Storing the tablet in such a peculiar place was tantamount to hiding it.

Fernandez must have considered the contents to be important and extremely personal, and Heather was reluctant to invade his privacy.

Though dead and gone, he was the benefactor who had radically changed their lives, he deserved her respect and discretion. She read the first few words on the top page-My name is Eduardo Fernandez- and thumbed through the tablet, confirming it had been written by Fernandez and was a lengthy document. More than two thirds of the long yellow pages were filled with neat handwriting. Stifling her curiosity, Heather put the tablet on top of the refrigerator, intending to give it to Paul Youngblood the next time she saw him. The attorney was the.closest thing to a friend that Fernandez had known and, in his professional capacity, was privy to all the old man's affairs. If the contents of the tablet were important and private, only Paul had any right to read them.

Finished with the inventory of frozen foods, she poured a cup of fresh coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and began to make a list of needed groceries and household supplies. Come morning, they would drive to the supermarket in Eagle's Roost and stock not only the refrigerator but the half-empty shelves of the pantry. She wanted to be well prepared if they were cut off by deep snow for any length of time during the winter.

She paused in her listmaking to scribble a note, reminding Jack to schedule an appointment next week with Parker's Garage for the installation of a plow on the front of the Explorer. Initially, as she sipped her coffee and composed her list, she was alert for any peculiar sound. However, the task before her was so mundane that it was calming, after a while, she could not sustain a sense of the uncanny.

In his sleep, Toby moaned softly. He said, "Go away… go… go away …"

After falling silent for a while, he pushed back the covers and got out of bed.

In the ruddy glow of the night-light, his pale-yellow pajamas appeared to be streaked with blood. He stood beside the bed, swaying as if keeping time to music that only he could hear. "No," he whispered, not with alarm but in a flat voice devoid of emotion. "No… no… no …" Lapsing into silence again, he walked to the window and gazed into the night.

At the top of the yard, nestled among the pines at the edge of the forest, the caretaker's house was no longer dark and deserted. Strange light, as purely blue as a gas flame, shot into the night from cracks around the edges of the plywood rectangles that covered the windows, from under the front door, and even from the top of the replace chimney. "Ah," Toby said. The light was not of constant intensity but sometimes flickered, sometimes throbbed. Periodically, even the narrowest of the escaping beams were so bright that staring at them was painful, although occasionally they grew so dim they seemed about to be extinguished.

Even at its brightest, it was a cold light, giving no impression whatsoever of heat. Toby watched for a long time. Eventually the light faded. The caretaker's house became dark once more.

The boy returned to the bed. The night passed.

Saturday morning began with sunshine. A cold breeze swept out of the northwest, and periodic flocks of dark birds wheeled across the sky from the forested Rockies toward the descending land in the east, as if fleeing a predator. The radio weatherman on a station in Butte-to which Heather and Jack listened as they showered and dressed-predicted.snow by nightfall. This was, he said, one of the earliest storms in years, and the total accumulation might reach ten inches. Judging by the tone of the report, a ten-inch snowfall was not regarded as a blizzard in these northern climes. There was no talk of anticipated road closures, no references to rural areas that might be snowbound. A second storm was rolling toward them in the wake of the first, though expected to arrive early Monday, it was apparently a weaker front than the one that would hit by evening.