Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

To Toby, he said, "When you were gone yesterday. son, where were you?"

"Gone."

"Gone where?"

"Under."

"Under? Under what?"

"Under it."

"Under…?"

"Controlled."

"Under this thing? Under its mind?"

"Yeah. In a dark place."

Toby's voice quavered with fear at the memory. "A dark place, cold, squeezed in a dark place, hurting."

"Shut it off, shut it down!" Heather demanded. Jack looked up at her.

She was glaring, all right, red in the face, as furious as she was frightened. Praying that she would be patient, he said, "We can shut the computer off, but we can't keep this thing out that way. Think about it, Heather. It can get to us by routes through dreams, through the TV. Apparently even while we're awake, somehow. Toby was awake yesterday when it got to him."

"I let it in," the boy said. Jack hesitated to ask the question that was, perhaps, the most critical of all. "Toby, listen… when it's in you… does it have to be actually in you? Physically? A part of it inside you somewhere?"

Something in the brain that would show up in a dissection. Or attached to the spine. The kind of thing for which Eduardo had wanted Travis Potter to look.

"No," the boy said. "No seed… no egg… no slug… nothing that it is."

"No." That was good, very good, thank God and all the angels, that was very good. Because if something was implanted, how did you get it out of your child, how did you free him, how could you cut open his brain and tear it out? Toby said, "Only thoughts. Nothing in you but thoughts."

"You mean, like it uses telepathic control?"."Yeah." How suddenly the impossible could seem inevitable.

Telepathic control. Something from beyond, hostile and strange, able to control other species telepathically. right out of a science fiction movie, yet it felt real and true. "And now it wants in again?"

Heather asked Toby. "Yes."

"But you won't let it in?" she asked. "No." Jack said, "You can really keep it out?"

"Yes." They had hope. They weren't finished yet. Jack said, "Why did it leave you yesterday?"

"Pushed it."

"You pushed it out?"

"Yeah. Pushed it. Hates me."

"For pushing it out?"

"Yeah." His voice sank to a whisper. "But it's… it…

it hates… hates everything."

"Why?" With a fury of scarlet and orange swirling across his face and flashing in his eyes, the boy still whispered: "Because… that's what it is."

"It's hate?"

"That's what it does."

"But why?"

"That's what it is."

"Why?" Jack repeated patiently. "Because it knows."

"Knows what?"

"Nothing matters."

"It knows… that nothing matters?"

"Yes."

"What does that mean?"

"Nothing means." Dizzied by the only half-coherent exchange, Jack said, "I don't understand." Ikl still lower whisper: "Everything can be underd, but nothing can be understood." I want to understand it." everything can be understood, but nothing can be stood." Hether's hands were still fisted, but now she pressed to her eyes, as if she.couldn't bear to look at him in this half-trance any longer. Nothing can be understood," Toby murmured again. frustrated, Jack said, "But it understands us." No." What doesn't it understand about us?" Lots of things. Mainly… we resist."

"Resist?"

"We resist it."

"And that's new to it?"

"Yeah. Never before."

"Everything else lets it in," Heather said. Toby nodded. "Except people." Chalk one up for human beings, Jack thought.

Good old Homo sapiens, bullheaded to the last. We're just not happy-go-lucky enough to let the puppetmaster jerk us around any way it wants, too uptight, too damned stuborn to love being slaves.

"Oh," Toby said quietly, more to himself than to hem or to the entity controlling the computer. "I see."

"What do you see?" Jack asked. Interesting."

"What's interesting?"

"The how." Jack looked at Heather, but she didn't seem to be tracking the enigmatic conversation any better than he was. "It senses," Toby said. "Toby?"

"Let's not talk about this," the boy said, glancing away from the screen for a moment to give Jack what seemed to be an imploring or warning look. "Talk about what?"

"Forget it," Toby said, gazing at the monitor again.

"Forget what?"

"I better be good. Here, listen, it wants to know." Then, with a voice as muffled as a sigh in a handkerchief, forcing Jack to lean closer, Toby seemed to change the subject: "What were they doing down there?" Jack said, "You mean in the graveyard?"

"Yeah."

"You know."

"But it doesn't. It wants to know."

"It doesn't understand death," Jack said. "No."

"How can that be?"

"Life is," the boy said, clearly interpreting a viewpoint that belonged to the creature with which he was in contact. "No meaning. No.beginning. No end. Nothing matters. It is."

"Surely this isn't the first world it's ever found where things die,"

Heather said. Toby began to tremble, and his voice rose, but barely.

"They resist too, the ones under the ground. It can use them, but it can't know them." can use them, but it can't know them. A few pieces of the puzzle suddenly fit together. Reling only a tiny portion of the truth. A monstrous, terible portion of the truth. Jack remained crouched beside the boy in stunned silence. At last he said weakly,

"Use them?"

"But it can't know them." How does it use them?"."Puppets." Heather gasped. "The smell. Oh, dear God. The smell,the back staircase." Though Jack wasn't entirely sure what she was talking about, he knew that she'd realized what was out e on the Quartermass Ranch. Not just this thing in beyond, this thing that could send the same dream to both of them, this unknowable alien thing whose purpose was to become and to hate. Other things were out e. Toby whispered, "But it can't know them. Not even as much as it can know us. It can use them better. Better than it can use us. But it wants to know them. Become them. And they resist." Jack had heard enough. Far too much. Shaken, he rose from beside Toby. He flipped the master switch to off, and the screen blanked. "It's going to come for us,"

Toby said, and then he Ucended slowly out of his half-trance.

Bitter storm wind shrieked at the window behind them, but even if it had been able to reach into the room, it couldn't have made Jack any colder than he already was. Toby swiveled in the office chair to direct a puzzled look first at his mother, then at his father. The dog came out of the corner. Though no one was touching it, the master switch on the computer flicked from the Off to the On position.

Everyone twitched in surprise, including Falstaff. The screen gushed with vile and squirming colors. Heather stooped, grabbed the power cord, and tore it out of the wall socket. The monitor went dark again, stayed dark.

"It won't stop," Toby said, getting up from the chair. Jack turned to the window and saw that dawn had come, dim and gray, revealing a landscape battered by a full-scale blizzard. In the past twelve hours, fourteen to sixteen inches of snow had fallen, drifting twice that deep where the wind chose to pile it.

Either the first storm had stalled, instead of moving farther eastward, or the second had blown in even sooner than expected overlapping the first. "It won't stop," Toby repeated solemnly. He wasn't talking about the snow.

Heather pulled him into her arms, lifted and held him as tightly and protectively as she would have held an infant. Everything becomes me.

Jack didn't know all that might be meant by those words, what horrors they might encompass, but he knew Toby was right. The thing wouldn't stop until it had become them and they'd become part of it… Condensation had frozen on the inside of the lower panes in the French window.

Jack touched the glistening with a fingertip, but he was so frigid with fear that ice felt no colder than his own skin. Beyond the kitchen windows, the white world was filled with cold motion, the relentless angular descent of driven snow. Restless, Heather moved continuously back and forth between the two windows, nervously anticipating the pearance of a monstrously corrupted intruder in that otherwise sterile landscape.