Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

They were dressed in the new ski suits they'd bought the previous morning, prepared to get out of the house quickly if they came under attack and found their prison indefensible. The loaded Mossberg twelve-gauge lay on the table.

Jack could drop the yellow tablet and snatch up the gun in the event that something-don't even think about what it might be launched an assault on the house. The Micro Uzi and the Korth.38 were on the counter by the sink.

Toby sat at the table, sipping hot chocolate from a mug, and the dog was lying at his feet. The boy was no longer in a trance state, was entirely disconnected from the mysterious invader of dreams, yet he was uncharacteristically subdued.? Although Toby had been fine yesterday afternoon and evening, following the apparently far more extensive assault he had suffered in the graveyard, Heather worried about him. He had come away from that first experience with no conscious memory of it, but the trauma of total mental enslavement had to have left scars deep in the mind, the effects of which might become evident only over a period of weeks or months. And he did remember the second attempt at control, because this time the puppetmaster hadn't succeeded in either dominating him or repressing the memory of the telepathic invasion. The encounter she'd had with the creature in a dream the night before last had been frightening and so repulsive that she had been overcome with nausea.

Toby's experiences with it, much more intimate than her own, must have been immeasurably more terrifying and affecting.

Moving restively from one window to the other, Heather stopped behind Toby's chair, put her hands on his thin shoulders, gave him a squeeze, smoothed his hair, kissed the top of his head. Nothing must happen to him. Unbearable to think of him being touched by that thing, whatever it was and whatever it might look like, or by one of its puppets.

Intolerable. She would do anything to prevent that. Anything. She would die to prevent it.

Jack looked up from the tablet after quickly reading the first three or four pages. His face was as white as the snowscape. "Why didn't you tell me about this when you found it?"

"Because of the way he'd hidden it in the freezer, I thought it must be personal, private, none of our business. Seemed like something only.Paul Youngblood ought to see."

"You should've showed it to me."

"Hey, you didn't tell me about what happened in the cemetery," she said, "and that's a hell of a lot bigger… "I'm sorry." You didn't share what Paul and Travis told you. that was wrong. But now you know everything. yes, finally." She had been furious that he'd withheld such things from her, but she hadn't been able to sustain her anger, she could not rekindle it now. Because, of course she was equally guilty. She'd not told him about the unease she'd felt during the entire tour of the property yesterday afternoon. The premonitions of violence and the unprecedented intensity of her nightmare. Certain that something had been in the back stairwell she'd gone into Toby's room the night before all the years they had been married, there had not been as many gaps in their communication with each-other since they'd come to Quartermass Ranch. They wanted their new life not merely to work but to be ct, and they had been unwilling to express doubts observations. For that failure to reach out to each, though motivated by the best intentions, they might pay with their lives.

Indicating the tablet, she said, "Is it anything?" It's everything I think. The start of it. His account what he saw." He Spot-read to them about the waves of virtually palpable sound that had awakened Eduardo Fernandez in the night, about the spectral light in the woods.

"I thought it would've come from the sky, a ship," she said. "You expect… after all the movies, all the books, you expect them to come in massive ships."

"When you're talking about extraterrestrials, alien means truly different, deeply strange," Jack said. "Eduardo makes that point on the first page. Deeply strange, beyond easy comprehension. Nothing we could imagine-including ships."

"I'm scared about what might happen, what I might have to do," Toby said. A blast of wind skirled under the back porch roof, as shrill as an electronic shriek, as questing and insistent as a living creature.

Heather crouched at Toby's side. "We'll be okay, honey. Now that we know something's out there, and a little bit about what it is, we'll handle it."

She wished she could be half as confident as she sounded. "But I shouldn't be scared."

Looking up from the tablet, Jack said, "Nothing shameful about being afraid, kiddo."

"You're never afraid," the boy said. "Wrong. I'm scared half to death right now." That revelation amazed Toby. "You are? But you're a hero."

"Maybe I am, and maybe I'm not. But theres nothing unique about being a hero," Jack said… "Most people are heroes. Your mom's a hero, so are you."

"Me?"

"For the way you handled this past year. Took courage to deal with everything." didn't feel brave."

"Truly brave people never do." said, "Lots of people are heroes even if they it dodge bullets or chase bad guys." People who go to work every day, make sacrifices for their families, and get through life without hurting people if they can help it-those are the real heroes,"

Jack told him. "Lots of them out there. And once in a while all of them are afraid."

"Then it's okay if I'm scared?" Toby said.

"More than okay," Jack said. "If you were never afraid of anything, then you'd be either very stupid or me. Now, I know you can't be stupid because you're Insanity, on the other hand… well, I can't be)sure about that, since it runs in your mom's family." he smiled. Then maybe I can do it," Toby said. "We'll get through this," Jack assured him. Heather met Jack's eyes and smiled as if to say, You did that so well, you ought to be Father of the Year. He winked at her. God, she loved him.

"Then it's insane," the boy said. Frowning, Heather said, "What?"

"The alien.

Can't be stupid. It's smarter than we are, can do things we can't. So it must be insane. It's never afraid." Heather and Jack glanced at each other. No smiles this time. "Never," Toby repeated, both hands clasped tightly around the mug of hot chocolate.

Heather returned to the windows, first one, then the other. Jack skimmed the tablet pages he hadn't yet read, found a passage about the doorway, and quoted from it aloud. Standing on edge, a giant coin of darkness. As thin as a sheet of paper. Big enough to drive a train through. A blackness of exceptional purity.

Eduardo daring to put his hand in it. His sense that something was coming out of that fearful gloom.

Pushing the tablet aside, getting up from his chair, Jack said, "That's enough for now. We can read the rest of it later. Eduardo's account supports our own experiences. That's what's important. They might've thought he was a crazy old geezer, or that we're flaky city people who've come down with a bad case of the heebie-jeebies in all this open space, but it isn't as easy to dismiss all of us."

Heather said, "So who're we going to call, the county sheriff?"

"Paul Youngblood, then Travis Potter. They already suspect something's wrong out here-though, God knows, neither of them could have a clue that it's any-thing this wrong. With a couple of locals on our side, there's a chance the sheriff's deputies might take us more seriously."

Carrying the shotgun with him, Jack went to the wall phone. He plucked the handset off the cradle, listened, rattled the disconnect lever,punched a couple of numbers, and hung up. "The line's dead." He had suspected as much even as he started toward the phone.

After the incident with the computer, she knew that getting help wasn't going to be easy, she hadn't wanted to think about the possibility they were trapped.