Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

But she was far enough from the back door to have a chance of obliterating the creature if it erupted into the house with unnatural speed and power. She stopped, put the gasoline can on the floor beside the newel post, and clutched the Uzi in both hands again… "Mom?"

"Sssshhhh."

"What're we gonna do?" he pleaded.

"Sssshhhh. Let me think."

Aspects of the intruder were obviously snakelike, although she couldn't know if that was the nature of only its appendages or of its entire body. Most snakes could move fast-or coil and spring substantial distances with deadly accuracy.

The back door remained ajar. Unmoving. Wisps of snow followed drafts through the narrow gap between the door and the jamb, into the house, spinning and glittering across the tile floor.

Whether or not the thing on the back porch was fast, it was undeniably big.

She'd sensed its considerable size when she'd had only the most fleeting glimpse of it slipping away from the window. Bigger than she was.

"Come on," she muttered, her attention riveted on the back door. "Come on, if you're never afraid, come on."

Both she and Toby cried out in surprise when, in the living room, the television switched on, with the volume turned all the way up.

Frenetic, bouncy music. Cartoon music. A screech of brakes, a crash and clatter, with comic accompaniment on a flute. Then the voice of a frustrated Elmer Fudd booming through the house:

"OOOHHH, I HATE THAT WABBIT!"

Heather kept her attention on the back door, beyond the hall and kitchen, altogether about fifty feet away.

So loud each word vibrated the windows, Bugs Bunny said: "EH, WHAT'S UP, DOC" And then a sound of something bouncing:

BOING, BOINC, BOING, BOING, BOING. "STOP THAT, STOP THAT, YOU CWAZY WABBIT!"

Falstaff ran into the living room, barking at the TV, and then scurried into the hall again, looking past Heather to where he, too, knew the real enemy still waited.

The back door.

Snow sifting through the narrow opening.

In the living room, the television program fell silent in the middle of a long comical trombone crescendo that, even under the circumstances, brought to mind a vivid image of Elmer Fudd sliding haplessly and inexorably toward one doom or another. Quiet. Just the keening wind.outside.

One second. Two. Three.

Then the TV blared again, but not with Bugs and Elmer. It spewed forth the same weird waves of unmelodic music that had issued from the radio in the kitchen.

To Toby, she said sharply, "Resist it!"

Back door. Snowflakes spiraling through the crack.

Come on, come on.

Keeping her eyes on the back door, at the far side of the lighted kitchen, she said, "Don't listen to it, honey, just tell it to go away, say no to it. No, no, no to it."

The tuneless music, alternately irritating and soothing, pushed her with what seemed like real physical force when the volume rose, pulled on her when the volume ebbed, pushed and pulled, until she realized that she was swaying as Toby had swayed in the kitchen when under the spell of the radio.

In one of the quieter passages, she heard a murmur Toby's voice. She couldn't catch the words.

She looked at him. He had that dazed expression. Transported. He was moving his lips. He might have been saying "yes, yes," but she couldn't tell for sure.

Kitchen door. Still ajar two inches, no more, as it had been.

Something still waiting out there on the porch.

She knew it.

The boy whispered to his unseen seducer, soft urgent words that might have been the first faltering steps of acquiescence or total surrender.

"Shit!" she said.

She backed up two steps, turned toward the livingroom arch on her left, and opened fire on the television. A brief burst, six or eight rounds, tore into the TV. The picture tube exploded, thin white vapor or smoke from the ruined electronics spurted into the air, and the darkly beguiling siren song was hammered into silence by the clatter of the Uzi.

A strong, cold draft swept through the hallway, and Heather spun toward the rear of the house. The back door was no longer ajar. It stood wide open. She could see the snow-covered porch and, beyond the porch, the churning white day.

The Giver had first walked out of a dream. Now it had walked out of the storm, into the house. It was somewhere in the kitchen, to the.left or right of the hall door, and she had missed the chance to cut it down as it entered.

If it was just on the other side of the threshold between the hall and the kitchen, it had closed to a maximum striking distance of about twenty-five feet. Getting dangerously close again.

Toby was standing on the first step of the staircase, clear-eyed once more but shivering and pale with terror. The dog was beside him, alert, sniffing the air.

Behind her, another pot-pan-bowl-flatware-dish alarm went off with a loud clanging of metal and shattering of glass. Toby screamed, Falstaff erupted into ferocious barking again, and Heather swung around, heart slamming so hard it shook her arms, made the gun jump up and down. The front door was arcing inward. A forest of long red-speckled black tentacles burst through the gap between door and jamb, glossy and writhing. So there were two of them, one at the front of the house, one at the back. The Uzi chattered. Six rounds, maybe eight. The door shut. But a mysterious dark figure was hunched against it, a small part of it visible in the beveled-glass window in the top of the door.

Without pausing to see if she'd actually hit the son of a bitch or scored only the door and wall, she spun toward the kitchen yet again, punching three or four rounds through the empty hallway behind her even as she turned.

Nothing there.

She had been sure the first one would be striking at her back.

Wrong.

Maybe twenty rounds left in the Uzi's double magazine. Maybe only fifteen.

They couldn't stay in the hall. Not with one of the damned things in the kitchen, another on the front porch.

Why had she thought there'd be only one of them? Because in the dream there was only one? Because Toby had spoken of just a single seducer?

Might be more than two. Hundreds.

The living room was on one side of her. Dining room on the other.

Ultimately, either place seemed likely to become a trap.

In different rooms all over the ground floor, windows imploded simultaneously.

The clinkjangle-tink of cascading glass and the shrieking of the wind at every breach decided her. Up. She and Toby would go up. Easier to defend high ground… She grabbed the can of gasoline.

The front door came open behind her again, banging against the scattered items with which they had built the alarm tower. She assumed that something other than the wind had shoved it, but she didn't glance back. The Giver hissed. As in the dream.

She leaped for the stairs, gasoline sloshing in the can, and shouted at Toby, "Go, go!"

The boy and the dog raced to the second floor ahead of her.

"Wait at the top!" she called as they scrambled upward and out of sight.

At the top of the first flight, Heather halted on the landing, looked back and down into the front hall, and saw a dead man walking. Eduardo Fernandez. She recognized him from the pictures they had found while sorting through his belongings. Dead and buried more than four months, he nevertheless moved in a shambling and stiffjointed manner, kicking through the dishes and pans and flatware, heading for the foot of the stairs, accompanied by swirling flakes of snow like ashes from the fires of hell.

There could be no self-awareness in the corpse, no slightest wisp of Ed Fernandez's consciousness remaining in it, for the old man's mind and soul had gone on to a better place before the Giver had requisitioned his body.

The soiled cadaver was evidently being controlled with the same power that had switched on the radio and the TV at long distance, had opened the dead-bolt locks without a key, and had caused the windows to implode. Call it telekinesis, mind over matter. Alien mind over earthly matter. In this case, it was decomposing organic matter in the rough shape of a human being.