Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

At the bottom of the steps, the corpse stopped and gazed up at her.

Its face was only slightly swollen, though darkly empurpled, mottled with yellow here and there, a crust of evil green under its clogged nostrils. One eye was missing. The other was covered with a yellow film, it bulged against a half-concealing lid that, though sewn shut by a mortician, had partially opened when the rotting threads had loosened.

Heather heard herself muttering rapidly, rhythmically. After a moment she realized that she was feverishly reciting a long prayer she had learned as a child but had not repeated in eighteen or twenty years.

Under other circumstances, if she had made a conscious effort to recall the words, she couldn't have come up with half of them, but now they flowed out of her as they had when she'd been a young girl kneeling in church.

The walking corpse was less than half the reason for her fear, however, and far less than half the reason for the acute disgust that knotted her stomach, made breathing difficult, and triggered her gag reflex… It was gruesome, but the discolored flesh was not yet dissolving from the bones. The dead man still reeked more of embalming fluid than of putrescence, a pungent odor that blew up the staircase on a cold draft and instantly reminded Heather of long-ago high-school biology classes and slippery specimen frogs fished from jars of formaldehyde for dissection.

What sickened and repelled her most of all was the Giver that rode the corpse as it might have ridden a beast of burden. Though the light in the hallway was bright enough to reveal the alien clearly, and though she might have wanted to see less of it rather than more, she was nevertheless unable to precisely define its physical form. The bulk of the thing appeared to hang along the dead man's back, secured by whiplike tentacles- some as thin as pencils, some as thick as her own forearm-that were firmly lashed around the mount's thighs, waist, chest, and neck. The Giver was mostly black, and such a deep black that it hurt her eyes to stare at it, though in places the inky sheen was relieved by blood-red speckles.

Without Toby to protect, she might not have been able to face this thing, for it was too strange, incomprehensible, just too damned much.

The sight of it dizzied like a whiff of nitrous oxide, brought her to the edge of desperate giddy laughter, a humorless mirth that was perilously close to madness.

Not daring to take her eyes off the corpse or its hideous rider, for fear she would look up to find it one step below her, Heather slowly lowered the five-gallon can of gasoline to the floor of the landing.

Along the dead man's back, at the heart of the churning mass of tentacles, there might have been a central body akin to the sac of a squid, with glaring inhuman eyes and a twisted mouth-but if it was there, she couldn't catch a glimpse of it. Instead, the thing seemed to be all ropy extremities, ceaselessly twitching, curling, coiling, and unraveling. Though oozing and gelatinous within its skin, the Giver occasionally bristled into spiky shapes that made her think of lobsters, crabs, crawfish-but in a blink, it was all sinuous motion once more.

In college, a friend of Heather's-Wendi Felzer-had developed liver cancer and had decided to augment her doctors' treatments with a course of self-healing through imaging therapy. Wendi had pictured her white blood cells as knights in shining armor with magic swords, her cancer as a dragon, and she had meditated two hours a day, until she could see, in her mind, all those knights slaying the beast. The Giver was the archetype for every image of cancer ever conceived, the slithering essence of malignancy. In Wendi's case, the dragon had won. Not a good thing to remember now, not good at all.

It started to climb the steps toward her.

She raised the Uzi.

The most loathsome aspect of the Giver's entanglement with the corpse.was the extent of its intimacy. The buttons had popped off the white burial shirt, which hung open, revealing that a few of the tentacles had pried open the thoracic incision made by the coroner during his autopsy, those red-speckled appendages vanished inside the cadaver, probing deep into unknown reaches of its cold tissues. The creature seemed to revel in its bonding with the dead flesh, an embrace that was as inexplicable as it was obscene.

Its very existence was offensive. That it could be seemed proof that the universe was a madhouse, full of worlds without meaning and bright galaxies without pattern or purpose.

It climbed two steps from the hall, toward the landing.

Three. Four.

Heather waited one more.

Five steps up, seven steps below her.

A bristling mass of tentacles appeared between the dead man's parted lips, like a host of black tongues spotted with blood.

Heather opened fire, held the trigger down too long, used up too much ammunition, ten or twelve rounds, even fourteen, although it was surprising-considering her state of mind-that she didn't empty both magazines. The 9mm slugs stitched a bloodless diagonal line across the dead man's chest, through body and entwining tentacles.

Parasite and dead host pitched backward to the hallway floor below, leaving two lengths of severed tentacles on the stairs, one about eighteen inches long, the other about two feet. Neither of those amputated limbs bled. Both continued to move, initially twisting and flailing the way the bodies of snakes writhe long after they have been separated from their heads.

Heather was transfixed by the grisly sight because, almost at once, the movement ceased to be the result of misfiring nerves and randomly spasming muscles, it began to appear purposeful. Each scrap of the primary organism seemed aware of the other, and they groped toward each other, the first curling down over the edge of a step while the second rose gracefully like a flute-charmed serpent to meet it. When they touched, a transformation occurred that was essentially black magic and beyond Heather's understanding, even though she had a clear view of it.

The two became as one, not simply entwining but melding, flowing together as if the soot-dark silken skin sheathing them was little more than surface tension that gave shape to the oozing protoplasm within.

As soon as the two combined, the resulting mass sprouted eight smaller tentacles, with a shimmer like quick shadows playing across a puddle of water, the new organism bristled into a vaguely crablike-but still eyeless-form, though it was as soft and flexible as ever. Quivering, as if to maintain even a marginally more angular shape required monumental effort, it began to hitch down the steps toward the mothermass from which it had become separated… Less than half a minute had passed from the moment when the two severed appendages had begun to seek each other.

Bodies are.

Those words were, according to Jack, part of what the Giver had said through Toby in the cemetery.

Bodies are.

A cryptic statement then. All too clear now. Bodies are-now and forever, flesh without end. Bodies are- expendable if necessary, fiercely adaptable, severable without loss of intellect or memory and therefore in infinite supply.

The bleakness of her sudden insight, the perception that they could not win regardless of how valiantly they struggled or how much courage they possessed, kicked her across the borderline of sanity for a moment, into madness no less total for its brevity. Instead of recoiling from the monstrously alien creature stilting determinedly down the steps to rejoin its mothermass, as any sane person would have done, she plunged after it, off the landing with a strangled scream that sounded like the thin and bitter grievance of a dying animal in a sawtooth trap, the Micro Uzi thrust in front of her.

Although she knew she was putting herself in terrible jeopardy, unconscionably abandoning Toby at the top of the stairs, Heather was unable to stop. She went down one, two, three, four, five steps in the time that the crablike thing descended two. They were four steps apart when the thing abruptly reversed direction without bothering to turn around, as if front and back and sideways were all the same to it. She stopped so fast she almost lost her balance, and the crab ascended toward her a lot faster than it had descended.