Dean Koontz: Winter Moon

Eduardo Fernandez stood on the front porch of the ranch house, staring.across the down-sloping, snowcovered fields to the woods a hundred yards to the east.

Sugar pines and yellow pines crowded close to one another and pinned inky shadows to the ground, as if the night never quite escaped their needled grasp even with the rising of a bright sun in a cloudless sky.

The silence was deep. Eduardo lived alone, and his nearest neighbor was two miles away. The wind was still abed, and nothing moved across that vast panorama except for two birds of prey-hawks, perhaps-circling soundlessly high overhead.

Shortly after one o'clock in the morning, when the night usually would have been equally steeped in silence, Eduardo had been awakened by a strange sound.

The longer he had listened, the stranger it had seemed. As he had gotten out of bed to seek the source, he had been surprised to find he was afraid. After seven decades of taking what life threw at him, having attained spiritual peace and an acceptance of the inevitability of death, he'd not been frightened of anything in a long time. He was unnerved, therefore, when last night he had felt his heart thudding furiously and his gut clenching with dread merely because of a queer sound.

Unlike many seventy-year-old men, Eduardo rarely had difficulty attaining plumbless sleep for a full eight hours. His days were filled with physical activity, his evenings with the solace of good books, a lifetime of measured habits and moderation left him vigorous in old age, without troubling regrets, content. Loneliness was the only curse of his life, since Margaret had died three years before, and on those infrequent occasions when he woke in the middle of the night, it was a dream of his lost wife that harried him from sleep.

The sound had been less loud than all-pervasive. A low throbbing that swelled like a series of waves rushing toward a beach. Beneath the throbbing, an undertone that was almost subliminal, quaverous, an eerie electronic oscillation. He'd not only heard it but felt it, vibrating in his teeth, his bones. The glass in the windows hummed with it.

When he placed a hand flat against the wall, he swore that he could feel the waves of sound cresting through the house itself, like the slow beating of a heart beneath the plaster. sure, as if he had been listening to someone or something rhythmically straining against confinement, struggling to break out of a prison or through a barrier.

But who?

Or what?

Eventually, after scrambling out of bed, pulling on pants and shoes, he had gone onto the front porch, where he had seen the light in the woods. No, he had to be more honest with himself. It hadn't been merely a light in the woods, nothing as simple as that… He wasn't superstitious. Even as a young man, he had prided himself on his levelheadedness, common sense, and unsentimental grasp of the realities of life. The writers whose books lined his study were those with a crisp, simple style and with no patience for fantasy, men with a cold clear vision, who saw the world for what it was and not for what it might be: men like Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Ford Madox Ford.

The phenomenon in the lower woods was nothing that his favorite writers-every last one of them a realist-could have incorporated into their stories. The light had not been from an object within the forest, against which the pines had been silhouetted, rather, it had come from the pines themselves, mottled amber radiance that appeared to originate within the bark, within the boughs, as if the tree roots had siphoned water from a subterranean pool contaminated by a greater percentage of radium than the paint with which watch dials had once been coated to allow time to be told in the dark.

Accompanying that pulse had been a sense of presi A cluster of ten to twenty pines had been involved.

Like a glowing shrine in the otherwise night-black fastness of timber.

Unquestionably, the mysterious source of the light was also the source of the sound. When the former had begun to fade, so had the latter.

Quieter and dimmer, quieter and dimmer. The March night had become silent and dark again in the same instant, marked only by the sound of his own breathing and illuminated by nothing stranger than the silver crescent of a quarter moon and the pearly phosphorescence of the snow-shrouded fields.

The event had lasted about seven minutes.

It had seemed much longer.

Back inside the house, he had stood at the windows, waiting to see what would happen next. Eventually, when that seemed to have been the sum of it, he returned to bed.

He had not been able to get back to sleep. He had lain awake… wondering.

Every morning he sat down to breakfast at six-thirty, with his big shortwave radio tuned to a station in Chicago that provided international news twenty-four hours a day. The peculiar experience during the previous night hadn't been a sufficient interruption of the rhythms of his life to make him alter his schedule. This morning he'd eaten the entire contents of a large can of grapefruit sections, followed by two eggs over easy, home fries, a quarter pound of bacon, and four slices of buttered toast. He hadn't lost his hearty appetite with age, and a lifelong dedication to the foods that were hardest on the heart had only left him with the constitution of a man more than twenty years his junior… Finished eating, he always liked to linger over several cups of black coffee, listening to the endless troubles of the world. The news unfailingly confirmed the wisdom of living in a far place with no neighbors in view.

This morning, though he had lingered longer than usual with his coffee, and though the radio had been on, he hadn't been able to remember a word of the news when he pushed back his chair and got up from breakfast. The entire time, he had been studying the woods through the window beside the table, trying to decide if he should go down to the foot of the meadow and search for evidence of the enigmatic visitation.

Now, standing on the front porch in knee-high boots, jeans, sweater, and sheepskin-lined jacket, wearing a cap with fur-lined earflaps tied under his chin, he still hadn't decided what he was going to do.

Incredibly, fear was still with him. Bizarre as they might have been, the tides of pulsating sound and the luminosity in the trees had not harmed him.

Whatever threat he perceived was entirely subjective, no doubt more imaginary than real.

Finally he became sufficiently angry with himself to break the chains of dread. He descended the porch steps and strode across the front yard.

The transition from yard to meadow was hidden under a cloak of snow six to eight inches deep in some places and knee-high in others, depending on where the wind had scoured it away or piled it. After thirty years on the ranch, he was so familiar with the contours of the land and the ways of the wind that he unthinkingly chose the route that offered the least resistance.

White plumes of breath steamed from him. The bitter air brought a pleasant flush to his cheeks. He calmed himself by concentrating on-and enjoying-the familiar effects of a winter day.

He stood for a while at the end of the meadow, studying the very trees that, last night, had glowed a smoky amber against the black backdrop of the deeper woods, as if they had been imbued with a divine presence, like God in the bush that burned without being consumed. This morning they looked no more special than a million other sugar and ponderosa pines, the former somewhat greener than the latter.

The specimens at the edge of the forest were younger than those rising behind them, only about thirty to thirty-five feet tall, as young as twenty years.

They had grown from seeds fallen to the earth when he had already been on the ranch a decade, and he felt as if he knew them more intimately than he had known most people in his life.