Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

The woods had always seemed like a cathedral to him. The trunks of the great evergreens were reminiscent of the granite columns of a nave, soaring high to support a vaulted ceiling of green boughs. The.pine-scented silence was ideal for meditation. Walking the meandering deer trails, he often had a sense that he was in a sacred place, that he was not just a man of flesh and bone but an heir to eternity.

He had always felt safe in the woods.

Until now.

Stepping out of the meadow and into the random-patterned mosaic of shadows and sunlight beneath the interlaced pine branches, Eduardo found nothing out of the ordinary. Neither the trunks nor the boughs showed signs of heat damage, no charring, not even a singed curl of bark or blackened cluster of needles.

The thin layer of snow under the trees had not melted anywhere, and the only tracks in it were those of deer, raccoon, and smaller animals.

He broke off a piece of bark from a sugar pine and crumbled it between the thumb and forefinger of his gloved right hand. Nothing unusual about it.

He moved deeper into the woods, past the place where the trees had stood in radiant splendor in the night. Some of the older pines were over two hundred feet tall. The shadows grew more numerous and blacker than ash buds in the front of March, while the sun found fewer places to intrude.

His heart would not be still. It thudded hard and fast.

He could find nothing in the woods but what had always been there, yet his heart would not be still.

His mouth was dry. The full curve of his spine was clad in a chill that had nothing to do with the wintry air.

Annoyed with himself, Eduardo turned back toward the meadow, following the tracks he had left in the patches of snow and the thick carpet of dead pine needles. The crunch of his footsteps disturbed a slumbering owl from its secret perch in some high bower.

He felt a wrongness in the woods. He couldn't put a finer point on it than that. Which sharpened his annoyance. A wrongness. What the hell did that mean? A wrongness.

The hooting owl.

Spiny black pine cones on white snow.

Pale beams of sunlight lancing through the gaps in the gray-green branches.

All of it ordinary. Peaceful. Yet wrong.

As he returned to the perimeter of the forest, with snow-covered fields visible between the trunks of the trees ahead, he was suddenly certain that he was not going to reach open ground, that something was rushing at him from behind, some creature as indefinable as the wrongness that.he sensed around him. He began to move faster. Fear swelled step by step. The hooting of the owl seemed to sour into a cry as alien as the shriek of a nemesis in a nightmare. He stumbled on an exposed root, his heart trip-hammered, and he spun around with a cry of terror to confront whatever demon was in pursuit of him.

He was, of course, alone.

Shadows and sunlight.

The hoot of an owl. A soft and lonely sound. As ever.

Cursing himself, he headed for the meadow again. Reached it. The trees were behind him. He was safe.

Then, dear sweet Jesus, the fear again, worse than ever, the absolute dead certainty that it was coming- what? — that it was for sure gaining on him, that it would drag him down, that it was bent upon committing an act infinitely worse than murder, that it had an inhuman purpose and unknown uses for him so strange they were beyond both his understanding and conception.

This time he was in the grip of a terror so black and profound, so mindless, that he could not summon the courage to turn and confront the empty day behind him-if, indeed, it proved to be empty this time. He raced toward the house, which appeared far more distant than a hundred yards, a citadel beyond his reach. He kicked through shallow snow, blundered into deeper drifts, ran and churned and staggered and flailed uphill, making wordless sounds of blind panic-"Uh, uh, uhhhhh, uh, uh"-all intellect repressed by instinct, until he found himself at the porch steps, up which he scrambled, at the top of which he turned, at last, to scream-"No!" — at the clear, crisp, blue Montana day.

The pristine mantle of snow across the broad field was marred only by his own trail to and from the woods.

He went inside.

He bolted the door.

In the big kitchen he stood for a long time in front of the brick fireplace, still dressed for the outdoors, basking in the heat that poured across the hearth-yet unable to get warm.

Old. He was an old man. Seventy. An old man who had lived alone too long, who sorely missed his wife. If senility had crept up on him, who was around to notice? An old, lonely man with cabin fever, imagining things.

"Bullshit," he said after a while.

He was lonely, all right, but he wasn't senile.

After stripping out of his hat, coat, gloves, and boots, he got the hunting rifles and shotguns out of the locked cabinet in the study. He loaded all of them… Mae Hong, who lived across the street, came over to take care of Toby.

Her husband was a cop too, though not in the same division as Jack.

Because the Hongs had no children of their own yet, Mae was free to stay as late as necessary, in the event Heather needed to put in a long vigil at the hospital.

While Louie Silverman and Mae remained in the kitchen, Heather lowered the sound on the television and told Toby what had happened. She sat on the foot-stool, and after tossing the blankets aside, he perched on the edge of the chair. She held his small hands in hers.

She didn't share the grimmest details with him, in part because she didn't know all of them herself but also because an eight-year-old could handle only so much. On the other hand, she couldn't gloss over the situation, either, because they were a police family.

They lived with the repressed expectation of JUSt such a disaster as had struck that morning, and even a child had the need and the right to know when his father had been seriously wounded.

"Can I go to the hospital with you?" Toby asked, holding more tightly to her hands than he probably realized.

"It's best for you to stay here right now, honey."

"I'm not sick any more."

"Yes, you are."

"I feel good."

"You don't want to give your germs to your dad."

"He'll be all right, won't he?"

She could give him only one answer even if she couldn't be certain it would prove to be correct. "Yes, baby, he's going to be all right."

His gaze was direct. He wanted the truth. Right at that moment he seemed to be far older than eight. Maybe cops' kids grew up faster than others, faster than they should.

"You're sure?" he said.

"Yes. I'm sure."

"Where was he shot?"

"In the leg."

Not a lie. It was one of the places he was shot. In the leg and two hits in the torso, Crawford had said. Two hits in the torso. Jesus.

What did that mean? Take out a lung? Gutshot? The heart? At least.he hadn't sustained head wounds. Tommy Fernandez had been shot in the head, no chance.

She felt a sob of anguish rising in her, and she strained to force it down, didn't dare give voice to it, not in front of Toby.

"That's not so bad, in the leg," Toby said, but his lower lip was trembling.

"What about the bad guy?"

"He's dead."

"Daddy got him?"

"Yes, he got him."

"Good," Toby said solemnly.

"Daddy did what was right, and now we have to do what's right too, we have to be strong. Okay?"

"Yeah."

He was so small. It wasn't fair to put such a weight on a boy so small.

She said, "Daddy needs to know we're okay, that we're strong, so he doesn't have to worry about us and can concentrate on getting well."

"Sure."

"That's my boy." She squeezed his hands. "I'm real proud of you, do you know that?"

Suddenly shy, he looked at the floor. "Well… I'm… I'm proud of Daddy."