Winter Moon Read online

In an infinite universe, the potential number of intelligent life-forms was also infinite—as he had discovered from the books he’d been reading lately. Theoretically, anything that could be imagined must exist in an infinite realm. When referring to extraterrestrial life-forms, alien meant alien, maximum strange, one weirdness wrapped in another, beyond easy understanding and possibly beyond all hope of comprehension.

  He had brooded about this issue before, but only now did he fully grasp that he had about as much chance of understanding this traveler, really understanding it, as a mouse had of understanding the intricacies of the human experience, the workings of the human mind.

  The dead crow shuddered, twitched its broken legs. From its twisted throat came a wet cawing sound that was a grotesque parody of the cry of a living crow.

  A spiritual darkness filled Eduardo, because he could no longer deny, to any extent whatsoever, the identity of the intruder who had left a vile trail through the house on the night of June tenth. He had known all along what he was repressing. Even as he had drunk himself into oblivion, he had known. Even as he had pretended not to know, he had known. And he knew now. He knew. Dear sweet Jesus, he knew.

  Eduardo had not been afraid to die.

  He’d almost welcomed death.

  Now he was again afraid to die. Beyond fright. Physically ill with terror. Trembling, sweating.

  Though the traveler had shown no signs of being able to control the body of a living human being, what would happen when he was dead?

  He picked up the shotgun from the table, snatched the keys to the Cherokee off the pegboard, went to the connecting door between the kitchen and the garage. He had to leave at once, no time to waste, get out and far away. To hell with learning more about the traveler. To hell with forcing a confrontation. He should just get in the Cherokee, jam the accelerator to the floorboards, run down anything that got in his way, and put a lot of distance between himself and whatever had come out of the black doorway into the Montana night.

  He jerked the door open but halted on the threshold between the kitchen and the garage. He had nowhere to go. No family left. No friends. He was too old to begin another life.

  And no matter where he went, the traveler would still be here, learning its way in this world, performing its perverse experiments, befouling what was sacred, committing unspeakable outrages against everything that Eduardo had ever cherished.

  He could not run from this. He had never run from anything in his life; however, it was not pride that stopped him before he had taken one full step into the garage. The only thing preventing him from leaving was his sense of what was right and wrong, the basic values that had gotten him through a long life. If he turned his back on those values and ran like a gutless wonder, he wouldn’t be able to look at himself in a mirror any more. He was old and alone, which was bad enough. To be old, alone, and eaten by self-loathing would be intolerable. He wanted desperately to run from this, but that option was not open to him.

  He stepped back from the threshold, closed the door to the garage, and returned the shotgun to the table.

  He knew a bleakness of the soul that perhaps no one outside of hell had ever known before him.

  The dead crow thrashed, trying to tear loose of the colander. Eduardo had used heavy thread and tied secure knots, and the bird’s muscles and bones were too badly damaged for it to exert enough force to break free.

  His plan seemed foolish now. An act of meaningless bravado—and insanity. He proceeded with it, anyway, preferring to act rather than wait meekly for the end.

  On the back porch, he held the colander against the outside of the kitchen door. The imprisoned crow scratched and thumped. With a pencil, Eduardo marked the wood where the openings in the handles met it.

  He hammered two standard nails into those marks and hung the colander on them.

  The crow, still struggling weakly, was visible through the wire mesh, trapped against the door. But the colander could be too easily lifted off the nails.

  Using two U-shaped nails on each side, he fixed both handles securely to the solid oak door. The hammering carried up the long slope of the yard and echoed back to him from the pine walls of the western forest.

  To remove the colander and get at the crow, the traveler or its surrogate would have to pry loose the U-shaped nails to free at least one of the handles. The only alternative was to cut the mesh with heavy shears and pull out the feathered prize.

  Either way, the dead bird could not be snatched up quickly or silently. Eduardo would have plenty of warning that something was after the contents of the colander—especially as he intended to spend the entire night in the kitchen if necessary.

  He could not be sure the traveler would covet the dead crow. Perhaps he was wrong, and it had no interest in the failed surrogate. However, the bird had lasted longer than the squirrels, which had lasted longer than the raccoons, and the puppetmaster might find it instructive to examine the carcass to help it discover why.

  It wouldn’t be working through a squirrel this time. Or even a clever raccoon. Greater strength and dexterity were required for the task as Eduardo had arranged it. He prayed that the traveler itself would rise to the challenge and put in its first appearance. Come on. However, if it sent the other thing, the unspeakable thing, the lost Lenore, that terror could be faced.

  Amazing, what a human being could endure. Amazing, the strength of a man even in the shadow of oppressive terror, even in the grip of horror, even filled with bleakest despair.

  The crow was motionless once more. Silent. Stone dead.

  Eduardo turned to look at the high woods.

  Come on. Come on, you bastard. Show me your face, show me your stinking ugly face. Come on, crawl out where I can see you. Don’t be so gutless, you fucking freak.

  Eduardo went inside. He shut the door but didn’t lock it.

  After closing the blinds at the windows, so nothing could look in at him without his knowledge, he sat at the kitchen table to bring his diary up-to-date. Filling three more pages with his neat script, he concluded what he supposed might be his final entry.

  In case something happened to him, he wanted the yellow tablet to be found—but not too easily. He inserted it in a large Ziploc plastic bag, sealed it against moisture, and put it in the freezer half of the refrigerator, among packages of frozen foods.

  Twilight had arrived. The time of truth was fast approaching. He had not expected the entity in the woods to put in an appearance in daylight. He sensed it was a creature of nocturnal habits and preferences, spawned in darkness.

  He got a beer from the refrigerator. What the hell. It was his first in several hours.

  Although he wanted to be sober for the confrontation to come, he didn’t want to be entirely clearheaded. Some things could be faced and dealt with better by a man whose sensibilities had been mildly numbed.

  Nightfall had barely settled all the way into the west, and he had not finished that first beer, when he heard movement on the back porch. A soft thud and a scrape and a thud again. Definitely not the crow stirring. Heavier noises than that. It was a clumsy sound made by something awkwardly but determinedly climbing the three wooden steps from the lawn.

  Eduardo got to his feet and picked up the shotgun. His palms were slick with sweat, but he could still handle the weapon.

  Another thud and a gritty scraping.

  His heart was beating bird-fast, faster than the crow’s had ever beaten when it had been alive.

  The visitor—whatever its world of origin, whatever its name, whether dead or alive—reached the top of the steps and moved across the porch toward the door. No thudding any longer. All dragging and shuffling, sliding and scraping.

  Because of the type of reading he had been doing these past few months, in but an instant Eduardo conjured image after image of different unearthly creatures that might produce such a sound instead of ordinary footsteps, each more malevolent in appearance than the one before it, until his mind swam with monsters. On
e monster among them was not unearthly, belonged more to Poe than to Heinlein or Sturgeon or Bradbury, gothic rather than futuristic, not only from Earth but from the earth.

  It drew nearer the door, nearer still, and finally it was at the door. The unlocked door.

  Silence.

  Eduardo had only to take three steps, grab the doorknob, pull inward, and he would stand face-to-face with the visitor. He could not move. He was as rooted to the floor as any tree was rooted to the hills that rose behind the house. Though he had devised the plan that had precipitated the confrontation, though he had not run when he’d had the chance, though he had convinced himself that his sanity depended on facing this ultimate terror forthrightly and putting it behind him, he was paralyzed and suddenly not so sure that running would have been wrong.

  The thing was silent. It was there but silent. Inches from the far side of the door.

  Doing what? Waiting for Eduardo to move first? Or studying the crow in the colander? The porch was dark, and only a little kitchen light was emitted by the covered windows, so could it really see the crow?

  Yes. Oh, yes, it could see in the dark, bet on that, it could see in the dark better than any damned cat could see, because it was of the dark.

  He could hear the kitchen clock ticking. Though it had been there all along, he hadn’t heard it in years, because it had become part of the background, white noise, but he heard it now, louder than it had ever been, like one stick striking slow measured beats on a felt-softened snare drum at a state funeral.

  Come on, come on, let’s do it. This time he was not urging the traveler to come out of hiding. He was goading himself. Come on, you bastard, you cowqrd, you stupid old ignorant fool, come on, come on, come on.

  He moved to the door and stood slightly to one side of it, so he could open it past himself.

  To grasp the knob, he would have to let go of the shotgun with one hand, but he couldn’t do that. No way.

  His heart was knocking painfully against his ribs. He could feel the pulse in his temples, pounding, pounding.

  He smelled the thing through the closed door. A nauseating odor, sour and putrescent, beyond anything in his long lifetime of experience.

  The doorknob in front of him, the knob that he could not bring himself to grasp, round and polished, yellow and gleaming, began to turn. Scintillant light, a reflection of the kitchen fluorescents, trickled along the smooth curve of the knob as it slowly revolved. So slowly. The free-moving latch bolt eased out of its notch in the striker plate with the faintest rasp of brass on brass.

  Pulse pounding in his temples, booming. Heart swollen in his chest, so swollen and leaping that it crowded his lungs and made breathing difficult, painful.

  And now the knob slipped back the other way, and the door remained unopened. The latch bolt eased into its catch once more. The moment of revelation was delayed, perhaps slipping away forever as the visitor withdrew….

  With an anguished cry that surprised him, Eduardo seized the knob and yanked the door open in one convulsively violent movement, bringing himself face-to-face with his worst fear. The lost maiden, three years in the grave and now released: a wiry and tangled mass of gray hair matted with filth, eyeless sockets, flesh hideously corrupted and dark in spite of the preserving influence of embalming fluid, glimpses of clean bone in the desiccated and reeking tissues, lips withered back from teeth to reveal a wide but humorless grin. The lost maiden stood in her ragged and worm-eaten burial dress, the blue-on-blue fabric grossly stained with the fluids of decomposition, risen and returned to him, reaching for him with one hand. The sight of her filled him not merely with terror and revulsion but with despair, oh God, he was sinking in a sea of cold black despair that Margarite should have come to this, reduced to the unspeakable fate of all living things—

  It’s not Margarite, not this thing, unclean thing, Margarite’s in a better place, heaven, sits with God, must be a God, Margarite deserves a God, not just this, not an ending like this, sits with God, sits with God, long gone from this body and sits with God.

  —and after the first instant of confrontation, he thought he was going to be all right, thought he was going to be able to hold on to his sanity and bring up the shotgun and blast the hateful thing backward off the porch, pump round after round into it until it no longer bore the vaguest resemblance to his Margarite, until it was nothing but a pile of bone fragments and organic ruins with no power to plunge him into despondency.

  Then he saw that he hadn’t been visited only by this heinous surrogate but by the traveler itself, two confrontations in one. The alien was entwined with the corpse, hanging upon its back but also intruding within the cavities of it, riding on and in the dead woman. Its own body appeared to be soft and poorly designed for gravity as heavy as that it had encountered here, so perhaps it needed support to permit locomotion in these conditions. Black, it was, black and slick, irregularly stippled with red, and seemed to be constituted only of a mass of entwined and writhing appendages that one moment appeared as fluid and smooth as snakes but the next moment seemed as spiky and jointed as the legs of a crab. Not muscular like the coils of snakes or armored like crabs but oozing and jellid. He saw no head or orifice, no familiar feature that could help him tell the top of it from the bottom, but he had only a few seconds to absorb what he was seeing, merely the briefest glimpse. The sight of those shiny black tentacles slithering in and out of the cadaver’s rib cage brought him to the realization that less flesh remained on the three-year-old corpse than he had at first believed and that the bulk of the apparition before him was the rider on the bones. Its tangled appendages bulged where her heart and lungs had once been, twined like vines around clavicles and scapulae, around humerus and radius and ulna, around femur and tibia, even filled the empty skull and churned frenziedly just behind the rims of the hollow sockets. This was more than he could tolerate and more than his books had prepared him for, beyond alien, an obscenity he couldn’t bear. He heard himself screaming, heard it but was unable to stop, could not lift the gun because all his strength was in the scream.

  Although it seemed like an eternity, only five seconds elapsed from the moment he yanked open the door until his heart was wrenched by fatal spasms. In spite of the thing that loomed on the threshold of the kitchen, in spite of the thoughts and terrors that exploded through his mind in that sliver of time, Eduardo knew the number of seconds was precisely five because a part of him continued to be aware of the ticking of the clock, the funereal cadence, five ticks, five seconds. Then a searing pain blazed through him, the mother of all pain, not from an assault by the traveler but arising from within, accompanied by white light as bright as the eye of a nuclear explosion might be, an all-obliterating whiteness that erased the traveler from his view and all the cares of the world from his consideration. Peace.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Because he had suffered some nerve damage in addition to the spinal fracture, Jack required a longer course of therapy at Phoenix Rehabilitation Hospital than he had anticipated. As promised, Moshe Bloom taught him to make a friend of pain, to see it as evidence of rebuilding and recovery. By early July, four months from the day he had been shot down, gradually diminishing pain had been a constant companion for so long that it was not just a friend but a brother.

  On July seventeenth, when he was discharged from Phoenix, he was able to walk again, although he still required the assurance of not one but two canes. He seldom actually used both, sometimes neither, but was fearful of falling without them, especially on a staircase. Although slow, he was for the most part steady on his feet; however, influenced by an occasional vagrant nerve impulse, either leg could go entirely limp without warning, causing his knee to buckle. Those unpleasant surprises became less frequent by the week. He hoped to be rid of one cane by August and the other by September.

  Moshe Bloom, as solid as sculpted rock but still appearing to drift along as if propelled on a thin cushion of air, accompanied Jack to the front entrance, while H
eather brought the car from the parking lot. The therapist was dressed all in white, as usual, but his skullcap was crocheted and colorful. “Listen, you be sure to keep up those daily exercises.”

  “All right.”

  “Even after you’re able to give up the canes.”

  “I will.”

  “The tendency is to slack off. Sometimes when the patient gets most of the function back, regains his confidence, he decides he doesn’t have to work at it any more. But the healing is still going on even if he doesn’t realize it.”

  “I hear you.”

  Holding open the front door for Jack, Moshe said, “Next thing you know, he has problems, has to come back here on an outpatient basis to gain back the ground he’s lost.”

  “Not me,” Jack assured him, caning outside into the gloriously hot summer day.

  “Take your medication when you need it.”

  “I will.”

  “Don’t try to tough it out.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Hot baths with Epsom salts when you’re sore.”

  Jack nodded solemnly. “And I swear to God, every day I’ll eat my chicken soup.”

  Laughing, Moshe said, “I don’t mean to mother you.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “No, not really.”

  “You’ve been mothering me for weeks.”

  “Have I? Yes, all right, I do mean to do it.”

  Jack hooked one cane over his wrist so he could shake hands. “Thank you, Moshe.”

  The therapist shook hands, then hugged him. “You’ve made a hell of a comeback. I’m proud of you.”

  “You’re damned good at this job, my friend.”

  As Heather and Toby pulled up in the car, Moshe grinned. “Of course I’m good at it. We Jews know all about suffering.”

  For a few days, just being in his own home and sleeping in his own bed was such a delight that Jack needed to make no effort to sustain optimism. Sitting in his favorite armchair, eating meals whenever he wanted rather than when a rigid institutional schedule said he must, helping Heather to cook dinner, reading to Toby before bedtime, watching television after ten o’clock in the evening without having to wear headphones—these things were more satisfying to him than all the luxuries and pleasures to which a Saudi Arabian prince might be entitled.