Winter Moon

"Everything else lets it in," Heather said. Toby nodded. "Except

people." Chalk one up for human beings, Jack thought.

Good old Homo sapiens, bullheaded to the last. We're just not

happy-go-lucky enough to let the puppetmaster jerk us around any way it

wants, too uptight, too damned stuborn to love being slaves.

"Oh," Toby said quietly, more to himself than to hem or to the entity

controlling the computer. "I see."

"What do you see?" Jack asked. Interesting."

"What's interesting?"

"The how." Jack looked at Heather, but she didn't seem to be tracking

the enigmatic conversation any better than he was. "It senses," Toby

said. "Toby?"

"Let's not talk about this," the boy said, glancing away from the

screen for a moment to give Jack what seemed to be an imploring or

warning look. "Talk about what?"

"Forget it," Toby said, gazing at the monitor again.

"Forget what?"

"I better be good. Here, listen, it wants to know." Then, with a

voice as muffled as a sigh in a handkerchief, forcing Jack to lean

closer, Toby seemed to change the subject: "What were they doing down

there?" Jack said, "You mean in the graveyard?"

"Yeah."

"You know."

"But it doesn't. It wants to know."

"It doesn't understand death," Jack said. "No."

"How can that be?"

"Life is," the boy said, clearly interpreting a viewpoint that belonged

to the creature with which he was in contact. "No meaning. No

beginning. No end. Nothing matters. It is."

"Surely this isn't the first world it's ever found where things die,"

Heather said. Toby began to tremble, and his voice rose, but barely.

"They resist too, the ones under the ground. It can use them, but it

can't know them." can use them, but it can't know them. A few pieces

of the puzzle suddenly fit together. Reling only a tiny portion of the

truth. A monstrous, terible portion of the truth. Jack remained

crouched beside the boy in stunned silence. At last he said weakly,

"Use them?"

"But it can't know them." How does it use them?"

."Puppets." Heather gasped. "The smell. Oh, dear God. The smell

,the back staircase." Though Jack wasn't entirely sure what she was

talking about, he knew that she'd realized what was out e on the

Quartermass Ranch. Not just this thing in beyond, this thing that

could send the same dream to both of them, this unknowable alien thing

whose purpose was to become and to hate. Other things were out e. Toby

whispered, "But it can't know them. Not even as much as it can know

us. It can use them better. Better than it can use us. But it wants to

know them. Become them. And they resist." Jack had heard enough. Far

too much. Shaken, he rose from beside Toby. He flipped the master

switch to off, and the screen blanked. "It's going to come for us,"

Toby said, and then he Ucended slowly out of his half-trance.

Bitter storm wind shrieked at the window behind them, but even if it

had been able to reach into the room, it couldn't have made Jack any

colder than he already was. Toby swiveled in the office chair to

direct a puzzled look first at his mother, then at his father. The dog

came out of the corner. Though no one was touching it, the master

switch on the computer flicked from the Off to the On position.

Everyone twitched in surprise, including Falstaff. The screen gushed

with vile and squirming colors. Heather stooped, grabbed the power

cord, and tore it out of the wall socket. The monitor went dark again,

stayed dark.

"It won't stop," Toby said, getting up from the chair. Jack turned to

the window and saw that dawn had come, dim and gray, revealing a

landscape battered by a full-scale blizzard. In the past twelve hours,

fourteen to sixteen inches of snow had fallen, drifting twice that deep

where the wind chose to pile it.

Either the first storm had stalled, instead of moving farther eastward,

or the second had blown in even sooner than expected overlapping the

first. "It won't stop," Toby repeated solemnly. He wasn't talking

about the snow.

Heather pulled him into her arms, lifted and held him as tightly and

protectively as she would have held an infant. Everything becomes

me.

Jack didn't know all that might be meant by those words, what horrors

they might encompass, but he knew Toby was right. The thing wouldn't

stop until it had become them and they'd become part of it.

Condensation had frozen on the inside of the lower panes in the French

window.

Jack touched the glistening with a fingertip, but he was so frigid with

fear that ice felt no colder than his own skin. Beyond the kitchen

windows, the white world was filled with cold motion, the relentless

angular descent of driven snow. Restless, Heather moved continuously

back and forth between the two windows, nervously anticipating the

pearance of a monstrously corrupted intruder in that otherwise sterile

landscape.

They were dressed in the new ski suits they'd bought the previous

morning, prepared to get out of the house quickly if they came under

attack and found their prison indefensible. The loaded Mossberg

twelve-gauge lay on the table.

Jack could drop the yellow tablet and snatch up the gun in the event