Winter Moon

She'd sensed its considerable size when she'd had only the most

fleeting glimpse of it slipping away from the window. Bigger than she

was.

"Come on," she muttered, her attention riveted on the back door. "Come

on, if you're never afraid, come on."

Both she and Toby cried out in surprise when, in the living room, the

television switched on, with the volume turned all the way up.

Frenetic, bouncy music. Cartoon music. A screech of brakes, a crash

and clatter, with comic accompaniment on a flute. Then the voice of a

frustrated Elmer Fudd booming through the house: "OOOHHH, I HATE THAT

WABBIT!"

Heather kept her attention on the back door, beyond the hall and

kitchen, altogether about fifty feet away.

So loud each word vibrated the windows, Bugs Bunny said: "EH, WHAT'S

UP, DOC" And then a sound of something bouncing: BOING, BOINC, BOING,

BOING, BOING.

"STOP THAT, STOP THAT, YOU CWAZY WABBIT!"

Falstaff ran into the living room, barking at the TV, and then scurried

into the hall again, looking past Heather to where he, too, knew the

real enemy still waited.

The back door.

Snow sifting through the narrow opening.

In the living room, the television program fell silent in the middle of

a long comical trombone crescendo that, even under the circumstances,

brought to mind a vivid image of Elmer Fudd sliding haplessly and

inexorably toward one doom or another. Quiet. Just the keening wind

outside.

One second. Two. Three.

Then the TV blared again, but not with Bugs and Elmer. It spewed forth

the same weird waves of unmelodic music that had issued from the radio

in the kitchen.

To Toby, she said sharply, "Resist it!"

Back door. Snowflakes spiraling through the crack.

Come on, come on.

Keeping her eyes on the back door, at the far side of the lighted

kitchen, she said, "Don't listen to it, honey, just tell it to go away,

say no to it. No, no, no to it."

The tuneless music, alternately irritating and soothing, pushed her

with what seemed like real physical force when the volume rose, pulled

on her when the volume ebbed, pushed and pulled, until she realized

that she was swaying as Toby had swayed in the kitchen when under the

spell of the radio.

In one of the quieter passages, she heard a murmur Toby's voice. She

couldn't catch the words.

She looked at him. He had that dazed expression. Transported. He was

moving his lips. He might have been saying "yes, yes," but she

couldn't tell for sure.

Kitchen door. Still ajar two inches, no more, as it had been.

Something still waiting out there on the porch.

She knew it.

The boy whispered to his unseen seducer, soft urgent words that might

have been the first faltering steps of acquiescence or total

surrender.

"Shit!" she said.

She backed up two steps, turned toward the livingroom arch on her left,

and opened fire on the television. A brief burst, six or eight rounds,

tore into the TV. The picture tube exploded, thin white vapor or smoke

from the ruined electronics spurted into the air, and the darkly

beguiling siren song was hammered into silence by the clatter of the

Uzi.

A strong, cold draft swept through the hallway, and Heather spun toward

the rear of the house. The back door was no longer ajar. It stood

wide open. She could see the snow-covered porch and, beyond the porch,

the churning white day.

The Giver had first walked out of a dream. Now it had walked out of

the storm, into the house. It was somewhere in the kitchen, to the

left or right of the hall door, and she had missed the chance to cut it

down as it entered.

If it was just on the other side of the threshold between the hall and

the kitchen, it had closed to a maximum striking distance of about

twenty-five feet. Getting dangerously close again.

Toby was standing on the first step of the staircase, clear-eyed once

more but shivering and pale with terror. The dog was beside him,

alert, sniffing the air.

Behind her, another pot-pan-bowl-flatware-dish alarm went off with a

loud clanging of metal and shattering of glass. Toby screamed,

Falstaff erupted into ferocious barking again, and Heather swung

around, heart slamming so hard it shook her arms, made the gun jump up

and down. The front door was arcing inward. A forest of long

red-speckled black tentacles burst through the gap between door and

jamb, glossy and writhing. So there were two of them, one at the front

of the house, one at the back. The Uzi chattered. Six rounds, maybe

eight. The door shut. But a mysterious dark figure was hunched

against it, a small part of it visible in the beveled-glass window in

the top of the door.

Without pausing to see if she'd actually hit the son of a bitch or

scored only the door and wall, she spun toward the kitchen yet again,

punching three or four rounds through the empty hallway behind her even

as she turned.

Nothing there.

She had been sure the first one would be striking at her back.

Wrong.

Maybe twenty rounds left in the Uzi's double magazine. Maybe only

fifteen.

They couldn't stay in the hall. Not with one of the damned things in

the kitchen, another on the front porch.