Winter Moon

Why had she thought there'd be only one of them? Because in the dream

there was only one? Because Toby had spoken of just a single

seducer?

Might be more than two. Hundreds.

The living room was on one side of her. Dining room on the other.

Ultimately, either place seemed likely to become a trap.

In different rooms all over the ground floor, windows imploded

simultaneously.

The clinkjangle-tink of cascading glass and the shrieking of the wind

at every breach decided her. Up. She and Toby would go up. Easier to

defend high ground.

She grabbed the can of gasoline.

The front door came open behind her again, banging against the

scattered items with which they had built the alarm tower. She assumed

that something other than the wind had shoved it, but she didn't glance

back. The Giver hissed. As in the dream.

She leaped for the stairs, gasoline sloshing in the can, and shouted at

Toby, "Go, go!"

The boy and the dog raced to the second floor ahead of her.

"Wait at the top!" she called as they scrambled upward and out of

sight.

At the top of the first flight, Heather halted on the landing, looked

back and down into the front hall, and saw a dead man walking. Eduardo

Fernandez. She recognized him from the pictures they had found while

sorting through his belongings. Dead and buried more than four months,

he nevertheless moved in a shambling and stiffjointed manner, kicking

through the dishes and pans and flatware, heading for the foot of the

stairs, accompanied by swirling flakes of snow like ashes from the

fires of hell.

There could be no self-awareness in the corpse, no slightest wisp of Ed

Fernandez's consciousness remaining in it, for the old man's mind and

soul had gone on to a better place before the Giver had requisitioned

his body.

The soiled cadaver was evidently being controlled with the same power

that had switched on the radio and the TV at long distance, had opened

the dead-bolt locks without a key, and had caused the windows to

implode. Call it telekinesis, mind over matter. Alien mind over

earthly matter. In this case, it was decomposing organic matter in the

rough shape of a human being.

At the bottom of the steps, the corpse stopped and gazed up at her.

Its face was only slightly swollen, though darkly empurpled, mottled

with yellow here and there, a crust of evil green under its clogged

nostrils. One eye was missing. The other was covered with a yellow

film, it bulged against a half-concealing lid that, though sewn shut by

a mortician, had partially opened when the rotting threads had

loosened.

Heather heard herself muttering rapidly, rhythmically. After a moment

she realized that she was feverishly reciting a long prayer she had

learned as a child but had not repeated in eighteen or twenty years.

Under other circumstances, if she had made a conscious effort to recall

the words, she couldn't have come up with half of them, but now they

flowed out of her as they had when she'd been a young girl kneeling in

church.

The walking corpse was less than half the reason for her fear, however,

and far less than half the reason for the acute disgust that knotted

her stomach, made breathing difficult, and triggered her gag reflex.

It was gruesome, but the discolored flesh was not yet dissolving from

the bones. The dead man still reeked more of embalming fluid than of

putrescence, a pungent odor that blew up the staircase on a cold draft

and instantly reminded Heather of long-ago high-school biology classes

and slippery specimen frogs fished from jars of formaldehyde for

dissection.

What sickened and repelled her most of all was the Giver that rode the

corpse as it might have ridden a beast of burden. Though the light in

the hallway was bright enough to reveal the alien clearly, and though

she might have wanted to see less of it rather than more, she was

nevertheless unable to precisely define its physical form. The bulk of

the thing appeared to hang along the dead man's back, secured by

whiplike tentacles-- some as thin as pencils, some as thick as her own

forearm--that were firmly lashed around the mount's thighs, waist,

chest, and neck. The Giver was mostly black, and such a deep black

that it hurt her eyes to stare at it, though in places the inky sheen

was relieved by blood-red speckles.

Without Toby to protect, she might not have been able to face this

thing, for it was too strange, incomprehensible, just too damned

much.

The sight of it dizzied like a whiff of nitrous oxide, brought her to

the edge of desperate giddy laughter, a humorless mirth that was

perilously close to madness.

Not daring to take her eyes off the corpse or its hideous rider, for

fear she would look up to find it one step below her, Heather slowly

lowered the five-gallon can of gasoline to the floor of the landing.

Along the dead man's back, at the heart of the churning mass of

tentacles, there might have been a central body akin to the sac of a

squid, with glaring inhuman eyes and a twisted mouth--but if it was

there, she couldn't catch a glimpse of it. Instead, the thing seemed