Winter Moon

to be all ropy extremities, ceaselessly twitching, curling, coiling,

and unraveling. Though oozing and gelatinous within its skin, the

Giver occasionally bristled into spiky shapes that made her think of

lobsters, crabs, crawfish--but in a blink, it was all sinuous motion

once more.

In college, a friend of Heather's--Wendi Felzer--had developed liver

cancer and had decided to augment her doctors' treatments with a course

of self-healing through imaging therapy. Wendi had pictured her white

blood cells as knights in shining armor with magic swords, her cancer

as a dragon, and she had meditated two hours a day, until she could

see, in her mind, all those knights slaying the beast. The Giver was

the archetype for every image of cancer ever conceived, the slithering

essence of malignancy. In Wendi's case, the dragon had won. Not a

good thing to remember now, not good at all.

It started to climb the steps toward her.

She raised the Uzi.

The most loathsome aspect of the Giver's entanglement with the corpse

was the extent of its intimacy. The buttons had popped off the white

burial shirt, which hung open, revealing that a few of the tentacles

had pried open the thoracic incision made by the coroner during his

autopsy, those red-speckled appendages vanished inside the cadaver,

probing deep into unknown reaches of its cold tissues. The creature

seemed to revel in its bonding with the dead flesh, an embrace that was

as inexplicable as it was obscene.

Its very existence was offensive. That it could be seemed proof that

the universe was a madhouse, full of worlds without meaning and bright

galaxies without pattern or purpose.

It climbed two steps from the hall, toward the landing.

Three. Four.

Heather waited one more.

Five steps up, seven steps below her.

A bristling mass of tentacles appeared between the dead man's parted

lips, like a host of black tongues spotted with blood.

Heather opened fire, held the trigger down too long, used up too much

ammunition, ten or twelve rounds, even fourteen, although it was

surprising--considering her state of mind--that she didn't empty both

magazines. The 9mm slugs stitched a bloodless diagonal line across the

dead man's chest, through body and entwining tentacles.

Parasite and dead host pitched backward to the hallway floor below,

leaving two lengths of severed tentacles on the stairs, one about

eighteen inches long, the other about two feet. Neither of those

amputated limbs bled. Both continued to move, initially twisting and

flailing the way the bodies of snakes writhe long after they have been

separated from their heads.

Heather was transfixed by the grisly sight because, almost at once, the

movement ceased to be the result of misfiring nerves and randomly

spasming muscles, it began to appear purposeful. Each scrap of the

primary organism seemed aware of the other, and they groped toward each

other, the first curling down over the edge of a step while the second

rose gracefully like a flute-charmed serpent to meet it. When they

touched, a transformation occurred that was essentially black magic and

beyond Heather's understanding, even though she had a clear view of

it.

The two became as one, not simply entwining but melding, flowing

together as if the soot-dark silken skin sheathing them was little more

than surface tension that gave shape to the oozing protoplasm within.

As soon as the two combined, the resulting mass sprouted eight smaller

tentacles, with a shimmer like quick shadows playing across a puddle of

water, the new organism bristled into a vaguely crablike--but still

eyeless--form, though it was as soft and flexible as ever. Quivering,

as if to maintain even a marginally more angular shape required

monumental effort, it began to hitch down the steps toward the

mothermass from which it had become separated.

Less than half a minute had passed from the moment when the two severed

appendages had begun to seek each other.

Bodies are.

Those words were, according to Jack, part of what the Giver had said

through Toby in the cemetery.

Bodies are.

A cryptic statement then. All too clear now. Bodies are--now and

forever, flesh without end. Bodies are-- expendable if necessary,

fiercely adaptable, severable without loss of intellect or memory and

therefore in infinite supply.

The bleakness of her sudden insight, the perception that they could not

win regardless of how valiantly they struggled or how much courage they

possessed, kicked her across the borderline of sanity for a moment,

into madness no less total for its brevity. Instead of recoiling from

the monstrously alien creature stilting determinedly down the steps to

rejoin its mothermass, as any sane person would have done, she plunged

after it, off the landing with a strangled scream that sounded like the

thin and bitter grievance of a dying animal in a sawtooth trap, the

Micro Uzi thrust in front of her.

Although she knew she was putting herself in terrible jeopardy,

unconscionably abandoning Toby at the top of the stairs, Heather was