Winter Moon

have been equally steeped in silence, Eduardo had been awakened by a

strange sound.

The longer he had listened, the stranger it had seemed. As he had

gotten out of bed to seek the source, he had been surprised to find he

was afraid. After seven decades of taking what life threw at him,

having attained spiritual peace and an acceptance of the inevitability

of death, he'd not been frightened of anything in a long time. He was

unnerved, therefore, when last night he had felt his heart thudding

furiously and his gut clenching with dread merely because of a queer

sound.

Unlike many seventy-year-old men, Eduardo rarely had difficulty

attaining plumbless sleep for a full eight hours. His days were filled

with physical activity, his evenings with the solace of good books, a

lifetime of measured habits and moderation left him vigorous in old

age, without troubling regrets, content. Loneliness was the only curse

of his life, since Margaret had died three years before, and on those

infrequent occasions when he woke in the middle of the night, it was a

dream of his lost wife that harried him from sleep.

The sound had been less loud than all-pervasive. A low throbbing that

swelled like a series of waves rushing toward a beach. Beneath the

throbbing, an undertone that was almost subliminal, quaverous, an eerie

electronic oscillation. He'd not only heard it but felt it, vibrating

in his teeth, his bones. The glass in the windows hummed with it.

When he placed a hand flat against the wall, he swore that he could

feel the waves of sound cresting through the house itself, like the

slow beating of a heart beneath the plaster.

sure, as if he had been listening to someone or something rhythmically

straining against confinement, struggling to break out of a prison or

through a barrier.

But who?

Or what?

Eventually, after scrambling out of bed, pulling on pants and shoes, he

had gone onto the front porch, where he had seen the light in the

woods. No, he had to be more honest with himself. It hadn't been

merely a light in the woods, nothing as simple as that.

He wasn't superstitious. Even as a young man, he had prided himself on

his levelheadedness, common sense, and unsentimental grasp of the

realities of life. The writers whose books lined his study were those

with a crisp, simple style and with no patience for fantasy, men with a

cold clear vision, who saw the world for what it was and not for what

it might be: men like Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Ford Madox Ford.

The phenomenon in the lower woods was nothing that his favorite

writers--every last one of them a realist--could have incorporated into

their stories. The light had not been from an object within the

forest, against which the pines had been silhouetted, rather, it had

come from the pines themselves, mottled amber radiance that appeared to

originate within the bark, within the boughs, as if the tree roots had

siphoned water from a subterranean pool contaminated by a greater

percentage of radium than the paint with which watch dials had once

been coated to allow time to be told in the dark.

Accompanying that pulse had been a sense of presi A cluster of ten to

twenty pines had been involved.

Like a glowing shrine in the otherwise night-black fastness of

timber.

Unquestionably, the mysterious source of the light was also the source

of the sound. When the former had begun to fade, so had the latter.

Quieter and dimmer, quieter and dimmer. The March night had become

silent and dark again in the same instant, marked only by the sound of

his own breathing and illuminated by nothing stranger than the silver

crescent of a quarter moon and the pearly phosphorescence of the

snow-shrouded fields.

The event had lasted about seven minutes.

It had seemed much longer.

Back inside the house, he had stood at the windows, waiting to see what

would happen next. Eventually, when that seemed to have been the sum

of it, he returned to bed.

He had not been able to get back to sleep. He had lain awake ...

wondering.

Every morning he sat down to breakfast at six-thirty, with his big

shortwave radio tuned to a station in Chicago that provided

international news twenty-four hours a day. The peculiar experience

during the previous night hadn't been a sufficient interruption of the

rhythms of his life to make him alter his schedule. This morning he'd

eaten the entire contents of a large can of grapefruit sections,

followed by two eggs over easy, home fries, a quarter pound of bacon,

and four slices of buttered toast. He hadn't lost his hearty appetite

with age, and a lifelong dedication to the foods that were hardest on

the heart had only left him with the constitution of a man more than

twenty years his junior.

Finished eating, he always liked to linger over several cups of black

coffee, listening to the endless troubles of the world. The news

unfailingly confirmed the wisdom of living in a far place with no

neighbors in view.

This morning, though he had lingered longer than usual with his coffee,

and though the radio had been on, he hadn't been able to remember a