Winter Moon

good place but dark and frightening. He hadn't thought of it as a

brave thing to do, only what must be done, what Captain Kirk or Mr.

Spock or Luke Skywalker or any of those guys would have done in his

place or when meeting a new and hostile intelligent species out on the

galactic rim. They'd have taken any advantage, added to their

knowledge in any way they could.

So did he.

No big deal.

Now, when the noise coming out of the radio urged him to open the

door--just open the door and let it in, let it in, accept the pleasure

and the peace, let it in--he did as it wanted, though he didn't let it

enter all the way, not half as far as he entered into it. As at the

computer this morning, he was now between complete freedom and

enslavement, walking the brink of a chasm, careful not to let his

presence be known until he was ready to strike.

While the Giver was rushing into his mind, confident of overwhelming

it, Toby turned the tables.

He imagined that his own mind was a colossal weight, a billion trillion

tons, even heavier than that, more than the weight of all the planets

in the solar system combined, and even a zillion times heavier than

that, pressing down on the mind of the Giver, so much weight, crushing

it, flattening it into a thin pancake and holding it there, so it could

think fast and furiously but could not act on its thoughts.

The thing let go of Heather's ankle. All of its sinuous and agitated

appendages retracted and curled into one another, and it went still,

like a massive ball of glistening intestines, four feet in diameter.

The other one lost control of the burning corpse with which it was

entwined.

Parasite and dead host collapsed in a heap and were also motionless.

Heather stood in stunned disbelief, unable to understand what had

happened.

Smoke churned into the room.

Toby had opened the dead bolt and the stairhead door. Tugging at her,

he said, "Quick, Mom."

Beyond confusion, in a state of utter baffflement, she followed her son

and the dog into the back stairwell and pulled the door shut, cutting

off the smoke before it reached them.

Toby hurried down the stairs, the dog at his heels, and Heather plunged

after him as he followed the curving wall out of sight.

"Honey, wait!"

"No time," he called back to her.

"Toby !"

She was terrified about descending the stairs so recklessly, not

knowing what might be ahead, assuming another of those things had to be

somewhere near at hand. Three graves had been disturbed at the

cemetery.

In the vestibule at the bottom, the door to the back porch was still

nailed shut. The door in the kitchen was wide open, and Toby was

waiting for her with the dog.

She would have thought her heart couldn't have beat any faster or

slammed any harder than it did on the way down those stairs, but when

she saw Toby's face, her pulse quickened and each lub-dub was so

forceful that it sent a throb of dull pain across her breast.

If he had been pale with fear, he was now a far whiter shade of pale.

His face didn't look like that of a living boy so much as like a death

mask of a face, rendered now in cold hard plaster as colorless as

powdered lime. The whites of his eyes were gray, one pupil large and

the other just a pinpoint, and his lips were bluish. He was in the

grip of terror, but it wasn't terror alone that drove him. He seemed

strange, haunted--and then she recognized the same fey quality that

he'd exhibited when he'd been in front of the computer this morning,

not in the grip of the Giver but not entirely free. Between, he had

called it.

"We can get it," he said.

Now that she recognized his condition, she could hear the same flatness

in his voice that she had heard this morning when he'd been in the

thrall of that storm of colors on the IBM monitor.

"Toby, what's wrong?"

"I've got it."

"Got what?"

"It."

"Got it where?"

"Under."

Her heart was exploding.

"Under?"

"Under me."

Then she remembered, blinked. Amazed.

"It's under you?"

He nodded.

So pale.

"You're controlling it?"

"For now."

"How can that be?" she wondered.

"No time. It wants loose. Very strong. Pushing hard."

A glistening beadwork of sweat had appeared on his brow. He chewed his

lower lip, drawing more blood.

Heather raised a hand to touch him, stop him, hesitated, not sure if

touching him would shatter his control.

"We can get it," he repeated.

Harlan damn near drove the grader into the house, halting the plow

inches from the railing, casting a great crashing wave of snow onto the

front porch.

He leaned forward in his seat to let Jack squeeze out of the storage

area behind him. "You go, take care of your people. I'll call the

depot, get a fire company out here."

Even as Jack went through the high door and dismounted from the grader,

he heard Harlan Moffit on the cellular system, talking to his

dispatcher.

He had never known fear like this before, not even when Anson Oliver

had opened fire at Arkadian's service station, not even when he'd

realized something was speaking through Toby in the graveyard

yesterday, never a fear half this intense, with his stomach knotted so