Winter Moon

Climbing the sloped backyard, Toby pictured himself in a green boat on

a cold black sea. Green because it was his favorite color. No land

anywhere in sight.

Just his little green boat and him in it. The sea was old, ancient,

older than ancient, so old that it had come alive in a way, could

think, could want things and need to have its way. The sea wanted to

rise on all sides of the little green boat, swamp it, drag it down a

thousand fathoms into the inky water, and Toby with it, ten thou

WINTER MOON 463

sand fathoms, twenty thousand, down and down to a place with no light

but strange music. In his boat, Toby had bags of Calming Dust, which

he'd gotten from someone important, maybe from Indiana Jones, maybe

from E.T maybe from Aladdin--probably from Aladdin, who got it from the

Genie. He kept scattering the Calming Dust on the sea as his little

green boat puttered along, and though the dust seemed light and silvery

in his hands, lighter than feathers, it became hugely heavy when it hit

the water, but heavy in a funny way, in a way that didn't make it sink,

magical Calming Dust that crushed the water flat, made the sea as

smooth and ripple-free as a mirror. The ancient sea wanted to rise up,

swamp the boat, but the Calming Dust weighed it down, more than iron,

more than lead, weighed it down and kept it calm, defeated it. Deep in

the darkest and coldest canyons below its surface, the sea raged,

furious with Toby, wanting more than ever to kill him, drown him, bash

his body to pieces against shoreline rocks, wear him away with its

waters until he would be just sand. But it couldn't rise, couldn't

rise, all was calm on the surface, peaceful and calm, calm.

Perhaps because Toby was concentrating so intensely on keeping the

Giver under him, he lacked the strength to climb the entire hill,

though the snow was not piled dauntingly high on that windswept

ground.

Jack put down the fuel cans two-thirds of the way to the higher woods,

carried Toby to the stone house, gave Heather the keys, and returned

for the ten gallons of gasoline.

By the time Jack reached the fieldstone house again, :

464 DEAN

KOONTZ

Heather had opened the door. The rooms inside were dark. He hadn't

had time to discover the reason for the malfunctioning lights.

Nevertheless, now he knew why Paul Youngblood couldn't get power to the

house on Monday. The dweller within hadn't wanted them to enter.

The rooms were still dark because the windows were boarded over, and

there was no time to pry off the plywood that shielded the glass.

Fortunately, Heather had remembered the lack of power and come

prepared. From two pockets of her ski suit, she produced, instead of

bullets, a pair of flashlights.

It always seems to come down to this, Jack thought: going into a dark

place.

Basements, alleyways, abandoned houses, boiler rooms, crumbling

warehouses.

Even when a cop was chasing a perp on a bright day and the chase led

only outdoors, in the final confrontation, when you came face-to-face

with evil, it was always a dark place, as if the sun could not find

that one small patch of ground where you and your potential murderer

tested fate.

Toby walked into the house ahead of them, either unafraid of the gloom

or eager to do the deed.

Heather and Jack each took a flashlight and a can of gasoline, leaving

two cans just outside the front door.

Harlan Moffit brought up the rear with two cans. "What're these

buggers like?

They all hairless and bigeyed like those geeks who kidnapped Whitley

Strieber?"

In the unfurnished and unlighted living room, Toby was standing in

front of a dark figure, and when their flashlight beams found what the

boy had found before

WINTER MOON 465

them, Harlan Moffit had his answer. Not hairless and big-eyed. Not

the cute little guys from a Spielberg movie. A decomposing body stood

with legs spread, swaying but in no danger of crumpling to the floor.

A singularly repulsive creature was draped across the cadaver's back,

bound to it by several greasy tentacles, intruded into its rotting

body, as though it had been trying to become one with the dead flesh.

It was quiescent but obviously alive: queer pulses were visible beneath

its wet-silk skin, and the tips of some appendages quivered.

The dead man with which the alien had combined was Jack's old friend

and partner Tommy Fernandez.

Heather realized, too late, that Jack had never actually seen one of

the walking dead with its puppetmaster in full saddle. That sight

alone was sufficient to undermine a lot of his assumptions about the

inherently benign-or at least neutral--character of the universe and

the inevitability of justice. There was nothing benign or just about

what had been done with Tommy Fernandez's remains--or about what the

Giver would do to her, Jack, Toby, and the rest of humanity while they

were still alive, if it had the opportunity.

The revelation had more sting because these were Tommy's remains in

this condition of profound violation, rather than those of a

stranger.

She turned her flashlight away from Tommy and was relieved when Jack