Winter Moon

time with the pressure waves, and the executive chair behind the desk

wobbled around enough to make its wheels creak.

As Eduardo opened the front door, most of the spots and spears of

colored light flew away, vanished as if into another dimension, and the

rest fled to the right-hand wall of the foyer, where they melted

together in a vibrant mosaic.

The woods were luminous precisely where they had been luminous last

month. The amber glow emanated from the same group of closely packed

trees and from the ground beneath, as if the evergreen needles and

cones and bark and dirt and stones and snow were the incandescent

elements of a lamp, shining brightly without being consumed. This time

the light was more dazzling than before, just as the throbbing was

louder and the waves of pressure more forceful.

He found himself at the head of the steps but did not remember exiting

the house or crossing the porch. He looked back and saw that he had

closed the front door behind him.

Punishing waves of bass sound throbbed through the night at the rate of

perhaps thirty a minute, but his heart was beating six times faster.

He wanted to turn and run back into the house.

He looked down at the pistol in his hand. He wished the shotgun had

been loaded and beside his bed.

When he raised his head and turned his eyes away from the gun, he was

startled to see that the woods had moved closer to him. The glowing

trees loomed.

Then he realized that he, not the woods, had moved. He glanced back

again and saw the house thirty to forty feet behind him. He had

descended the steps without being aware of it. His tracks marred the

snow.

"No," he said shakily The swelling sound was like a surf with an

undertow that pulled him relentlessly from the safety of the shore.

The ululant electronic wail seemed like a siren's song, penetrating

him, speaking to him on a level so deep that he seemed to understand

the message without hearing the words, a music in his blood, luring him

toward the cold fire in the woods.

His thoughts grew fuzzy.

He peered up at the star-punctured sky, trying to clear his head. A

delicate filigree of clouds shone against the black vault, rendered

luminous by the silver light of the quarter moon.

He closed his eyes. Found the strength to resist the pull of each

ebbing wave of sound.

But when he opened his eyes, he discovered his resistance was

imaginary. He was even closer to the trees than before, only thirty

feet from the perimeter of the forest, so close he had to squint

against the blinding brightness emanating from the branches, the

trunks, and the ground under the pines.

The moody amber light was now threaded with red, like blood in an egg

yolk.

Eduardo was scared, miles past fear into sheer terror, fighting a

looseness in his bowels and a weakness in his bladder, shaking so

violently that he would not have been surprised to hear his bones

rattling together--yet his heart was no longer racing. It had slowed

drastically and now matched the steady thirty-beats-per-minute of the

pulsating sound that seemed to issue from every radiant surface.

He couldn't possibly stay on his feet when his heartbeat was so slow,

the blood supply to his brain so diminished. He ought to be either in

severe shock or unconscious. His perceptions must be untrustworthy.

Perhaps the throbbing had escalated to match the pace of his hammering

heart.

Curiously, he was no longer aware of the frigid air. Yet no heat

accompanied the enigmatic light. He was neither hot nor cold.

He couldn't feel the earth under his feet. No sense of gravity,

weight, or weariness of muscle. Might as well have been floating.

The odors of the winter were no longer perceptible. Gone was the

faint, crisp, ozone-like scent of snow. Gone, the fresh smell of the

pine forest that rose just in front of him. Gone, the faint sour stink

of his own icy sweat.

No taste on his tongue. That was the weirdest of all. He had never

before realized there was always an endless and subtly changing series

of tastes in his mouth even when he wasn't eating anything. Now a

blandness. Neither sweet nor sour. Neither salty nor bitter. Not

even a blandness. Beyond blandness.

Nothing. Nada. He worked his mouth, felt saliva flooding it, but

still no taste.

All of his powers of sensory perception seemed to be focused solely on

the ghost light shining from within the trees and on the punishing,

insistent sound. He no longer felt the throbbing bass washing in cold

waves across his body, rather, the sound was coming from within him

now, and it surged out of him in the same way that it issued from the

trees.

Suddenly he was standing at the edge of the woods, on ground as

effulgent as molten lava. Inside the phenomenon. Gazing down, he saw

that his feet seemed to be planted on a sheet of glass beneath which a

sea of fire churned, a sea as deep as the stars were distant. The

extent of that abyss made him cry out in panic, although no thinnest

whisper escaped him.

Fearfully and reluctantly, yet wonderingly, Eduardo looked at his legs