Winter Moon

and body, and saw that the amber light also radiated from him and was

riddled with bursts of red. He appeared to be a man from another

world, filled with alien energy, or a holy Indian spirit that had

walked out of the high mountains in search of the ancient nations once

in dominion over the vast Montana wilderness but long lost:

Blackfeet?

Crow, Sioux, Assiniboin, Cheyenne.

He raised his left hand to examine it more closely. His skin was

transparent, his flesh translucent. At first he could see the bones of

his hand and fingers, well-articulated gray-red forms within the molten

amber substance of which he seemed to be made. Even as he watched, his

bones became transparent too, and he was entirely a man of glass, no

substance to him at all any more, he had become a window through which

could be seen an unearthly fire, just as the ground under him was a

window, just as the stones and trees were windows.

The crashing waves of sound and the electronic squeal arose from within

the currents of fire, ever more insistent. As on that night in March,

he had an almost clairvoyant perception of something straining against

confinement, struggling to break out of a prison or through a

barrier.

Something trying to force open a door.

He was standing in the intended doorway.

On the threshold.

He was seized by the bizarre conviction that if the door opened while

he was standing in the way, he would shatter into disassociated atoms

as if he'd never existed. He would become the door. An unknown caller

would enter through him, out of the fire and through him.

Jesus, help me, he prayed, though he wasn't a religious man.

He tried to move.

Paralyzed.

Within his raised hand, within his entire body, within the trees and

stones and earth, the fire grew less amber, more red, hotter, entirely

red, scarlet, seething. Abruptly it was marbled with blue-white veins

to rival the consuming brightness at the very heart of a star. The

malevolent pulsations swelled, exploded, swelled, exploded, like the

pounding of colossal pistons, booming, booming, pistons in the

perpetual engines that drove the universe itself, harder, harder,

pressure escalating, his glass body vibrating, fragile as crystal,

pressure, expanding, demanding, hammering, fire and thunder, fire and

thunder, fire and thunder-Blackness.

Silence.

Cold.

When he woke, he was lying at the perimeter of the forest, in the light

of a quarter moon. Above him, the trees stood sentinel, dark and

still.

He was in possession of all his senses again. He smelled the ozone

crispness of snow, dense masses of pines, his own sweat--and urine. He

had lost control of his bladder. The taste in his mouth was unpleasant

but familiar: blood. In his terror or when he'd fallen, he must have

bitten his tongue.

Evidently, the door in the night had not opened.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

That same night, Eduardo removed the weapons from the cabinet in the

study and reloaded them. He distributed them throughout the house, so

one firearm or another would always be within reach.

The following morning, April fourth, he drove into Eagle's Roost, but

he didn't go to the sheriff's substation. He still had no evidence to

back up his story.

He went, instead, to Custer's Appliance. Custer's was housed in a

yellow-brick building dating from about 1920, and the glittering

high-tech merchandise in its display windows was as anachronistic as

tennis shoes on a Neanderthal.

Eduardo purchased a videocassette recorder, a video camera, and half a

dozen blank tapes.

The salesman was a long-haired young man who looked like Mozart, in

boots, jeans, a decoratively stitched cowboy shirt, and a string tie

with a turquoise clasp. He kept up a continuous chatter about the

multitude of features the equipment offered, using so much jargon that

he seemed to be speaking a foreign language.

Eduardo just wanted to record and play back. Nothing more. He didn't

care if he could watch one show while taping another, or whether the

damned gadgets could cook his dinner, make his bed, and give him a

pedicure.

The ranch already had a television capable of receiving a lot of

channels, because shortly before his death, Mr. Quartermass had

installed a satellite dish behind the stables. Eduardo seldom watched

a program, maybe three or four times a year, but he knew the TV

worked.

From the appliance store he went to the library. He checked out a

stack of novels by Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, plus

collections of stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and M.

R. James.

He felt no less a fool than if he had selected lurid volumes of

flapdoodle purporting to be nonfiction accounts of the Abominable

Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster, the Lost Continent of Atlantis, the

Bermuda Triangle, and the true story of Elvis Presley's faked death and

sex-change operation. He fully expected the librarian to sneer at him

or at least favor him with a pitying and patronizing smile, but she

processed the books as if she found nothing frivolous about his taste

in fiction.

After stopping at the supermarket as well, he returned to the ranch and