Winter Moon

The heatless fire was fiercely bright, shining through from some other

place or time or dimension.

Pressure waves battered Eduardo. No longer like a crashing storm

surf.

Hard, punishing. Rocking him so forcefully he had to concentrate on

keeping his balance.

Again he was aware of something struggling to be free of constraint,

break loose of confinement, and burst full-born into the world.

The apocalyptic roar of Wormheart was the ideal accompaniment to the

moment, brutal as a sledgehammer yet thrilling, atonal yet compelling,

anthems to animal need, shattering the frustrations of human

limitations, liberating. It was the darkly gleeful music of

doomsday.

The throbbing and the electronic whine must have grown to match the

brilliance of the light and the power of the escalating pressure

waves.

He began to hear them again and was aware of being seduced.

He cranked up the volume on Wormheart.

The sugar and ponderosa pines, previously as still as trees on a

painted stage backdrop, suddenly began to thrash, though no wind had

risen. The air was filled with whirling needles.

The pressure waves grew so fierce that he was pushed backward,

stumbled, fell on his ass. He stopped recording, dropped the video

camera on the ground beside him.

The Discman, clipped to his belt, began to vibrate against his left

hip. A wail of Wormheart guitars escalated into a shrill electronic

shriek that replaced the music and was as painful as jamming nails into

his ears might have been.

Screaming in agony, he stripped off the headphones. Against his hip,

the vibrating Discman was smoking. He tore it loose, threw it to the

ground, scorching his fingers on the hot metal case.

The metronomic throbbing surrounded him, as if he were adrift inside

the beating heart of a leviathan.

Resisting the urge to walk into the light and become part of it

forever, Eduardo struggled to his feet. Shrugged the shotgun off his

shoulder, Blinding light forcing him to squint, serial shock waves

knocking the breath out of him, evergreen boughs churning, a trembling

in the earth, the electronic oscillation like the high-pitched squeal

of a surgeon's bone saw, and the whole night throbbing, the sky and the

earth throbbing as something pushed repeatedly and relentlessly at the

fabric of reality, throbbing, throbbing-Whoooosh.

The new sound was like--but enormously louder than--the gasp of a

vacuum-packed can of coffee or peanuts being opened, air rushing to

fill a void.

Immediately after that single brief whoooosh, a pall of silence fell

across the night and the unearthly light vanished in an instant.

, Eduardo Fernandez stood in stunned disbelief under the crescent moon,

staring at a perfect sphere of pure blackness that towered over him,

like a gargantuan ball on a cosmic billiards table. It was so

flawlessly black, it stood out against the ordinary darkness of the May

night as prominently as the flare of a nuclear explosion would stand

out against the backdrop of even the sunniest summer day. Huge.

Thirty feet in diameter. It filled the space once occupied by the

radiant pine trees and earth.

A ship.

For a moment he thought that he was gazing up at a ship with a

windowless hull as smooth as pooled oil. He waited in paralytic terror

for a seam of light to appear, a portal to crack open, a ramp to

extrude.

In spite of the fear that clouded his thinking, Eduardo quickly

realized he was not looking at a solid object. The moon-glow wasn't

reflected on its surface. Light just fell into it as it would fall

into a well. Or tunnel.

Except that it revealed no curving walls within. Instinctively,

without needing to touch that smooth inky surface, he knew the sphere

had no weight, no mass at all, he had no primitive sense whatsoever

that it was looming over him, as he should have had if it had been

solid.

The object wasn't an object, it was not a sphere but a circle. Not

three dimensional but two.

A doorway.

Open.

The dark beyond the threshold was unrelieved by gleam, glint, or

faintest glimmer. Such perfect blackness was neither natural nor

within human experience, and staring at it made Eduardo's eyes ache

with the strain of seeking dimension and detail where none existed.

He wanted to run.

He approached the doorway instead.

His heart thudded, and his blood pressure no doubt pushed him toward a

stroke. He clutched the shotgun with what he knew was pathetic faith

in its efficacy, shoving it out in front of him as a primitive

tribesman might brandish a talismanic staff carved with runes, inset

with wild-animal teeth, lacquered with sacrificial blood, and crowned

with a shock of a witch doctor's hair.

However, his fear of the door--and of the unknown realms and entities

beyond it--was not as debilitating as the fear of senility and the

self-doubt with which he had been living lately. While the chance

existed to gather proof of this experience, he intended to explore as

far and as long as his nerves would hold out. He hoped never to wake

another morning with the suspicion that his brain was addled and his

perceptions were no longer trustworthy.