Winter Moon

Moving cautiously across the dead and flattened meadow grass, feet

sinking slightly into the spring-softened soil, he remained alert for

any change within the circle of exceptional darkness: a lesser

blackness, shadows within the gloom, a spark, a hint of movement,

anything that might signal the approach of ... a traveler. He stopped

three feet from the brink of that eye-baffling tenebrity, leaning

forward slightly, as wonder-struck as a man in a fairy tale gazing into

a magical mirror, the biggest damned magical mirror the Brothers Grimm

ever imagined, one that offered no reflections--enchanted or

otherwise-but that gave him a hair-raising glimpse of eternity.

Holding the shotgun in one hand, he reached down and picked up a stone

as large as a lemon. He tossed it gently at the portal. He more than

half expected the stone to bounce off the blackness with a hard

metallic tonk, for it was still easier to believe he was looking at an

object rather than peering into infinity. But it crossed the vertical

plane of the doorway and vanished without a sound.

He edged closer.

Experimentally, he pushed the barrel of the Remington shotgun across

the threshold. It didn't fade into the gloom. Instead, the blackness

so totally claimed the forward part of the weapon that it appeared as

if someone had run a high-speed saw through the barrel and the forearm

slide handle, neatly truncating them.

He pulled back on the Remington, and the forward part of the gun

reappeared.

It seemed to be intact.

He touched the steel barrel and the checkered wood grip on the slide.

Everything felt as it should feel.

Taking a deep breath, not sure whether he was brave or insane, he

raised one trembling hand, as if signaling "hello" to someone, and

eased it forward, feeling for the transition point between this world

and . . . whatever lay beyond the doorway. A tingle against his palm

and the pads of his fingers. A coolness. It felt almost as if his

hand rested on a pool of water but too lightly to break the surface

tension.

He hesitated.

"You're seventy years old," he grumbled. "What've you got to lose?"

Swallowing hard, he pushed his hand through the portal, and it

disappeared in the same manner as the shotgun. He encountered no

resistance, and his wrist terminated in a neat stump.

"Jesus," he said softly.

He made a fist, opened and closed it, but he couldn't tell if his hand

responded on the other side of the barrier. All feeling ended at the

point at which that hellish blackness cut across his wrist.

When he withdrew his hand from the doorway, it was as unchanged as the

shotgun had been. He opened his fist, closed it, opened it.

Everything worked as it should, and he had full feeling again.

Eduardo looked around at the deep and peaceful May night. The forest

flanking the impossible circle of darkness. Meadow sloping upward,

palely frosted by the glow of the quarter moon. The house at the

higher end of the meadow. Some windows dark and others filled with

light. Mountain peaks in the west, caps of snow phosphorescent against

the post-midnight sky.

The scene was too detailed to be a place in a dream or part of the

hallucination-riddled world of senile dementia. He was not a demented

old fool, after all. Old, yes. A fool, probably. But not demented.

He returned his attention to the doorway again--and suddenly wondered

what it looked like from the side. He imagined a long tube of

perfectly nonreflective ebony leading straight off into the night more

or less like an oil pipeline stretching across Alaskan tundra, boring

through mountains in some cases and suspended in thin air when it

crossed less lofty territories, until it reached the curve of the

earth, where it continued straight and true, unbending, off into space,

a tunnel to the stars.

When he walked to one end of the thirty-foot-wide blot and looked at

the side of it, he discovered something utterly different from--but

quite as strange as-- the pipeline image in his mind. The forest lay

behind the enormous portal, unchanged as far as he could tell: the moon

shone down, the trees rose as if responding to the caress of that

silvery light, and an owl hooted far away. The doorway disappeared

when viewed from the side. Its width, if it had any width at all, was

as thin as a thread or as a well-stropped razor blade.

He walked all the way around to the back of it.

Viewed from a point a hundred and eighty degrees from his first

position, the doorway was the same thirty-foot circle of featureless

mystery. From that reverse perspective, it seemed to have swallowed

not part of the forest but the meadow and the house at the top of the

rise. It was like a great paper-thin black coin balanced on edge.

He moved to take another look at the side of it. From that angle, he

couldn't make out even the finest filament of supernatural blackness

against the lesser darkness of the night. He felt for the edge with

one hand, but he encountered only empty air.

From the side, the doorway simply didn't exist-- which was a concept

that made him dizzy.