Winter Moon

He ventured cautiously into the study, where there was no ceiling

fixture. The influx of light from the hallway dispelled enough shadows

to allow him to find and click on the desk lamp.

Crumbs and smears of dirt, now dry, soiled the blotter on the desk.

More of it on the red leather seat of the chair.

"What the hell?" he wondered softly.

Warily he rolled aside the mirrored doors on the study closet, but no

one was hiding in there.

In the hall he checked the foyer closet too. Nobody.

The front door was still standing open. He couldn't decide what to do

about it. He liked it open because it offered an unobstructed exit if

he wanted to get out fast. On the other hand, if he searched the house

top to bottom and found no one in it, he would have to come back, lock

the door, and search every room again to guard against the possibility

that someone had slipped in behind his back. Reluctantly he closed it

and engaged the dead bolt.

The beige wall-to-wall carpet that was used through the upstairs also

extended down the inlaid-oak staircase, with its heavy handrail. In

the center of a few of the lower treads were crumbled chunks of dry

earth, not much, just enough to catch his eye.

He peered up at the second floor.

No. First, the downstairs.

He found nothing in the powder room, in the closet under the stairs, in

the large dining room, in the laundry room, in the service bath. But

there was dirt again in the kitchen, more than elsewhere.

His unfinished dinner of rigatoni, sausage, and butter bread was on the

table, for he'd been interrupted in mid-meal by the intrusion of the

raccoon--and by its spasmodic death. Smudges of now dry mud marked the

rim of his dinner plate. The table around the plate was littered with

pea-size lumps of dry earth, a spadeshaped brown leaf curled into a

miniature scroll, and a dead beetle the size of a penny.

The beetle was on its back, six stiff legs in the air. When he flicked

it over with one finger, he saw that its shell was iridescent

blue-green.

Two flattened wads of dirt, like dollar pancakes, were stuck to the

seat of the chair. On the oak floor around the chair was more

detritus.

Another concentration of soil lay in front of the refrigerator.

Altogether, it amounted to a couple of tablespoons' worth, but there

were also a few blades of grass, another dead leaf, and an earthworm.

The worm was still alive but curled up on itself, suffering from a lack

of moisture.

A crawling sensation along the nape of his neck and a sudden conviction

that he was being watched made him clutch the shotgun with both hands

and spin toward one window, then the other. No pale, ghastly face was

pressed to either pane of glass, as he had imagined.

Only the night.

The chrome handle on the refrigerator was dulled by filth, and he did

not touch it. He opened the door by gripping the edge. The food and

beverages inside seemed untouched, everything just as he'd left it.

The doors of both double ovens were hanging open. He closed them

without touching the handles, which were also smeared in places with

unidentifiable crud.

Caught on a sharp edge of the oven door was a torn scrap of fabric,

half an inch wide and less than an inch long. It was pale blue, with a

fragmentary curve of darker blue that might have been a portion of a

repeating pattern against the lighter background.

Eduardo stared at the fragment of cloth for a personal eternity. Time

seemed to-stop, and the universe hung as still as the pendulum of a

broken grandfather clock-- until icy spicules of profound fear formed

in his blood and made him shudder so violently that his teeth actually

chattered. The graveyard ... He whipped around again, toward one

window, the other, but nothing was there.

Only the night. The night. The blind, featureless, uncaring face of

the night.

He searched the upstairs. Telltale chunks, crumbs, and smears of

earth--once moist, now dry--could be found in most rooms. Another

leaf. Two more dead beetles as dry as ancient papyrus. A pebble the

size of a cherry pit, smooth and gray.

He realized that some of the switch plates and light switches were

soiled.

Thereafter, he flicked the lights on with his sleeve-covered arm or the

shotgun barrel.

When he had examined every chamber, probed to the back of every closet,

inspected behind and under every piece of furniture where a hollow

space might conceivably offer concealment even to something as large as

a seven- or eight-year-old child, and when he was satisfied that

nothing was hiding on the second floor, he returned to the end of the

upstairs hall and pulled on the dangling release cord that lowered the

attic trapdoor.

He pulled down the folding ladder fixed to the back of the trap.

The attic lights could be turned on from the hall, so he didn't have to

ascend into darkness. He searched every shadowed niche in the deep and

dusty eaves, where snowflake moths hung in webs like laces of ice and

feeding spiders loomed as cold and black as winter shadows.

Downstairs in the kitchen again, he slid aside the brass bolt on the