Winter Moon

He expected to find a macabre pile of remains, well plucked and

dismembered by carrion eaters, but the squirrels were gone. He would

not have been surprised if one or even two of the carcasses had been

dragged off to be devoured elsewhere. But most carrion eaters would

strip the squirrels where they were found, leaving at least several

bones, the inedible feet, scraps of fur-covered hide, a well-gnawed and

pecked-at skull.

The lack of any remains whatsoever could only mean the squirrels had

been removed by the traveler. Or by its sorcerously controlled

surrogates.

Perhaps, having tested them to destruction, the traveler wanted to

examine them to determine why they failed--which it had not been able

to do with the raccoons because Eduardo had intervened and taken them

to the veterinarian. Or it might feel that they were, like the

raccoons, evidence of its presence. It might prefer to leave as few

loose ends as possible until its position on this world was more firmly

established.

He stood in the meadow, staring at the place where the dead squirrels

had been. Thinking.

He raised his left hand, from which dangled the broken crow, and stared

at the now sightless eyes. As shiny as polished ebony and bulging from

the sockets.

"Come on," he whispered.

Finally he took the crow into the house. He had a use for it. A

plan.

The wire-mesh colander was held together by sturdy stainless-steel

rings at top and bottom, and stood on three short steel legs. It was

the size of a two- or three-quart bowl. He used it to drain pasta when

he cooked large quantities to make salads or to ensure that there would

be plenty of leftovers. Two steel-loop handles were fixed to the top

ring, by which to shake it when it was filled with steaming pasta that

needed encouragement to fully drain.

Turning the colander over and over in his hands, Eduardo thought

through his plan one more time--then began to put it into action.

Standing at a kitchen counter, he folded the wings of the dead crow.

He tucked the whole bird into the colander. With needle and thread, he

fixed the crow to the wire mesh in three places. That would prevent

the limp body from slipping out when he tilted the colander. As he put

the needle and thread aside, the bird rolled its head loosely and

shuddered. Eduardo recoiled from it and took a step back from the

counter in surprise. The crow issued a feeble, quavery cry. He knew

it had been dead. Stone dead. For one thing, its neck had been

broken. Its swollen eyes had been virtually hanging out of the

sockets. Apparently it had died in mid-flight of a massive brain

seizure like those that had killed the raccoons and the squirrels.

Dropping from a great height, it had hit the ground with sickening

force, sustaining yet more physical damage. Stone dead.

Now, stitched to the wire mesh of the colander, the reanimated bird was

unable to lift its head off its breast, not because it was hampered by

the threads with which he'd secured it but because its neck was still

broken. Smashed legs flopped uselessly. Crippled wings tried to

flutter and were hampered more by the damage to them than by the

entangling threads. Overcoming his fear and revulsion, Eduardo pressed

one hand against the crow's breast. He couldn't feel a heartbeat.

The heart of any small bird pounded extremely fast, much faster than

the heart of any mammal, a racing little engine,

putta-putta-putta-putta-putta. It was always easy to detect because

the whole body reverberated with the rapid beats.

The crow's heart was definitely not beating. As far as he was able to

tell, the bird wasn't breathing, either. And its neck was broken. He

had hoped that he was witnessing the traveler's ability to bring a dead

creature back to life, a miracle of sorts. But the truth was darker

than that. The crow was dead. Yet it moved.

Trembling with disgust, Eduardo lifted his hand from the small

squirming corpse.

The traveler could reestablish control of a carcass without

resuscitating the animal. To some extent, it had power over the

inanimate as well as the animate.

Eduardo desperately wanted to avoid thinking about that. But he

couldn't turn his mind off. Couldn't avoid that dreaded line of

inquiry any longer. If he had not taken the raccoons away at once to

the vet, would they eventually have shuddered and pulled themselves to

their feet again, cold but moving, dead but animated?

In the colander, the crow's head wobbled loosely on its broken neck,

and its beak opened and closed with a faint clicking. Perhaps nothing

had carried the four dead squirrels out of the meadow, after all.

Maybe those carcasses, stiff with rigor mortis, had responded to the

insistent call of the puppetmaster on their own, cold muscles flexing

and contracting awkwardly, rigid joints cracking and snapping as

demands were put upon them. Even as their bodies had entered the early

stages of decomposition, perhaps they twitched and lifted their heads,

crawled and hitched and dragged themselves out of the meadow, into the

woods, to the lair of the thing that commanded them.