Winter Moon

himself that his sanity depended on facing this ultimate terror

forthrightly and putting it behind him, he was paralyzed and suddenly

not so sure that running would have been wrong.

The thing was silent. It was there but silent. Inches from the far

side of the door. Doing what? Waiting for Eduardo to move first? Or

studying the crow in the colander?

The porch was dark, and only a little kitchen light was emitted by the

covered windows, so could it really see the crow? Yes. Oh, yes, it

could see in the dark, bet on that, it could see in the dark better

than any damned cat could see, because it was of the dark.

He could hear the kitchen clock ticking. Though it had been there all

along, he hadn't heard it in years, it had become part of the

background noise, but he heard it now, louder than it had ever been,

like a softened stick striking a slow measured beat on a snare drum at

a state funeral. come on lets do it.

This time he was urging the traveler to come out of hiding. He was

goading himself. Come on, you bastard, you coward, you id Id ignorant

fool, come on, come on, He moved to the door and stood slightly to one

side of it, so he could open it past himself. To grasp the knob, he

would have to let go of the with one hand, but he couldn't do that was

knocking painfully against him. He could feel the pulse in his

temples, pounding, pounding.

He smelled the thing through the closed door. A nauseating odor, sour

and putrescent, beyond anything in his long lifetime of experience.

The doorknob in front of him, the knob that he could of bring himself

to grasp, round a p and gleaming, began to turn. Scintillant light, a

reflection of the kitchen fluorescents, trickled along the curve of the

knoll as it slowly l The free-moving latch bolt eased notch in the

striker plate with the faintest rasp of brass on brass. pounding

in his temples, booming his chest so swollen and leaping that his

lungs and made breathing difficult, painful And now the knob slipped

back the other way, and the door remained unopened. The latch bolt

eased into its catch once more. The moment of revelation was delayed,

perhaps slipping away forever as the visitor withdrew.... With an

anguished cry that surprised him, Eduardo seized the knob and yanked

the door open in one convulsively violent movement, bringing himself

face-to-face with his worst fear.

The lost maiden, three years in the grave and now released: a wiry and

tangled mass of gray hair matted with filth, eyeless sockets, flesh

hideously corrupted and dark in spite of the preserving influence of

embalming fluid, glimpses of clean bone in the desiccated and reeking

tissues, lips withered back from teeth to reveal a wide but humorless

grin. The lost maiden stood in her ragged and worm-eaten burial dress,

the blue-on-blue fabric grossly stained with the fluids of

decomposition, risen and returned to him, reaching for him with one

hand. The sight of her filled him not merely with terror and revulsion

but with despair, oh God, he was sinking in a sea of cold black despair

that Margaret should have come to this, reduced to the unspeakable

fate of all living things-- It's not Margaret, not this thing, unclean

thing, Margarite's in a better place, heaven, sits with God, must be a

God, Margaret deserves a God, not just this, not an ending like this,

sits with God, sits with God, long gone from this body and sits with

God. -- and after the first instant of confrontation, he thought he

was going to be all right, thought he was going to be able to hold on

to his sanity and bring up the shotgun and blast the hateful thing

backward off the porch, pump round after round into it until it no

longer bore the vaguest resemblance to his Margaret, until it was

nothing but a pile of bone fragments and organic ruins with no power to

plunge him into despondency.

Then he saw that he hadn't been visited only by this heinous surrogate

but by the traveler itself, two confrontations in one. The alien was

entwined with the corpse, hanging upon its back but also intruding

within the cavities of it, riding on and in the dead woman. Its own

body appeared to be soft and poorly designed for gravity as heavy as

that it had encountered here, so perhaps it needed support to permit

locomotion in these conditions. Black, it was, black and slick,

irregularly stippled with red, and seemed to be constituted only of a

mass of entwined and writhing appendages that one moment appeared as

fluid and smooth as snakes but the next moment seemed as spiky and

jointed as the legs of a crab. Not muscular like the coils of snakes

or armored like crabs but oozing and jellid. He saw no head or

orifice, no familiar feature that could help him tell the top of it

from the bottom, but he had only a few seconds to absorb what he was

seeing, merely the briefest glimpse.

The sight of those shiny black tentacles slithering in and out of the

cadaver's rib cage brought him to the realization that less flesh

remained on the three-year-old corpse than he had at first believed and