Winter Moon

at the threshold. Slam the door, slam the door, slam the door,

slamthedoor-- ..

Heather exploded from sleep, cast back the covers, rolled out of bed

onto her feet in one fluid and frantic movement. Her booming heart

kept knocking the breath out of her as she tried to inhale. A dream.

Only a dream. But no dream in her experience had ever been so

intense.

Maybe the thing beyond the door had followed her out of sleep into the

real world. Crazy thought. Couldn't shake it.

Wheezing thinly, she fumbled with the nightstand lamp, found the

switch. The light revealed no nightmare creatures. Just Jack. Asleep

on his stomach, head turned away from her, snoring softly. She managed

to draw a breath, though her heart continued to pound. She was damp

with sweat and couldn't stop shivering.

Jesus. Not wanting to wake Jack, Heather switched off the lamp--and

twitched as darkness fell around her. She sat on the edge of the bed,

intending to perch there until her heart stopped racing and the shakes

passed, then pull a robe over her pajamas and go downstairs to read

until morning. According to the luminous green numbers on the digital

alarm clock, it was 3:09 A.M but she was not going to be able to get

back to sleep. No way. She might be unable to sleep even tomorrow

night. She remembered the glistening, writhing, half-seen presence on

the threshold and the bitter cold that flowed from it. The touch of it

was still within her, a lingering chill. Disgusting. She felt

contaminated, dirty inside, where she could never wash the corruption

away.

Deciding that she needed a hot shower, she got up from the bed.

Disgust swiftly ripened into nausea. In the dark bathroom she was

racked by dry heaves at left a bitter taste. After turning on the

light only enough to find the bottle of mouthwash, she rinsed away the

bitterness. In the dark again, she repeatedly bathed her face in

handfuls of cold water. She sat on the edge of the tub. She dried her

face on a towel. As she waited for calm to return, she tried to figure

out why a mere dream could have had such a powerful effect on her, but

there was no understanding.

In a few minutes, when she'd regained her composure, she quietly

returned to the bedroom. Jack was still snoring softly. Her robe was

draped over the back of a Queen Anne chair. She picked it up, slipped

out of the room, and eased the door shut behind her.

In the hall, she pulled on the robe and belted it. Although she'd

intended to go downstairs, brew a pot of coffee, and read, she turned

instead toward Toby's room at the end of the hall. Try as she might,

Heather was unable to extinguish completely the fear from the

nightmare, and her simmering anxiety began to focus on her son.

Toby's door was ajar, and his room was not entirely - dark Since moving

to the ranch, he had chosen to sleep with a night-light again, although

he had given up that security a year ago. Heather and Jack were

surprised but not particularly concerned by the boy's loss of

confidence. They assumed, once he adjusted to his surroundings he

would again prefer darkness to the red glow of the low-wattage bulb

that was plugged into a wall socket near the floor.

Toby was tucked under his covers, only his head exposed on the

pillow.

His breathing was so shallow that to hear it, Heather had to bend close

to him.

Nothing in the room was other than it ought to have been, but she

hesitated to leave. Mild apprehension continued to tug at her.

Finally, as Heather reluctantly retreated to the open hall door, she

heard a soft scrape that halted her. She turned to the bed, where Toby

had not awakened, had not moved.

Even as she glanced at her son, however, she realized that the noise

had come from the back stairs. It had been the sly, stealthy scrape of

something hard, perhaps a boot heel, dragged across a wooden

step-recognizable because of the air space under each stair tread,

which lent the sound a distinctive hollow quality.

She was instantly afflicted by the same distress that she'd not felt

while cleaning the stairs but that had plagued her on Monday when she'd

followed Paul Youngblood and Toby down that curving well. The sweaty

paranoid conviction that somebody-- something?--was waiting around the

next turn. Or descending behind them. An enemy possessed by a

singular rage and capable of extreme violence.

She stared at the closed door at the head of those stairs. It was

painted white, but it reflected the red glow of the night-light and

seemed almost to shimmer like a portal of fire. She waited for another

sound. Toby sighed in his sleep.

Just a sigh. Nothing more. Silence again. Heather supposed she could

have been wrong, could have heard an innocent sound from

outside--perhaps a night bird settling onto the roof with a rustle of

feathers and a scratching of claws against shingles--and could have

mistakenly transposed the noise to the stairwell. She was jumpy

because of the nightmare.

Her perceptions might not be entirely trustworthy. She certainly

wanted to believe she had been wrong. Creak-creak. No mistaking it