Winter Moon

the actual experience. The conversation with the thing that had spoken

through Toby had been about death--cryptic, even inscrutable, but

definitely about death. Nothing was as certain to dampen desire as

brooding about death, graves, and the moldering bodies of old

friends.

At least, that's what he thought when she touched him, kissed him, and

murmured endearments. Instead, to his surprise, he found that he was

not only ready but rampant, not merely capable but full of more vigor

than he'd known since long before the shooting back in LA.

She was so giving yet demanding, alternately submissive and aggressive,

shy yet all-knowing, as enthusiastic as a bride embarking on a new

marriage, velvet and silken and alive, so wonderfully alive.

Later, as he lay on his side and she drifted asleep with her breasts

pressed to his back, the two of them a pair of spoons, he understood

that making love with her had been a rejection of the frightening yet

alluring presence in the cemetery.

A day of brooding about death had proved to be a perverse

aphrodisiac.

He was facing the windows. The draperies were open. Ghosts of snow

whirled past the glass, dancing white phantoms spinning to the music of

the fluting wind, waltzing spirits, pale and cold, waltzing and pale,

cold and spinning, spinning..in cloying blackness, blindly feeling his

way toward the Giver, toward an offer of peace and love, pleasure and

joy, an end to all fear, ultimate freedom, his for the taking, if only

he could find the way, the path, the truth.

The door. Jack knew he had only to find the door, to open it, and a

world of wonder and beauty would lie beyond. Then he understood that

the door was within himself, not to be found by stumbling through

eternal darkness. Such an exciting revelation. Within himself.

Paradise, paradise. Joy eternal. Just open the door within himself

and let it in, let it in, as simple as that, just let it in. He wanted

to accept, surrender, because life was hard when it didn't have to

be.

But some stubborn part of him resisted, and he sensed the frustration

of the Giver beyond the door, frustration and inhuman rage. He said, I

can't, no, can't, won't, no. Abruptly the darkness acquired weight,

compacting around him with the inevitability of stone forming around a

fossil over millennia, a crushing and unrelenting pressure, and with

that pressure came the Giver's furious assertion: Everything becomes,

everything becomes me, everything, everything becomes me, me, me. Must

submit . . . useless to resist . .. Let it in . . . paradise,

paradise, joy forever . . . Let it in. Hammering on his soul.

Everything becomes me. Jarring blows at the very structure of him,

ramming, pounding, colossal blows shaking the deepest foundations of

his existence: let it in, let it in, let it in, LET IT IN, LET IT IN,

LET IT IN, LET IT ININININININ-- A brief internal sizzle and crack,

like the hard quick sound of an electrical arc jumping a gap, jittered

through his mind, and Jack woke. His eyes snapped open. At first he

lay rigid and still, so terrified he could not move. Bodies are.

Everything becomes me. Puppets. Surrogates. Jack had never before

awakened so abruptly or so completely in an instant. One second in a

dream, the next wide awake and alert and furiously thinking. Listening

to his frantic heart, he knew that the dream had not actually been a

dream, not in the usual sense of the word, but . . . an intrusion.

Communication. Contact. n attempt to subvert and overpower his will

while he slept. .. Everything becomes me. Those three words were not

so cryptic now as they had seemed before, but an arrogant assertion of

superiority and a claim of dominance. They had been spoken by the

unseen Giver in the dream and by the hate entity that communicated

through Toby in the graveyard yesterday. In both instances, waking and

sleeping Jack had felt the presence of something inhuman, impedous,

hostile, and violent, something that would slaughter the innocent

without remorse but preferred to subvert and dominate. A greasy nausea

made Jack gag. He felt cold and dirty inside. Corrupted by the

Giver's attempt to seize control and nest within him, even though it

had not been successful. He knew as surely as he had ever known

anything in his life that this enemy was real: not a ghost, not a

demon, not just the paranoid-schizophrenic delusion of a troubled mind,

but a creature of flesh and blood. No doubt infinitely strange

flesh.

And blood that might not be recognized as such by any physician yet

born. But flesh and blood nonetheless.

He didn't know what the thing was, where it had come from, or out of

what it had been born, he knew only that it existed. And that it was

somewhere on Quartermass Ranch.

Jack was lying on his side, but Heather was no longer pressed against

him. She had turned over during the night. Crystals of snow

tick-tick-ticked against the window, like a finely calibrated

astronomical clock counting off every hundredth of a second. The wind

that harried the snow made a low whirring sound. Jack felt as if he