Winter Moon. By: Dean R. Koontz

over two hundred feet tall. The shadows grew more numerous and blacker

than ash buds in the front of March, while the sun found fewer places

to intrude.

His heart would not be still. It thudded hard and fast.

He could find nothing in the woods but what had always been there, yet

his heart would not be still.

His mouth was dry. The full curve of his spine was clad in a chill

that had nothing to do with the wintry air.

Annoyed with himself, Eduardo turned back toward the meadow, following

the tracks he had left in the patches of snow and the thick carpet of

dead pine needles. The crunch of his footsteps disturbed a slumbering

owl from its secret perch in some high bower.

He felt a wrongness in the woods. He couldn’t put a finer point on it

than that. Which sharpened his annoyance. A wrongness. What the hell

did that mean? A wrongness.

The hooting owl.

Spiny black pine cones on white snow.

Pale beams of sunlight lancing through the gaps in the gray-green

branches.

All of it ordinary. Peaceful. Yet wrong.

As he returned to the perimeter of the forest, with snow-covered fields

visible between the trunks of the trees ahead, he was suddenly certain

that he was not going to reach open ground, that something was rushing

at him from behind, some creature as indefinable as the wrongness that

he sensed around him. He began to move faster. Fear swelled step by

step. The hooting of the owl seemed to sour into a cry as alien as the

shriek of a nemesis in a nightmare. He stumbled on an exposed root,

his heart trip-hammered, and he spun around with a cry of terror to

confront whatever demon was in pursuit of him.

He was, of course, alone.

Shadows and sunlight.

The hoot of an owl. A soft and lonely sound. As ever.

Cursing himself, he headed for the meadow again. Reached it. The

trees were behind him. He was safe.

Then, dear sweet Jesus, the fear again, worse than ever, the absolute

dead certainty that it was coming– what?–that it was for sure gaining

on him, that it would drag him down, that it was bent upon committing

an act infinitely worse than murder, that it had an inhuman purpose and

unknown uses for him so strange they were beyond both his understanding

and conception.

This time he was in the grip of a terror so black and profound, so

mindless, that he could not summon the courage to turn and confront the

empty day behind him–if, indeed, it proved to be empty this time. He

raced toward the house, which appeared far more distant than a hundred

yards, a citadel beyond his reach. He kicked through shallow snow,

blundered into deeper drifts, ran and churned and staggered and flailed

uphill, making wordless sounds of blind panic–“Uh, uh, uhhhhh, uh,

uh”–all intellect repressed by instinct, until he found himself at the

porch steps, up which he scrambled, at the top of which he turned, at

last, to scream–“No!”–at the clear, crisp, blue Montana day.

The pristine mantle of snow across the broad field was marred only by

his own trail to and from the woods.

He went inside.

He bolted the door.

In the big kitchen he stood for a long time in front of the brick

fireplace, still dressed for the outdoors, basking in the heat that

poured across the hearth–yet unable to get warm.

Old. He was an old man. Seventy. An old man who had lived alone too

long, who sorely missed his wife. If senility had crept up on him, who

was around to notice? An old, lonely man with cabin fever, imagining

things.

“Bullshit,” he said after a while.

He was lonely, all right, but he wasn’t senile.

After stripping out of his hat, coat, gloves, and boots, he got the

hunting rifles and shotguns out of the locked cabinet in the study. He

loaded all of them.

Mae Hong, who lived across the street, came over to take care of

Toby.

Her husband was a cop too, though not in the same division as Jack.

Because the Hongs had no children of their own yet, Mae was free to

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