Winter Moon. By: Dean R. Koontz

him.

He was alone.

The sky was entirely blue, the last of the clouds having slipped across

the northern horizon, and the air was warmer than it had been at any

time since last autumn. Nonetheless, the chill persisted. He rolled

down his sleeves, buttoned the cuffs.

When he looked at the headstones again, Eduardo’s imagination was

suddenly crowded with unwanted images of Tommy and Margaret, not as

they had been in life but as they might be in their coffins: decaying,

worm-riddled, eye sockets empty, lips shriveled back from

yellow-toothed grins. Trembling uncontrollably, he was gripped by an

absolute conviction that the earth in front of the granite markers was

going to shift and cave inward, that the corrupted hands of their

corpses were going to appear in the crumbling soil, digging fiercely

and then their faces, their eyeless faces, as they pulled themselves

out of the ground.

He backed away from the graves a few steps but refused to flee. He was

too old to believe in the living dead or in ghosts.

The dead brown grass and spring-thawed earth did not move. After a

while he stopped expecting it to move.

When he was in full control of himself again, he walked between the low

stone columns and out of the graveyard. All the way to the house, he

wanted to spin around and look back. He didn’t do it.

He entered the house through the back door and locked it behind him.

Ordinarily he never locked doors.

Though it was time for lunch, he had no appetite. Instead, he opened a

bottle of Corona.

He was a three-beers-a-day man. That was his usual limit, not a

minimum requirement. There were days when he didn’t drink at all.

Though not lately.

Recently, in spite of his limit, he had been downing more than three a

day.

Some days, a lot more.

Later that afternoon, sitting in a living-room armchair, trying to read

Thomas Wolfe and sipping a third bottle of Corona, he became convinced,

against his will, that the experience in the graveyard had been a vivid

premonition. A warning. But a warning of what?

As April passed with no recurrence of the phenomenon in the lower

woods, Eduardo had become more– not less–tense. Each of the previous

events had transpired when the moon was in the same phase, a quarter

full. That celestial condition seemed increasingly pertinent as the

April moon waxed and waned without another disturbance. The lunar

cycle might have nothing whatsoever to do with these peculiar

events-yet still be a calendar by which to anticipate them.

Beginning the night of May first, which boasted a sliver of the new

moon, he slept fully clothed. The .22 was in a soft leather holster on

the nightstand.

Beside it was the Discman with headphones, Wormheart album inserted. A

loaded Remington twelve-gauge shotgun lay under the bed, within easy

reach. The video camera was equipped with fresh batteries and a blank

cassette. He was prepared to move fast.

He slept only fitfully, but the night passed without incident.

He didn’t actually expect trouble until the early-morning hours of May

fourth.

Of course, the strange spectacle might never be repeated. In fact, he

hoped he wouldn’t have to witness it again. In his heart, however, he

knew what his mind could not entirely admit: that events of

significance had been set in motion, that they were gathering momentum,

and that he could no more avoid playing a role in them than a condemned

man, in shackles, could avoid the noose or guillotine.

As it turned out, he didn’t have to wait quite as long as he had

expected.

Because he’d had little sleep the night before, he went to bed early on

May second–and was awakened past midnight, in the first hour of May

third, by those ominous and rhythmic pulsations.

The sound was no louder than it had been before, but the wave of

pressure that accompanied each beat was half again as powerful as

anything he had previously experienced. The house shook all the way

into its foundations, the rocking chair in the corner arced back and

forth as if a hyperactive ghost was working off a superhuman rage, and

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