Winter Moon. By: Dean R. Koontz

She wasn’t afraid of the darkness.

What she feared was the damage people were capable of doing to one

another either in darkness or at high noon.

CHAPTER TEN.

The tenth of June was not a day in which to be cooped up inside. The

sky was delft blue, the temperature hovered around eighty degrees, and

the meadows were still a dazzling green because the heat of summer had

not yet seared the grass.

Eduardo spent most of the balmy afternoon in a bentwood hickory rocking

chair on the front porch. A new video camera, loaded with tape and

fully charged batteries, lay on the porch floor beside the rocker.

Next to the camera was a shotgun. He got up a couple of times to fetch

a fresh bottle of beer or to use the bathroom. And once he went for a

half-hour walk around the nearer fields, carrying the camera. For the

most part, however, he remained in the chair-waiting.

It was in the woods.

Eduardo knew in his bones that something had come through the black

doorway in the first hour of May third, over five weeks ago. Knew it,

felt it. He had no idea what it was or where it had begun its journey,

but he knew it had traveled from some strange world into that Montana

night.

Thereafter, it must have found a hiding place, into which it had

crawled. No other analysis of the situation made sense. Hiding. If

it had wanted its presence to be known, it would have revealed itself

to him that night or later. The woods, vast and dense, offered an

infinite number of places to go to ground.

Although the doorway had been enormous, that didn’t mean the

traveler–or the vessel carrying it, if a vessel existed–was also

large. Eduardo had once been to New York City and driven through the

Holland Tunnel, which had been a lot bigger than any car that used

it.

Whatever had come out of that death-black portal might be no larger

than a man, perhaps even smaller, and able to hide almost anywhere

among those timbered vales and ridges.

The doorway indicated nothing about the traveler, in fact, except that

it was undoubtedly intelligent. Sophisticated science and engineering

lay behind the creation of that gate.

He had read enough Heinlein and Clarke–and selected others in their

vein–to have exercised his imagination, and he had realized that the

intruder might have a variety of origins. More likely than not, it was

extraterrestrial.

However, it might also be something from another dimension or from a

parallel world. It might even be a human being, opening a passage into

this age from the far future.

The numerous possibilities were dizzying, and he no longer felt like a

fool when he speculated about them. He also had ceased being

embarrassed about borrowing fantastical literature from the

library–though the cover art was often trashy even when well

drawn–and his appetite for it had become voracious.

Indeed, he found that he no longer had the patience to read the realist

writers who had been his lifelong favorites. Their work simply wasn’t

as realistic as it had seemed before. Hell, it wasn’t realistic at all

to him any longer. Now, when he was just a few pages into a book or

story by one of them, Eduardo got the distinct feeling that their point

of view consisted of an extremely narrow slice of reality, as if they

looked at life through the slit of a welder’s hood. They wrote well,

certainly, but they were writing about only the tiniest sliver of the

human experience in a big world and an infinite universe.

He now preferred writers who could look beyond this horizon, who knew

that humanity would one day reach childhood’s end, who believed

intellect could triumph over superstition and ignorance, and who dared

to dream.

He was also thinking about buying a second Discman and giving Wormheart

another try.

He finished a beer, put the bottle on the porch beside the rocker, and

wished he could believe the thing that had come through the doorway was

just a person from the distant future, or at least something benign.

But it had gone into hiding for more than five weeks, and its