Winter Moon. By: Dean R. Koontz

gulls appeared in the sky, having strayed inland from the Santa Monica

shoreline. They hovered on rising thermals for half a minute or so,

like three white kites. Suddenly the birds wheeled across the blue in

an aerial ballet of freedom and disappeared to the west. Jack watched

them until they were gone, his vision blurring, and he turned away from

the window without once lowering his gaze to the city beyond and below

him.

Heather and Toby visited that evening and brought Baskin-Robbins

peanut-butter-and-chocolate ice cream. In spite of the flab around his

waist, Jack ate his share.

That night he dreamed of sea gulls. Three. With gloriously wide

wingspans. As white and luminous as angels. They flew steadily

westward, soaring and diving, spiraling and looping spiritedly, but

always westward, and he ran through fields below, trying to keep pace

with them. He was a boy again, spreading his arms as if they were

wings, zooming up hills, down grassy slopes, wildflowers lashing his

legs, easily imagining himself taking to the air at any moment, free of

the bonds of gravity, high in the company of the gulls. Then the

fields ended while he was gazing up at the gulls, and he found himself

pumping his legs in thin air, over the edge of a bluff, with pointed

and bladed rocks a few hundred feet below, powerful waves exploding

among them, white spray cast high into the air, and he was falling,

falling. He knew, then, that it was only a dream, but he couldn’t wake

up when he tried. Falling and falling, always closer to death but

never quite there, falling and falling toward the jagged black maw of

the rocks, toward the cold deep gullet of the hungry sea, falling,

falling .

After four days of increasingly arduous therapy at Westside General,

Jack was transferred to Phoenix Rehabilitation Hospital on the eleventh

of June.

Although the spinal fracture had healed, he had sustained some nerve

damage.

Nevertheless, his prognosis was excellent.

His room might have been in a motel. Carpet instead of a vinyl-tile

floor, green-and-white-striped wallpaper, nicely framed prints of

bucolic landscapes, garishly patterned but cheerful drapes at the

window. The two hospital beds, however, belied the Holiday Inn

image.

The physical therapy room, where he was taken in a wheelchair for the

first time at six-thirty in the morning, June twelfth, was well

equipped with exercise machines. It smelled more like a hospital than

like a gym, which wasn’t bad. And perhaps because he had at least an

idea of what lay ahead of him, he thought the place looked less like a

gym than like a torture chamber.

His physical therapist, Moshe Bloom, was in his late twenties, six feet

four, with a body so pumped and well carved that he looked as if he was

in training to go one-on-one with an army tank. He had curly black

hair, brown eyes flecked with gold, and a dark complexion enhanced by

the California sun to a lustrous bronze shade. In white sneakers,

white cotton slacks, white T-shirt, and skullcap, he was like a radiant

apparition, floating a fraction of an inch above the floor, come to

deliver a message from God, which turned out to be, “No pain, no

gain.”

“Doesn’t sound like advice, the way you say it,” Jack told him.

“Oh?”

“Sounds like a threat.”

“You’ll cry like a baby after the first several sessions.”

“If that’s what you want, I can cry like a baby right now, and we can

both go home.”

“You’ll fear the pain to start with.”

“I’ve had some therapy at Westside General.”

“That was just a game of patty-cake. Nothing like the hell I’m going

to put you through.”

“You’re so comforting.”

Bloom shrugged his immense shoulders. “You’ve got to have no illusions

about any easy rehabilitation.”

“I’m the original illusionless man.”

“Good. You’ll fear the pain at first, dread it, cower from it, beg to

be sent home half crippled rather than finish the program–”

“Gee, I

can hardly wait to start.”

“–but I’ll teach you to hate the pain instead of fear it–”

“Maybe I

should just go to some UCLA extension classes, learn Spanish