Winter Moon by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

thin layer of snow under the trees had not melted anywhere, and the only tracks in it were those of deer, raccoon, and smaller animals.
    He broke off a piece of bark from a sugar pine and crumbled it between the thumb and forefinger of his gloved right hand. Nothing unusual about it.
    He moved deeper into the woods, past the place where the trees had stood in radiant splendor in the night. Some of the older pines were 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