Winter Moon

face Jack.
        "Dad! What're you doing here?"
        He sounded like Toby again.
        "Jeer, you scared me!
        What're you sneaking in a cemetery for? Boy, that's not funny!" They weren't as close as they had been, but Jack thought the child's eyes no longer seemed strange, Toby peared to see him again.
        "Holy Jeer, on your hands and knees, sneaking in a cemetery." The boy was Toby again, all right. The thing that had controlled him was not a good enough actor to be this convincing. Or maybe he had always been Toby. The unnerving possibility of madness and delusion confronted Jack again.
        "Are you all right?" he asked, rising onto his knees once more, wiping his palms on his jeans.
        "Almost pooped my pants," Toby said, and giggled.
        What a marvelous sound. That giggle. Sweet music. Jack clasped his hands to his thighs, squeezing hard, trying to stop shaking.
        "What're you…" His voice was quavery. He cleared his throat.
        "What are you doing up here?" The boy pointed to the Frisbee on the dead grass. "Wind caught the flying saucer." Remaining on his knees,.Jack said, "Come here." Toby was clearly dubious. "Why?"
        "Come here, Skipper, just come here."
        "You going to bite my neck?"
        "What?"
        "You going to pretend to bite my neck or do something and scare me again, like sneaking up on me, something weird like that?" Obviously, the boy didn't remember their conversation while he'd been… possessed. His awareness of Jack's arrival in the graveyard began when, startled, he'd spun away from the granite marker. Holding his hands out, arms open, Jack said, "No, I'm not going to do anything like that. Just come here."
        Skeptical and cautious, puzzled face framed by the red hood of the ski suit, Toby came to him. Jack gripped the boy by the shoulders, looked into his eyes.
        Blue-gray. Clear. No smoky spiral under the color. "What's wrong?"
        Toby asked, frowning. "Nothing. It's okay." while first, you and me?
        A Frisbee's more fun with. Frisbee tossing, hot chocolate.
        Normality hadn't erely returned to the day, it had crashed down like a weight. Jack doubted he could have convinced anyone that he and Toby had so recently been deep in the muddy river of the supernatural.
        His own fear and his perception of uncanny forces were fading so rapidly that already he could not quite recall the power of what he'd felt.
        Hard gray sky, every scrap of blue chased way beyond the eastern horizon, trees shivering in the frigid breeze, brown grass, velvet shadows, Frisbee games, hot chocolate: the whole world waited for the first spiraling flake of winter, and no aspect of the November day admitted the possibilities of ghosts, disembodied entities, possession, or any other-worldly Compulsively, he pulled the boy close, hugged him.
        "Dad?" henomena whatsoever.
        "You don't remember, do you?"
        "Huh?"
        "Good."
        "Your heart's really wild," Toby said. "That's all right, I'm okay, everything's okay."
        "I'm the one scared poopless. Boy, I sure owe you one!" Jack let go of his son and struggled to his feet. The sweat on his face felt like.a mask of ice. He combed his hair back with his fingers, wiped his face with both hands, and blotted his palms on his jeans. "Let's go back to the house and get some hot chocolate."
        Picking up the Frisbee, Toby said, "Can't we play "Can we, Dad?" Toby asked, brandishing the Frisbee. "all right, for a little while. But not here. Not in this…" It would sound so stupid to say not in this graveyard. Might as well segue into one of those grotesque Stepin Fetchit routines from old movies, do a double take and roll his eyes and shag his arms at his sides and howl, Feets don't fail me now.
        Instead, he said, "… not so near the woods. Maybe… down there closer to the stables." Carrying the flying-saucer Frisbee, Toby sprinted between the gateless posts, out of the cemetery. "Last one there's a monkey!"
        Jack didn't chase after the boy. Hunching his shoulders against the chill wind, thrusting his hands in his pockets, he stared at the four graves, again troubled that only Quartermass's plot was flat and grass-covered. Freakish thoughts flickered in his mind. Scenes from old Boris Karloff movies. Graverobbers and ghouls. Desecration.
        Satanic rituals in cemeteries by moonlight. Even considering the