Winter Moon

aggressive, shy yet all-knowing, as enthusiastic as a bride embarking on a new marriage, velvet and silken and alive, so wonderfully alive.
        Later, as he lay on his side and she drifted asleep with her breasts pressed to his back, the two of them a pair of spoons, he understood that making love with her had been a rejection of the frightening yet alluring presence in the cemetery..A day of brooding about death had proved to be a perverse aphrodisiac.
        He was facing the windows. The draperies were open. Ghosts of snow whirled past the glass, dancing white phantoms spinning to the music of the fluting wind, waltzing spirits, pale and cold, waltzing and pale, cold and spinning, spinning..in cloying blackness, blindly feeling his way toward the Giver, toward an offer of peace and love, pleasure and joy, an end to all fear, ultimate freedom, his for the taking, if only he could find the way, the path, the truth.
        The door. Jack knew he had only to find the door, to open it, and a world of wonder and beauty would lie beyond. Then he understood that the door was within himself, not to be found by stumbling through eternal darkness. Such an exciting revelation. Within himself.
        Paradise, paradise. Joy eternal. Just open the door within himself and let it in, let it in, as simple as that, just let it in. He wanted to accept, surrender, because life was hard when it didn't have to be.
        But some stubborn part of him resisted, and he sensed the frustration of the Giver beyond the door, frustration and inhuman rage. He said, I can't, no, can't, won't, no. Abruptly the darkness acquired weight, compacting around him with the inevitability of stone forming around a fossil over millennia, a crushing and unrelenting pressure, and with that pressure came the Giver's furious assertion: Everything becomes, everything becomes me, everything, everything becomes me, me, me. Must submit… useless to resist… Let it in… paradise, paradise, joy forever… Let it in. Hammering on his soul.
        Everything becomes me. Jarring blows at the very structure of him, ramming, pounding, colossal blows shaking the deepest foundations of his existence: let it in, let it in, let it in, LET IT IN, LET IT IN, LET IT IN, LET IT ININININININ- A brief internal sizzle and crack, like the hard quick sound of an electrical arc jumping a gap, jittered through his mind, and Jack woke. His eyes snapped open. At first he lay rigid and still, so terrified he could not move. Bodies are.
        Everything becomes me. Puppets. Surrogates. Jack had never before awakened so abruptly or so completely in an instant. One second in a dream, the next wide awake and alert and furiously thinking. Listening to his frantic heart, he knew that the dream had not actually been a dream, not in the usual sense of the word, but… an intrusion.
        Communication. Contact. n attempt to subvert and overpower his will while he slept… Everything becomes me. Those three words were not so cryptic now as they had seemed before, but an arrogant assertion of superiority and a claim of dominance. They had been spoken by the unseen Giver in the dream and by the hate entity that communicated through Toby in the graveyard yesterday. In both instances, waking and sleeping Jack had felt the presence of something inhuman, impedous, hostile, and violent, something that would slaughter the innocent without remorse but preferred to subvert and dominate. A greasy nausea made Jack gag. He felt cold and dirty inside. Corrupted by the Giver's attempt to seize control and nest within him, even though it.had not been successful. He knew as surely as he had ever known anything in his life that this enemy was real: not a ghost, not a demon, not just the paranoid-schizophrenic delusion of a troubled mind, but a creature of flesh and blood. No doubt infinitely strange flesh.
        And blood that might not be recognized as such by any physician yet born. But flesh and blood nonetheless.
        He didn't know what the thing was, where it had come from, or out of what it had been born, he knew only that it existed. And that it was somewhere on Quartermass Ranch.
        Jack was lying on his side, but Heather was no longer pressed against him. She had turned over during the night. Crystals of snow tick-tick-ticked against the window, like a finely calibrated astronomical clock counting off every hundredth of a second. The wind that harried the snow made a low