Winter Moon

wearing her quilted red robe, hair tousled. She didn't ask what was happening. if she already knew. She wasn't looking directly at Jack or Toby but at the window behind them. Jack turned and saw showers of snowflakes repeatedly changing color as the display on the monitor continued its rapid and fluid metamorphosis.
        "Talking to whom?" he asked Toby.
        After a hesitation, the boy said, "No name."
        His voice was not flat and soulless as it had been in the graveyard but neither was it quite normal.
        "Where is he?" Jack asked.
        "Not he."
        "Where is she?"
        "Not she."
        Frowning, Jack said, "Then what?"
        The boy said nothing, gazed unblinking at the screen.
        "It?" Jack wondered.
        "All right," Toby said.
        Approaching them, Heather looked strangely at Jack.
        "It?"
        To Toby, Jack said, "What is it?"
        "Whatever it wants to be."
        "Where is it?"
        "Wherever it wants to be," the boy said cryptically.
        "What is it doing here?"
        "Becoming."
        Heather stepped around the table, stood on the other side of Toby, and stared at the monitor.."I've seen this before."
        Jack was relieved to know the bizarre display wasn't unique, therefore not necessarily related to the experience in the cemetery, but Heather's demeanor was such that his relief was extremely short-lived.
        "Seen it when?"
        "Yesterday morning, before we went into town. On the TV in the living room.
        Toby was watching it… sort of enraptured like this. Strange."
        She shuddered and reached for the master switch.
        "Shut it off."
        "No," Jack said, reaching in front of Toby to stay her hand. "Wait.
        Let's see."
        "Honey," she said to Toby, "what's going on here, what kind of game is this?"
        "No game. I dreamed it, and in the dream I came in then I woke up and I was here, so we started talking-"
        "Does this make any sense to you?" she asked Jack.
        "Yes. Some."
        "What's going on, Jack?"
        "Later."
        "Am I out of the loop on something? What is this all about?" When he didn't respond, she said, "I don't like this."
        "Neither do I," Jack said. "But let's see where it ads, whether we can figure this out."
        "Figure what out?" The boy's fingers pecked busily at the keys.
        Although no words appeared on the screen, it seemed as if new colors and fresh patterns appeared and progressed in a rhythm that matched his typing.
        "Yesterday, on the TV… I asked Toby what it was," Heather said.
        "He didn't know. But he said… he liked it." Toby stopped typing. The colors faded, then suddenly intensified and flowed in wholly new patterns and shades.."No," the boy said. "No what?" Jack asked. "Not talking to you.
        Talking to… it." And to the - screen, he said, "No. Go away." Waves of sour green. Blossoms of blood red appeared at random points across the screen, turned black, flowered into red again, then wilted, streamed, a viscous pus yellow. The endlessly mutagenic display dazed Jack when he watched it too long, and he could understand how it could completely capture the immature mind of an eight-year-old boy, hypnotize him.
        As Toby began to hammer the keyboard once more, the colors on the screen faded-then abruptly brightened again, although in new shades and in yet more varied and fluid forms.
        "It's a language," Heather exclaimed softly. For a moment Jack stared at her, uncomprehending. She said, "The colors, the patterns. A language." He checked the monitor. "How can it be a language?"
        "It is," she insisted. "There aren't any repetitive shapes, nothing that could be letters, words."
        "Talking," Toby confirmed. He pounded the keyboard. As before, the patterns and colors acquired a rhythm consistent with the pace at which he input his side of the conversation. "A tremendously complicated and expressive language," Heather said, "beside which English or French or Chinese is primitive."
        Toby stopped typing, and the response from the other conversant was dark and churning, black and bile green, clotted with red. "No," the boy said to the screen. The colors became more dour, the rhythms more vehement. "No," Toby repeated. Churning, seething, spiraling reds.
        For a third time- "No." Jack said, "What're you saying 'no' to?"
        "To