Winter Moon

wants to know."
        "It doesn't understand death," Jack said. "No."
        "How can that be?"
        "Life is," the boy said, clearly interpreting a viewpoint that belonged to the creature with which he was in contact. "No meaning. No.beginning. No end. Nothing matters. It is."
        "Surely this isn't the first world it's ever found where things die,"
        Heather said. Toby began to tremble, and his voice rose, but barely.
        "They resist too, the ones under the ground. It can use them, but it can't know them." can use them, but it can't know them. A few pieces of the puzzle suddenly fit together. Reling only a tiny portion of the truth. A monstrous, terible portion of the truth. Jack remained crouched beside the boy in stunned silence. At last he said weakly,
        "Use them?"
        "But it can't know them." How does it use them?" ."Puppets." Heather gasped. "The smell. Oh, dear God. The smell ,the back staircase." Though Jack wasn't entirely sure what she was talking about, he knew that she'd realized what was out e on the Quartermass Ranch. Not just this thing in beyond, this thing that could send the same dream to both of them, this unknowable alien thing whose purpose was to become and to hate. Other things were out e. Toby whispered, "But it can't know them. Not even as much as it can know us. It can use them better. Better than it can use us. But it wants to know them. Become them. And they resist." Jack had heard enough. Far too much. Shaken, he rose from beside Toby. He flipped the master switch to off, and the screen blanked. "It's going to come for us,"
        Toby said, and then he Ucended slowly out of his half-trance.
        Bitter storm wind shrieked at the window behind them, but even if it had been able to reach into the room, it couldn't have made Jack any colder than he already was. Toby swiveled in the office chair to direct a puzzled look first at his mother, then at his father. The dog came out of the corner. Though no one was touching it, the master switch on the computer flicked from the Off to the On position.
        Everyone twitched in surprise, including Falstaff. The screen gushed with vile and squirming colors. Heather stooped, grabbed the power cord, and tore it out of the wall socket. The monitor went dark again, stayed dark.
        "It won't stop," Toby said, getting up from the chair. Jack turned to the window and saw that dawn had come, dim and gray, revealing a landscape battered by a full-scale blizzard. In the past twelve hours, fourteen to sixteen inches of snow had fallen, drifting twice that deep where the wind chose to pile it.
        Either the first storm had stalled, instead of moving farther eastward, or the second had blown in even sooner than expected overlapping the first. "It won't stop," Toby repeated solemnly. He wasn't talking about the snow.
        Heather pulled him into her arms, lifted and held him as tightly and protectively as she would have held an infant. Everything becomes me.
        Jack didn't know all that might be meant by those words, what horrors they might encompass, but he knew Toby was right. The thing wouldn't stop until it had become them and they'd become part of it..Condensation had frozen on the inside of the lower panes in the French window.
        Jack touched the glistening with a fingertip, but he was so frigid with fear that ice felt no colder than his own skin. Beyond the kitchen windows, the white world was filled with cold motion, the relentless angular descent of driven snow. Restless, Heather moved continuously back and forth between the two windows, nervously anticipating the pearance of a monstrously corrupted intruder in that otherwise sterile landscape.
        They were dressed in the new ski suits they'd bought the previous morning, prepared to get out of the house quickly if they came under attack and found their prison indefensible. The loaded Mossberg twelve-gauge lay on the table.
        Jack could drop the yellow tablet and snatch up the gun in the event that something-don't even think about what it might be launched an assault on the house. The Micro Uzi and the Korth.38 were on the counter by the sink.
        Toby sat at the table, sipping hot chocolate from a mug, and the dog was lying at his feet. The boy was no longer in a trance state, was entirely disconnected from the mysterious invader of dreams, yet he was uncharacteristically subdued. ? Although Toby had been