Winter Moon

fine yesterday afternoon and evening, following the apparently far more extensive assault he had suffered in the graveyard, Heather worried about him. He had come away from that first experience with no conscious memory of it, but the trauma of total mental enslavement had to have left scars deep in the mind, the effects of which might become evident only over a period of weeks or months. And he did remember the second attempt at control, because this time the puppetmaster hadn't succeeded in either dominating him or repressing the memory of the telepathic invasion. The encounter she'd had with the creature in a dream the night before last had been frightening and so repulsive that she had been overcome with nausea.
        Toby's experiences with it, much more intimate than her own, must have been immeasurably more terrifying and affecting.
        Moving restively from one window to the other, Heather stopped behind Toby's chair, put her hands on his thin shoulders, gave him a squeeze, smoothed his hair, kissed the top of his head. Nothing must happen to him. Unbearable to think of him being touched by that thing, whatever it was and whatever it might look like, or by one of its puppets.
        Intolerable. She would do anything to prevent that. Anything. She would die to prevent it.
        Jack looked up from the tablet after quickly reading the first three or four pages. His face was as white as the snowscape. "Why didn't you tell me about this when you found it?"
        "Because of the way he'd hidden it in the freezer, I thought it must be personal, private, none of our business. Seemed like something only.Paul Youngblood ought to see."
        "You should've showed it to me."
        "Hey, you didn't tell me about what happened in the cemetery," she said, "and that's a hell of a lot bigger.."I'm sorry." You didn't share what Paul and Travis told you. that was wrong. But now you know everything. yes, finally." She had been furious that he'd withheld such things from her, but she hadn't been able to sustain her anger, she could not rekindle it now. Because, of course she was equally guilty. She'd not told him about the unease she'd felt during the entire tour of the property yesterday afternoon. The premonitions of violence and the unprecedented intensity of her nightmare. Certain that something had been in the back stairwell she'd gone into Toby's room the night before all the years they had been married, there had not been as many gaps in their communication with each-other since they'd come to Quartermass Ranch. They wanted their new life not merely to work but to be ct, and they had been unwilling to express doubts observations. For that failure to reach out to each, though motivated by the best intentions, they might pay with their lives.
        Indicating the tablet, she said, "Is it anything?" It's everything I think. The start of it. His account what he saw." He Spot-read to them about the waves of virtually palpable sound that had awakened Eduardo Fernandez in the night, about the spectral light in the woods.
        "I thought it would've come from the sky, a ship," she said. "You expect… after all the movies, all the books, you expect them to come in massive ships."
        "When you're talking about extraterrestrials, alien means truly different, deeply strange," Jack said. "Eduardo makes that point on the first page. Deeply strange, beyond easy comprehension. Nothing we could imagine-including ships."
        "I'm scared about what might happen, what I might have to do," Toby said. A blast of wind skirled under the back porch roof, as shrill as an electronic shriek, as questing and insistent as a living creature.
        Heather crouched at Toby's side. "We'll be okay, honey. Now that we know something's out there, and a little bit about what it is, we'll handle it."
        She wished she could be half as confident as she sounded. "But I shouldn't be scared."
        Looking up from the tablet, Jack said, "Nothing shameful about being afraid, kiddo."
        "You're never afraid," the boy said. "Wrong. I'm scared half to death right now." That revelation amazed Toby. "You are? But you're a hero."
        "Maybe I am, and maybe I'm not. But theres nothing unique about being a hero," Jack said.."Most people are heroes. Your mom's a hero, so are you."
        "Me?"
        "For the way you handled this past year. Took courage to deal with everything." didn't feel