Winter Moon

side. e didn't want to leave her there alone. She was his mom. He hadn't seen all of the Giver, only the tangle of tentacles squirming around the edge of the front door, but he knew it was more than she could handle.
        It was more than he could handle too, so he had to forget about doing anything, didn't dare think about it. He knew what had to be done, but he was too scared to do it, which was all right, because even heroes were afraid, because only insane people were never ever scared. And right now he knew he sure wasn't insane, not even a little bit, because he was scared bad, so bad he felt like he had to pee. This thing was like the Terminator and the Predator and the alien from Alien and the shark from Jaws and the velociraptors from Jurassic Park and a bunch of other monsters rolled into one- but he was just a kid. Maybe he was a hero too, like his dad said, even if he didn't feel like a hero, which he didn't, not one bit, but if he was a hero, he couldn't do what he knew he should do.
        He reached the end of the hall, where Falstaff stood trembling and whining.
        "Come on, fella," Toby said.
        He pushed past the dog into his bedroom, where the lamps were already bright because he and Mom had turned on just about every lamp in the house before Dad left, though it was daytime.
        "Get out of the hall, Falstaff. Mom wants us out of the hall. Come on!"
        The first thing he noticed, when he turned away from the dog, was that the door to the back stairs stood open. It should have been locked.
        They were making a fortress here. Dad had nailed shut the lower door, but this one should also be locked. Toby ran to it, pushed it shut, engaged the dead bolt, and felt better.
        At the doorway, Falstaff had still not entered the room. He had stopped whining.
        He was growling.
        Jack at the ranch entrance. Pausing only a moment to recover from the first and most arduous leg of the journey.
        Instead of soft flakes, the snow was coming down in sharp-edged crystals, almost like grains of salt. The wind drove it hard enough to.sting his exposed forehead.
        A road crew had been by at least once, because a four-foot-high wall of plowed snow blocked the end of the driveway. He clambered over it, onto the two-lane.
        Flame flared off the match head.
        For an instant Heather expected the fumes to explode, but they weren't sufficiently concentrated to be combustible.
        The parasite and its dead host climbed another step, apparently oblivious of the danger-or certain that there was none.
        Heather stepped back, out of the flash zone, tossed the match.
        Continuing to back up until she bumped into the hallway wall, watching the flame flutter in an arc toward the stairwell, she had a seizure of manic thoughts that elicited an almost compulsive bark of mad laughter, a single dark bray that came dangerously close to ending in a thick sob: Burning down my own house, welcome to Montana, beautiful scenery and walking dead men and things from other worlds, and here we go, flame falling, may you.burn in hell, burning down my own house, wouldn't have to do that in Los Angeles, other people will do it for you there.
        WHOOSH!
        The gasoline-soaked carpet exploded into flames that leaped all the way to the ceiling. The fire didn't spread through the stairwell, it was simply everywhere at once. Instantaneously the walls and railings were as fully involved as the treads and risers.
        A stinging wave of heat hit Heather, forcing her to squint. She should at once have moved farther away from the blaze because the air was nearly hot enough to blister her skin, but she had to see what happened to the Giver.
        The staircase was an inferno. No human being could have survived in it longer than a few seconds.
        In that swarming incandescence, the dead man and the living beast were a single dark mass, rising another step. And another. No screams or shrieks of pain accompanied its ascent, only the roar and crackle of the fierce fire, which was now lapping out of the stairwell and into the upstairs hallway.
        As Toby locked the stairhead door and turned from it, and as Falstaff growled from the threshold of the other door, orange-red light flashed through the hall behind the dog. His growl spiraled into a yelp of surprise. Following the flash were flickering figures of light that danced on the walls