Winter Moon

with the solace of good books, a lifetime of measured habits and moderation left him vigorous in old age, without troubling regrets, content. Loneliness was the only curse of his life, since Margaret had died three years before, and on those infrequent occasions when he woke in the middle of the night, it was a dream of his lost wife that harried him from sleep.
        The sound had been less loud than all-pervasive. A low throbbing that swelled like a series of waves rushing toward a beach. Beneath the throbbing, an undertone that was almost subliminal, quaverous, an eerie electronic oscillation. He'd not only heard it but felt it, vibrating in his teeth, his bones. The glass in the windows hummed with it.
        When he placed a hand flat against the wall, he swore that he could feel the waves of sound cresting through the house itself, like the slow beating of a heart beneath the plaster. sure, as if he had been listening to someone or something rhythmically straining against confinement, struggling to break out of a prison or through a barrier.
        But who?
        Or what?
        Eventually, after scrambling out of bed, pulling on pants and shoes, he had gone onto the front porch, where he had seen the light in the woods. No, he had to be more honest with himself. It hadn't been merely a light in the woods, nothing as simple as that..He wasn't superstitious. Even as a young man, he had prided himself on his levelheadedness, common sense, and unsentimental grasp of the realities of life. The writers whose books lined his study were those with a crisp, simple style and with no patience for fantasy, men with a cold clear vision, who saw the world for what it was and not for what it might be: men like Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Ford Madox Ford.
        The phenomenon in the lower woods was nothing that his favorite writers-every last one of them a realist-could have incorporated into their stories. The light had not been from an object within the forest, against which the pines had been silhouetted, rather, it had come from the pines themselves, mottled amber radiance that appeared to originate within the bark, within the boughs, as if the tree roots had siphoned water from a subterranean pool contaminated by a greater percentage of radium than the paint with which watch dials had once been coated to allow time to be told in the dark.
        Accompanying that pulse had been a sense of presi A cluster of ten to twenty pines had been involved.
        Like a glowing shrine in the otherwise night-black fastness of timber.
        Unquestionably, the mysterious source of the light was also the source of the sound. When the former had begun to fade, so had the latter.
        Quieter and dimmer, quieter and dimmer. The March night had become silent and dark again in the same instant, marked only by the sound of his own breathing and illuminated by nothing stranger than the silver crescent of a quarter moon and the pearly phosphorescence of the snow-shrouded fields.
        The event had lasted about seven minutes.
        It had seemed much longer.
        Back inside the house, he had stood at the windows, waiting to see what would happen next. Eventually, when that seemed to have been the sum of it, he returned to bed.
        He had not been able to get back to sleep. He had lain awake… wondering.
        Every morning he sat down to breakfast at six-thirty, with his big shortwave radio tuned to a station in Chicago that provided international news twenty-four hours a day. The peculiar experience during the previous night hadn't been a sufficient interruption of the rhythms of his life to make him alter his schedule. This morning he'd eaten the entire contents of a large can of grapefruit sections, followed by two eggs over easy, home fries, a quarter pound of bacon, and four slices of buttered toast. He hadn't lost his hearty appetite with age, and a lifelong dedication to the foods that were hardest on the heart had only left him with the constitution of a man more than twenty years his junior..Finished eating, he always liked to linger over several cups of black coffee, listening to the endless troubles of the world. The news unfailingly confirmed the wisdom of living in a far place with no neighbors in view.
        This morning, though he had lingered longer than usual with his coffee, and though the radio had been on, he hadn't been able to remember a word of the news when he pushed back