Winter Moon

Falstaff flew across the room, slammed into the wall beside the window, and dropped to the floor with a squeal of pain.
        The.38 Korth was in Heather's hand though she didn't remember having drawn it.
        Before she could squeeze the trigger, the new Given-or the new aspect of the only Giver, depending on whether there was one entity with many bodies or, instead, many individuals-snared Toby in three oily black tentacles. It lifted him off the floor and drew him toward the leering grin of the long-dead woman, as if it wanted him to plant a kiss on her.
        With a cry of outrage, furious and terrified in equal measure, Heather rushed the thing, unable to shoot from even a few steps away because she might hit Toby. Threw herself against it. Felt one of its serpentine arms-cold even through her ski suit-curling around her waist. The stench of the corpse.
        Jesus. The internal organs were long gone, and extrusions of the alien were squirming within the body cavity. The head turned toward her, face-to-face, red-stipled black tendrils with spatulate tips flickering like multiple tongues in the open mouth, bristling from the bony nostrils, the eye sockets.
        Cold slithered all the way around her waist now. She jammed the.38 under the bony chin, bearded with graveyard moss. She was going for the head as if the head still mattered, as if a brain still packed the cadaver's cranium, she could think of nothing else to do. Toby screaming, the Giver hissing, the gun booming, booming, booming, old bones shattering to dust, the grinning skull cracking off the knobby spine and lolling to one side, the gun booming again-she lost count-then clicking, the maddening clicking of the hammer on empty chambers.
        When the creature let go of her, Heather almost fell on her ass because she was already straining so hard to pull loose. She dropped the gun, and it bounced across the carpet.
        The Giver collapsed in front of her, not because it was dead but because its puppet, damaged by gunfire, had broken apart in a couple of key places and now provided too little support to keep its soft, heavy master erect.
        Toby was free too. For the moment.
        He was white-faced, wide-eyed. He'd bitten his lip. It was bleeding.
        But otherwise he seemed all right.
        Smoke was beginning to roil into the room, not much, but she knew how abruptly it could become blindingly dense.."Go!" she said, shoving Toby toward the back stairs. "Go, go, go!"
        He scrambled across the floor on his hands and knees, and so did she, both of them reduced by terror and expediency to the locomotion of infancy. Got to the door. Pulled herself up against it. Toby at her side.
        Behind them was a scene out of a madman's nightmare: The Giver sprawled on the floor, resembling nothing so much as an immensely complicated octopus, although stranger and more evil than anything that had ever lived in the seas of Farth, a tangle of wriggling ropy arms. Instead of trying to reach for her and Toby, it was struggling with the disconnected bones, attempting to pull the moldering corpse together and lever itself erect on the damaged skeleton.
        She wrenched the doorknob, yanked.
        The stairhead door didn't open.
        Locked.
        On the shelf behind the alcove bed, Toby's clock radio came on all by itself, and rap music hammered them at full volume for a second or two.
        Then that other music. Tuneless, strange, but hypnotic.
        "No!" she told Toby as she struggled with the dead bolt turn. It was maddeningly stiff. "No! Tell it no!" The lock hadn't been stiff before, damn it.
        At the other door, the first Giver lurched out of the burning hall and through the smoke, into the room. It was still wrapped around and through what was left of Eduardo's charred corpse. Still afire. Its dark bulk was diminished.
        Fire had consumed part of it.
        The thumb-turn twisted slowly, as if the lock mechanism was rusted.
        Slowly.
        Slowly. Then: clack.
        But the bolt snapped into the jamb again before she could pull open the door.
        Toby was murmuring something. Talking. But not to her.
        "No!" she shouted. "No, no! Tell it no!"
        Grunting with the effort, Heather twisted the bolt open again and held tightly to the thumb-turn. But she felt the lock being reengaged against her will, the shiny brass slipping inexorably between her