Winter Moon

cellar door was ajar. He pulled it open, looked down.
        Heather was at the landing, a five-gallon can of gasoline in each hand.
        "We need all of it, Jack."
        "What're you doing? The house is on fire! Get out of there!"
        "We need the gasoline to do the job."
        "What're you talking about?"
        "Toby's got it."
        "Got what?" he demanded, going down the steps to her.
        "It. He's got it. Under him," she said breathlessly.
        "Under him?" he asked, taking the cans out of her hands.
        "Like he was under it in the graveyard."
        Jack felt as if he'd been shot, not the same pain but the same impact as a bullet in the chest. "He's a boy, a little boy, he's just a little boy, for Christ's sake!" : "He paralyzed it, the thing itself and all its surrogates. You should've seen! He says there isn't much time. The goddamned thing is strong, Jack, it's powerful. Toby can't keep it under him very long, and when it gets on top, it'll never let him go. It'll hurt him, Jack..It'll make him pay for this. So we have to get it first. We don't have time to question him, second-guess him, we just do what he says."
        She turned away from him, retreated down the lower steps.
        "I'll get two more cans."
        "The house is on fire!" he protested.
        "Upstairs. Not here yet."
        Madness.
        "Where's Toby?" he called as she turned out of sight below.
        "The back porch!"
        "Hurry and get yourself out of there," he shouted as he lugged ten gallons of gasoline up the basement stairs of a burning house, unable to repress mental images of the flaming rivers of gasoline in front of Arkadian's station.
        He went onto the porch. No fire there yet. No reflections of second-story flames on the backyard snow, either. The blaze was still largely at the front of the house.
        Toby was standing in his red-and-black ski suit at the head of the porch steps, his back to the door. Snow churned around him. The little point on the hood gave him the look of a gnome.
        The dog was at Toby's side. He turned his burly head to look at Jack, wagged his tail once.
        Jack put down the gasoline cans and hunkered beside his son. If his heart didn't turn over in his chest when he saw the boy's face, he felt as if it did.
        Toby looked like death.
        "Skipper?"
        "Hi, Dad."
        His voice had little inflection. He seemed to be in a daze, as he had been in front of the computer that morning. He didn't look at Jack but stared uphill toward the caretaker's house, which was visible only when the dense shrouds of snow were drawn apart by the capricious wind.
        "Are you between?" Jack asked, dismayed by the tremor in his voice.
        "Yeah. Between."
        "Is that a good idea?"
        "Yeah."."Aren't you afraid of it?"
        "Yeah. That's okay."
        "What're you staring at?"
        "Blue light."
        "I don't see any blue light."
        "When I was asleep."
        "You saw a blue light in your sleep?"
        "In the caretaker's house."
        "Blue light in a dream?"
        "Might have been more than a dream."
        "So that's where it is?"
        "Yeah. Part of me too."
        "Part of you is in the caretaker's house?"
        "Yeah. Holding it under."
        "We can actually burn it?"
        "Maybe. But we've got to get all of it."
        Harlan Moffit clumped onto the back porch, carrying two cans of gasoline.
        "Lady in there give me these, told me to bring em out here. She your wife?"
        Jack rose to his feet. "Yeah. Heather. Where is she?"
        "Went down for two more," Harlan said, "like she doesn't know the house is on fire."
        In the backyard, there were reflections of fire on the snow now, probably from the main roof or from Toby's room. Even if the blaze hadn't yet spread all the way down the front stairs, the whole house would soon be engulfed when the roof fell into second-floor rooms and second-floor rooms fell into those below them.
        Jack started toward the kitchen, but Harlan Moffit put down the fuel cans and grabbed him by the arm.
        "What the hell's going on here?"
        Jack tried to pull away from him. The chubby, bearded man was stronger than he looked.."You tell me your family's in danger, going to die any minute, trapped somehow, but then we get here and what I see is your family is the danger,